this story just keeps getting more and more shocking and bizarre and entertaining and sickening and...

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1118-22.htm

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/112004X.shtml

Published on Thursday, November 18, 2004 by CommonDreams.org 'Stinking Evidence' of Possible Election Fraud Found in Florida by Thom Hartmann   There was something odd about the poll tapes. A "poll tape" is the phrase used to describe a printout from an optical scan voting machine made the evening of an election, after the machine has read all the ballots and crunched the numbers on its internal computer. It shows the total results of the election in that location. The printout is signed by the polling officials present in that precinct/location, and then submitted to the county elections office as the official record of how the people in that particular precinct had voted. (Usually each location has only one single optical scanner/reader, and thus produces only one poll tape.) Bev Harris of www.blackboxvoting.org, the erstwhile investigator of electronic voting machines, along with people from Florida Fair Elections, showed up at Florida's Volusia County Elections Office on the afternoon of Tuesday, November 16, 2004, and asked to see, under a public records request, each of the poll tapes for the 100+ optical scanners in the precincts in that county. The elections workers - having been notified in advance of her request - handed her a set of printouts, oddly dated November 15 and lacking signatures. Bev pointed out that the printouts given her were not the original poll tapes and had no signatures, and thus were not what she'd requested. Obligingly, they told her that the originals were held in another location, the Elections Office's Warehouse, and that since it was the end of the day they should meet Bev the following morning to show them to her. Bev showed up bright and early the morning of Wednesday the 17th - well before the scheduled meeting - and discovered three of the elections officials in the Elections Warehouse standing over a table covered with what looked like poll tapes. When they saw Bev and her friends, Bev told me in a telephone interview less than an hour later, "They immediately shoved us out and slammed the door." In a way, that was a blessing, because it led to the stinking evidence. "On the porch was a garbage bag," Bev said, "and so I looked in it and, and lo and behold, there were public record tapes." Thrown away. Discarded. Waiting to be hauled off. "It was technically stinking, in fact," Bev added, "because what they had done was to have thrown some of their polling tapes, which are the official records of the election, into the garbage. These were the ones signed by the poll workers. These are something we had done an official public records request for." When the elections officials inside realized that the people outside were going through the trash, they called the police and one came out to challenge Bev. Kathleen Wynne, a www.blackboxvoting.org investigator, was there. "We caught the whole thing on videotape," she said. "I don't think you'll ever see anything like this - Bev Harris having a tug of war with an election worker over a bag of garbage, and he held onto it and she pulled on it, and it split right open, spilling out those poll tapes. They were throwing away our democracy, and Bev wasn't going to let them do it." As I was interviewing Bev just moments after the tussle, she had to get off the phone, because, "Two police cars just showed up." She told me later in the day, in an on-air interview, that when the police arrived, "We all had a vigorous debate on the merits of my public records request." The outcome of that debate was that they all went from the Elections Warehouse back to the Elections Office, to compare the original, November 2 dated and signed poll tapes with the November 15 printouts the Elections Office had submitted to the Secretary of State. A camera crew from www.votergate.tv met them there, as well. And then things got even odder. "We were sitting there comparing the real [signed, original] tapes with the [later printout] ones that were given us," Bev said, "and finding things missing and finding things not matching, when one of the elections employees took a bin full of things that looked like garbage - that looked like polling tapes, actually - and passed by and disappeared out the back of the building." This provoked investigator Ellen Brodsky to walk outside and check the garbage of the Elections Office itself. Sure enough - more original, signed poll tapes, freshly trashed. "And I must tell you," Bev said, "that whatever they had taken out [the back door] just came right back in the front door and we said, 'What are these polling place tapes doing in your dumpster?'" A November 18 call to the Volusia County Elections Office found that Elections Supervisor Deanie Lowe was unavailable and nobody was willing to speak on the record with an out-of-state reporter. However, The Daytona Beach News (in Volusia County), in a November 17th article by staff writer Christine Girardin, noted, "Harris went to the Department of Elections' warehouse on State Road 44 in DeLand on Tuesday to inspect original Nov. 2 polling place tapes, after being given a set of reprints dated Nov. 15. While there, Harris saw Nov. 2 polling place tapes in a garbage bag, heightening her concern about the integrity of voting records." The Daytona Beach News further noted that, "[Elections Supervisor] Lowe confirmed Wednesday some backup copies of tapes from the Nov. 2 election were destined for the shredder," but pointed out that, according to Lowe, that was simply because there were two sets of tapes produced on election night, each signed. "One tape is delivered in one car along with the ballots and a memory card," the News reported. "The backup tape is delivered to the elections office in a second car." Suggesting that duplicates don't need to be kept, Lowe claims that Harris didn't want to hear an explanation of why some signed poll tapes would be in the garbage. "She's not wanting to listen to an explanation," Lowe told the News of Harris. "She has her own ideas." But the Ollie North action in two locations on two days was only half of the surprise that awaited Bev and her associates. When they compared the discarded, signed, original tapes with the recent printouts submitted to the state and used to tabulate the Florida election winners, Harris says a disturbing pattern emerged. "The difference was hundreds of votes in each of the different places we examined," said Bev, "and most of those were in minority areas." When I asked Bev if the errors they were finding in precinct after precinct were random, as one would expect from technical, clerical, or computer errors, she became uncomfortable. "You have to understand that we are non-partisan," she said. "We're not trying to change the outcome of an election, just to find out if there was any voting fraud." That said, Bev added: "The pattern was very clear. The anomalies favored George W. Bush. Every single time." Of course finding possible voting "anomalies" in one Florida county doesn't mean they'll show up in all counties. It's even conceivable there are innocent explanations for both the mismatched counts and trashed original records; this story undoubtedly will continue to play out. And, unless further investigation demonstrates a pervasive and statewide trend toward "anomalous" election results in many of Florida's counties, odds are none of this will change the outcome of the election (which exit polls showed John Kerry winning in Florida). Nonetheless, Bev and her merry band are off to hit another county. As she told me on her cell phone while driving toward their next destination, "We just put Volusia County and their lawyers on notice that they need to continue to keep a number of documents under seal, including all of the memory cards to the ballot boxes, and all of the signed poll tapes." Why? "Simple," she said. "Because we found anomalies indicative of fraud."

the academically minded are weighing in. screw the new york times- this isn't just some internet conspiracy theory. let us acknowledge the very real problems which undermine the validity of this election. without a true representative democracy, all we have is the fascist states of america. george w. bush, i do not recognize you as the president of the united states.

--------------------------------------

"The Effect of Electronic Voting Machines on Change in Support for Bush in the 2004 Florida Elections"

by Michael Hout, Laura Mangels, Jennifer Carlson, and Rachel Best

UC Berkeley

the press release: http://www.commondreams.org/news2004/1118-14.htm

the actual paper and data: http://ucdata.berkeley.edu/new_web/VOTE2004/index.html

--------------------------------------

"The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy"

by Steven F. Freeman, PhD

University of Pennsylvania

http://truthout.org/unexplainedexitpoll.pdf

UPDATE! please sign this petition as well: http://www.moveon.org/investigatethevote/

-----------------------------------------------

http://www.petitiononline.com/uselect/

To:  United States Congress

TO: All members of the Congress of the United States of America; all Senators and Members of the House of Representatives

A Petition to immediately and without delay open a joint investigation into potential wrongdoing in the Presidential Election of 2004, specifically to investigate the potential of voting machine manipulation or purposeful malfunction, especially electronic voting machines manufactured and supplied by Diebold, Inc.; Electronic Systems & Software (ES & S); Sequoia Voting Systems, and others, and also to identify and investigate all allegations of improper conduct by election officials, workers, observers, challengers and operatives and employees of both major parties concerning the voting process including intimidation, dissemination of improper information, manipulation of registration records, improper handling of actual voting ballots and, in general, any and all potential improprieties which could have led to improper or inaccurate election results.

Such inquiries should not be limited to any particular state, precinct or district but strive to examine the voting process in any and all areas in which there is even the slightest indication of impropriety, but especially in the states of Florida, Ohio, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Nevada, New Mexico, Iowa, Arkansas, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Minnesota, Texas and New Hampshire, and not limit such investigation, and expand such investigations to cover Senatorial races as well, especially those in Kentucky, Florida and South Dakota.

We, the undersigned, request that our elected representatives act in accordance with the Constitution of the United States of America in a legal, impartial and expedient manner for an open hearing before the people of the United States and if such wrongdoing, illegal practices, manipulation of voting records or processes is of such a nature to indicate egregious or extensive tampering, alteration or misappropriation of the voting process that the violators be brought to justice and remedies, potentially including a nationwide audit, recall, recount or new election be imposed by your bodies.

We feel it is our patriotic duty to request such action from you, our elected officials, and your duty to respond in a responsible manner.

Sincerely,

YOU, IF YOU GO HERE AND SIGN IT

when i went to lunch today, i saw this old english salesman sitting on the sidewalk and garnering a pretty good crowd of people. he was demonstrating the uses of a white plastic vegetable peeler. with ruddy bare hands exposed to the chilly air, he sliced a potato up into chips and french fry form. a plastic tub to the side of the cutting board showed he had been busy shredding a mountain of carrots prior to that. i could see with his profile against the sunlight, the spray of the vegetables as he cut them mixing with the spray of his mouth as he bellowed about cutting onions without tearing, slicing cheese without cutting oneself, and something about apple "fritters". what the fuck are fritters? get the shotgun bubba, must be some kind of tea-sipping englishman food. but his audience didn't seem to mind. their attention was held rapt.

to be sure, there was nothing interesting about the vegetable peeler he was selling. it was a piece of shit. but to see a grizzly old englishman working his snake-oil charm, maniacally preaching the wonders of the peeler while spraying spittle on a jaded city, now that's something special.

i just can't let it go... reposted from mike2cents'. and he got it from somewhere else, too.

Friends,

It has been five days since the election.

In that time, accounts of voter fraud and malfunctioning voting machines have flooded into local newspapers in Ohio, to public-interest groups, universities and weblogs.

One issue is that there's a recurrent pattern in the e-machine votes in both Gahanna, Ohio, and the six counties in Florida. In both cases, there were more votes cast than there are voters living there.

In Gahanna, it was investigated and determined that the overage all went to Bush. In Florida, so far as I know, it hasn't been determined yet who got the made-up votes.

On another tack: we've got the data to compare registrations vs. final results in Florida, and it looks very damning. But has anyone compiled the same data yet for Ohio? Could someone do that fairly easily, trolling thru the state's official results, and putting them in a table?

This message is an overview of those reports.

The stories are summarized here, with links to the original publications. After seeing this evidence -- and there is more still to be rounded up -- I am no longer convinced that Bush won the election.

I hope you will read through these summaries, click on the links to the original stories, and come to your own conclusions.

I've included all the accounts of election tampering that I'm aware of, but have not done a broad search. This is only what I've learned in the past five days.

My education was provided by a group of concerned journalists who posted reports to a chat list. This is a compilation of their research.

I believe there is enough evidence to suggest that the electorate may have actually chosen Kerry on Tuesday. We don't know for sure -- we can't know till there is a recount. Or, if that's not possible because of electronic voting machines, until the election is held over in Ohio and Florida.

Bush has not yet been chosen by the Electoral College. The Electors meet and vote on Dec. 13. We need to raise questions about the results -- and raise them loudly -- to get an investigation launched before that date.

So far, the mainstream media in not picking up the story. They moved very slowly after the 2000 election.

Here are the accounts of election tampering from four states, plus reports on multi-state problems.

(Please note: some of the newspaper links may expire soon. You may want to print out the stories so that later on, you don't have to buy them from the newspapers' archives.)

FLORIDA:

The most troubling news comes out of Florida. Throughout most of the state, new electronic voting machines were in use. These machines -- many manufactured by a company called Diebold -- are controversial because they don't leave a paper trail.

There is no way to double-check the results.

The final Florida tallies on Diebold machines from Tuesday are literally unbelievable.

In 29 counties where Diebold machines (an optical scanner) were used to count the ballots, large majorities of voters were registered Democrats. But the final results gave all the counties to Bush, sometimes by huge margins.

The individual county data shows how unlikely the machine results were.

For instance:

• In Calhoun County, 82% of registered voters are Democrats. But Diebold machines said 63% of the county voted for Bush.
• In Lafayette County, 83% of voters are Democrats, but Diebold said 74% of the county voted for Bush.
• In Liberty County, 88% of voters are Democrats, but Diebold said 64% voted for Bush.
• In Washington County, 67% of voters are Democrats, but Diebold said 71% voted for Bush.

This same pattern appears in the results for 29 COUNTIES in Florida. In every one of those counties, the Diebold Optical Scanner produced the results.

The Optical Scanner has been called the voting machine that is most susceptible to tampering.

Many of you have been watching elections closely for years. Do you believe that in 29 Florida counties in which Democrats were in the majority -- in some cases with 4 out of 5 registered voters being Democrats -- they all voted strongly for Bush?

Here are the links. You can find the voter registration/final result data here: http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm

You can find a story analyzing these results here: http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1106-30.htm

You can read about electronic voting machines -- an untested phenomenon in American elections, here: http://www.moderateindependent.com/v2i21thoreau.htm

THE OTHER PROBLEM IN FLORIDA:

In 6 counties -- again, they were all using electronic machines -- more votes for President were recorded than there were actual voters in the counties.

Altogether, these six counties reported 188,885 more votes for President than there are voters living there.

Right now, no one knows whether those extra 188,000 votes were cast for Bush or for Kerry. But Bush won the state of Florida by a 5% margin -- contrary to what all the polls were showing only days earlier.

In Glades County:  2,443 votes for Bush / 1,718 votes for Kerry / 27 votes for Other. Those add up to 4,188. But the machines recorded the official turnout as
3,446. That adds up to 742 more votes than voters.

In Highlands County:  25,874 for Bush / 15,346 for Kerry / 271 for Other. Official Turnout: 33,996. That adds up to 7,495 more votes than voters.

In Miami-Dade County: 358,613 for Bush / 406,099 for Kerry / 3,841 for Other. Official Turnout 716,574. That adds up to 51,979 more votes than voters.

In Osceola County: 43,108 for Bush / 38,617 for Kerry / 453 for Other. Official Turnout 63589. That adds up to 18,589 more votes than voters.

In Palm Beach County: 211,894 for Bush / 327,698 for Kerry / 3,243 for Other. Official Turnout: 452,061. That adds up to 90,774 more votes than voters.

In Volusia County: 111,544 for Bush / 115,319 for Kerry / 1,495 for Other. Official Turnout: 209,052. That adds up to 19,306 more votes than voters.

Use this link to get to the data: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/11/5/18466/2846

STILL MORE PROBLEMS IN FLORIDA

This account comes from partisans. Four Kerry volunteers working in Broward County sent a letter detailing election tampering to one of the reporters on our chat list. All four signed it and included their email addresses.

They report a wide, disturbing range of problems, from voters saying their electronic machines malfunctioned, poll workers denied them assistance, to police putting up roadblocks on the routes to polling places, and so on.

The entire text of the letter, along with the signatures, appears at the bottom of this letter.

OHIO

In Ohio, there were problems in four counties and one city.

In Howard County, a judge ruled on Election Day that everyone standing in line to vote at 7:30 p.m. had to eventually be allowed inside.

The order said the ruling was good for the day of Nov. 2. (You can view the order at the website below.) But maybe it didn't occur to the judge that everybody might not make it inside by midnight.

At the stroke of midnight, when the calendar legally clicked over to Nov. 3, Republican Ken Blackwell, the secretary of state, told all the waiting voters to go home. His workers gave them paper ballots (i.e., provisional ballots), told them to fill them out and bring them back later.

It was an improvised move that undercut the intent of the judge's ruling, and created chaos. Many people in Howard County still haven't turned in those ballots because they don't know where to take them or what the deadline is.

The only kind of ballot in a federal election that people can legally take home, fill out and turn in later is an absentee ballot, and those are marked as such. They're marked with clear rules concerning deadlines, postmarking, and so on.

So an uncounted number of people in Howard County--estimated in the thousands-- couldn't get in and were turned away with what may be ruled an illegal procedure. The vast majority of those votes wre expected to go to Kerry based on the heavily Democratic population of Howard County.

The Democrats have filed a lawsuit. You can click on the Ohio State University law school website to read about it: http://216.239.39.104/search?q=cache:pKbOJwHH7OMJ:moritzlaw.osu.edu/electionlaw/anal
ysis/110304b.htm+Ohio+7:30+election+Blackwell+waiting+line&hl=en&start=4&lr=lang_en

Meanwhile, in Warren County, election officials locked the doors to the County building and refused to allow bi-partisan observers to watch the vote-count. They also denied access to the AP reporter (it is standard procedure for the AP to observe vote-counting in counties all over the country.)

The Sheriff of the county said he did it for "homeland security" reasons. He never explained or specified what the security concerns were.

Here is the link to the story in the Cincinnati Enquirer: http://www.enquirer.com/editions/2004/11/05/loc_warrenvote05.html

Meanwhile, in a Columbus suburb called Gahanna, the same problem showed up with electronic machines that we saw in Florida: more votes were cast than there were voters to cast them. In this case, however, the problem was investigated and the extra 3,893 votes were shown to have been erroneously tallied for Bush.

Here is the link to the story on the Ohio Network News: http://www.onnnews.com/Global/story.asp?S=2524952

Meanwhile, in Mahoning and Mercer Counties, electronic machines again malfunctioned, but the effect that had on the vote count is not clear. The machines had to be re-set, and at one point showed votes of "negative 25 million," according to  the head of the local board of elections.

Here is the story from the local Youngstown paper, called the Vindicator: http://www.vindy.com/basic/news/281829446390855.php

INDIANA

In Laporte County, electronic voting machines once again appear to have failed.

They tallied results for 22,200 voters, even though there are 79,000 registered voters in LaPorte County. Assuming the county actually had a 65% turnout rate (comparable to others in the area and its own track record), that means 29,000 votes were not counted.

Here is the link to the story in the Michigan City News-Dispatch: http://www.michigancityin.com/articles/2004/11/04/news/news02.txt

NEW HAMPSHIRE

This is one of several states where original exit polls (interviews with voters as they are leaving) do not jive with the results produced by electronic voting machines. I was told by an administrator at Bev Harris's group, called BlackBoxVoting (more on this below) that they are urging Ralph Nader to press for a recount in New Hampshire. Nader was on the ballot there, so he is in a good position to ask for a re-count.

You can read about Harris and her work at www.BlackBoxVoting.org.

SIX STATES

In at least six states, there was a large difference between how people said they'd voted, and how officials said they'd voted.

In Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, New Hampshire and New Mexico, there was a large discrepancy between what voters said in the original exit polls, and the final results claimed by election officials.

In each of those six states, electronic voting machines were used in some or most of the counties.

In contrast, in states where paper ballots were the primary method of voting, there was little or no discrepancy between original exit polls and official results.

To see an easily viewable graph of this data, go to http://www.therandirhodesshow.com/todays_show.html

That graph was originally compiled by a website affiliated with The Raw Story, which often gets quoted in the major dailies. So far as I know, it's a reputable site.

You can see their original posting here: http://www.bluelemur.com/index.php?p=388

MORE ON EXIT POLLS

These are routinely conducted in elections by major news organizations. Accounts are surfacing that both the Associated Press and CNN (and perhaps others) later CHANGED their exit polling data to more closely resemble the official results.

So far as I know, none of the news orgs has offered an explanation. They may try to justify it on statistical grounds.

Here are two accounts. The first is very brief, the second is in-depth: http://www.buzzflash.com/analysis/04/11/ana04025.html
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/KEE411A.html

MORE ON ELECTRONIC VOTING MACHINES

Here is an except from the Moderate Independent website about Bev Harris's work. She is a freelance journalist who has been documenting how unreliable the machines are, and how vulnerable they are to tampering.

"Bev Harris, author of Black Box Voting and the BlackBoxVoting.org web site, has documented numerous cases of electronic disasters. One occurred in Volusia County, Fla., in 2000 in which county election officials hand recounted more than 184,000 paper ballots used to feed the computerized system, after the central ballot-counting computer showed a Socialist Party candidate receiving more than 9,000 votes and Al Gore getting minus 19,000. Another 4,000 votes were received for Bush that should not have been there.

"Election officials eventually tallied Gore beating Bush by 97,063 votes to 82,214. But the wrong numbers had already been sent to the media, which were used by FOX and other networks to erroneously call the election for Bush and swing the public relations part of the recount battle in his favor."

I urge you to get familiar with Harris and her work as quickly as possible.

Three Members of Congress Have Asked the GAO to Investigate the Election
Three Congressmen have asked the General Accounting Office, a federal agency, to investigate the election, citing questionable results in Ohio, Florida, North Carolina and California. Click here to see their letter to the GAO: http://forum.therandirhodesshow.com/index.php?act=ST&f=87&t=34711

Remember These Four Points:

• Bush's approval numbers were consistently below 50% throughout the campaign.
• New Democratic registrations in Ohio were 10 times that of Republicans, and in Florida, Democrats held a similar but somewhat smaller advantage.
• All the polls that were still giving Bush leads after the debates were within the margin of error, and when the undecideds started making up their minds over the last  weekend, Kerry's poll numbers were surging.
• the $10 million exit-poll system, specifically designed not to fail this time, clearly showed, in the original reports, a Kerry victory.

Other Voices to Hear:

Other people besides me and the journalists I know are beginning to question the legitimacy of the election. Here are some of them:

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/kerry_won.php
http://americablog.blogspot.com/archives/2004_10_31_americablog_archive.html#10997
0362694815839
http://www.ecotalk.org/VotingSecurity.htm
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/article.php?sid=18588&mode=&order=0

Here is a report of voter complaints in 7 Southern states:

http://www.abcnews4.com/news/stories/1104/185549.html

Again, I urge you to realize that there may still be time to do something about this before the Electoral College meets on December 13th.

The first step is to educate ourselves. The second step is to educate the mainstream media. The local and regional press, and the alternative media, have been doing their jobs; now we need the national press to do its job, too.

If you are concerned about this election being stolen, please do two things:

1. Send your concerns to everyone you know, both inside and outside the United States.
2. Send your concerns to the major news organizations. A list of contacts appears at the end of this message.

Sincerely,
Donna Knipp, New York, N.Y.

---

The Letter from Kerry Workers In Broward County, Fla.:

"Spurred by the unwillingness of the broadcast media to report voting problems during the 2004 election race, we want to alert others to the widespread voter suppression and disenfranchisement that occurred in Broward County, Florida.  We staffed the emergency hotline for the Kerry Campaign Headquarters in Broward County from late October through the election.


"All of us were devastated by the margin of Bush's win in Florida, particularly since polls predicted the race would be extremely close.

"Many of the calls to our hotline were from voters who had pressed the "Kerry" button on their electronic voting screen, only to have "Bush" light up as the candidate they had chosen.  In some cases, this would happen repeatedly until about the 5th or 6th time the voter pressed "Kerry" and eventually his name would light up.  In other cases, the voters pushed "Kerry" but were later asked to confirm their "Bush" vote.

"We had calls about a road block, put up by the police at 7am on Nov. 2, which blocked road access to two precinct locations in majority black districts.  There was no justification for the road block - no accident or crime scene or  construction.

"Many of our calls dealt with voter suppression, or manipulation, of the Haitian population - occurrences which seem too numerous, and their targets too indefensible, as primarily poor, first-time-voter, Creole-speaking refugees, to be anything but systemic.  In one example, a voter whose hands were bandaged could not press the touch-screen himself; he asked the nonpartisan election official to press "Kerry" for him, but the election official pressed "Bush" and sent his vote immediately into the machine.  Many, many others were denied the right to vote and were not given provisional ballots, while others were refused assistance at the polls, even though provisional ballots and voter assistance are legal rights.

"Others were told they had already voted and were turned away, although they had never voted previously.  This latter experience was a complaint not isolated to Haitians but also included other surprised voters with no recourse except their word against that of the Supervisor of Elections.

"We spoke with hundreds of voters who were certain they had registered to vote in the past 6 months, well before the October 18 deadline, but were not on the rolls.  And those were just the people who had the information to contact us.

"The local paper, citing the Supervisor of Elections office as its source, told all people voting by absentee ballot that they could turn in ballots by hand to any of its seven offices by 5pm on Tuesday, Nov. 2.

"Every single one of those offices except one was closed on Tuesday.

"We had numerous calls from voters on Nov. 2 whose precincts had closed, yet the Supervisor of Elections office had given voters no notification of the closure, and no notification of where to go to vote.

"Thousands of people were likely disenfranchised because of inexcusable mishaps such as this. We had many calls from people who had been harassed by poll workers, who were turned away without being allowed the right to vote provisionally (another breech of voter rights).  Other people were turned away because the address on their driver's license did not match the address on their voter registration card; again, this is in direct violation of election law.

"All of these problems do not even take into account the 58,000 absentee ballots that had been "lost" by the Supervisor of Elections, in perhaps the most democratic county in the state, disenfranchising thousands of people who were disabled, out of the country, or elderly and unable get to the polls.  These events, and many others, have been documented and also reported to lawyers, but we fear they will not get the attention they deserve.  This is what we witnessed in just one county.  We believe that these "voting irregularities" raise serious concerns about the legitimacy of the results in Florida, and more broadly, about the health of democracy in this country."

Libby Anker   Libanker@berkeley.edu
Ryan  Centner   rcentner@berkeley.edu
Jill Greenlee  jillgs@socrates.berkeley.edu
Rachel Van Sickle-Ward  rvansick@berkeley.edu

A list of media contacts:

ABC News
47 W. 66 St., New York, NY 10023
Phone: 212-456-7777
D.C. Bureau phone: 202-222-7777
General e-mail: netaudr@abc.com

ABC World News Tonight with Peter Jennings:
Phone: 212-456-4040
Fax: 212-456-2795
E-mail: netaudr@abc.com

Nightline:
1717 DeSales St., NW, Washington, DC 20036
Phone: 202-222-7000
E-mail: niteline@abc.com

20/20:
147 Columbus Ave., 10th fl, New York, NY 10023
Phone: 212-456-2020
Fax: 212-456-0533
E-mail: 2020@abc.com

ABC's Good Morning America:
147 Columbus Ave., New York, NY 10023
Phone: 212-456-5900
Fax: 212-456-7257
E-mail: netaudr@abc.com

CBS
CBS News
524 W. 57 St., New York, NY 10019
Phone: 212-975-4321
Fax: 212-975-1893
D.C. Bureau phone: 202-457-4385

CBS Evening News with Dan Rather:
Phone: 212-975-3691 or 202-457-4385
Fax: 212-975-1893

The Early Show:
Phone: 212-975-2824
Fax: 212-975-7133 or 212-975-2033

60 Minutes:
555 W. 57th St., New York, NY 10019-2985
Phone: 212-975-2006
Fax: 212-757-6975

60 Minutes II:
Phone: 212-975-6200

CNBC
2200 Fletcher Ave.
Fort Lee, NJ 07024
Phone: (201) 585-2622
Fax: (201) 583-5453
Email: info@cnbc.com

CNN
One CNN Center, Box 105366, Atlanta, GA 30303-5366
Phone: 404-827-1500
Fax: 404-827-1906
E-mail: cnn.feedback@cnn.com

CNN Washington Bureau
820 First St. N.E., Washington, DC 20002
Phone: 202-898-7900
Fax: 202-898-7923

Crossfire
Phone: 202-898-7655
Fax: 202-898-7611

Larry King Live
Phone: 202-898-7690
Fax: 202-898-7686

Fox News Channel
1211 Ave. of the Americas
New York, NY 10036
Phone: (212) 301-3000
Fax: (212) 301-4229
Email: comments@foxnews.com

MSNBC
One MSNBC Plaza
Secaucus, NJ 07094
Phone: (201) 583-5000
Fax: (201) 583-5453
Email: world@msnbc.com

NBC
30 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, NY 10112
Phone: 212-664-4444
Fax: 212-664-4426

Washington Bureau
4001 Nebraska Ave. NW, Washington, DC 20016
Phone: 202-885-4200
Fax: 202-362-2009

NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw:
Phone: 212-664-4971 or 202-885-4259 Fax: 202-362-2009 E-mail:
nightly@nbc.com

NBC News' Today:
Phone: 212-664-4602 or 202-885-4231
Fax: 212-664-4426
E-mail: today@nbc.com

Dateline NBC
Phone: 212-664-7501
Fax: 212-664-7864
E-mail: dateline@nbc.com

Public Broadcasting

PBS
1320 Braddock Place, Alexandria, VA 22314
Phone: 703-739-5000
Fax: 703-739-8458

The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer
3620 South 27th St., Arlington, VA 22206
Phone: 703-998-2150
E-mail: newshour@pbs.org

National Public Radio
635 Massachusetts Ave. NW, Washington, DC 20001-3753
Phone: 202-513-2000
Fax: 202-513-3329
E-mail: Jeffrey Dvorkin, Ombudsman ombudsman@npr.org

All Things Considered:
Phone: 202-513-2110
E-mail: atc@npr.org

Morning Edition:
Phone: 202-513-2150
Fax: 202-513-3329
E-mail: morning@npr.org

National Newspapers

Los Angeles Times
202 West First Street, Los Angeles, CA 90012
Phone: 800-528-4637 or 213-237-5000
Fax: 213-237-4712
E-mail: letters@latimes.com

New York Times
229 W. 43rd St., New York, NY 10036
Phone: 212-556-1234
Fax: 212-556-3690
D.C. Bureau phone: 202-862-0300
E-mail: letters@nytimes.com

USA Today
1000 Wilson Blvd., Arlington, VA 22229
Phone: 800-872-0001 or 703-276-3651
Fax: 703-247-3108
E-mail: editor@usatoday.com

Wall Street Journal
200 Liberty St., New York, NY 10281
Phone: 212-416-2000
Fax: 212-416-2658
E-mail: editors@interactive.wsj.com

Washington Post
1150 15th St., NW, Washington, DC 20071
Phone: 202-334-6000
Fax: 202-334-5269
E-mail: ombudsman@washpost.com

Associated Press
50 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, NY 10020
Phone: 212-621-1500
Fax: 212-621-7523
D.C. Bureau phone: 202-776-9400

Magazines

Newsweek
251 W 57th Street, New York, NY 10019
Phone: 212-445-4000
Fax: 212-445-5068
E-mail: letters@newsweek.com

Time
Time & Life Bldg., Rockefeller Center, New York, NY 10020
Phone: 212-522-1212
Fax: 212-522-0323
E-mail: letters@time.com

U.S. News & World Report
1050 Thomas Jefferson St., Washington, DC 20007
Phone: 202-955-2000
Fax: 202-955-2049
E-mail: letters@usnews.com