When I heard the election had been called for Walker, I posted on my fb page, “something’s hinky here.” I felt that way then and I know it for sure now. The early exit polls predicted the race between Walker and Barrett to be a virtual tie. A second round of exit polling data gave Walker a small lead over Barrett but was still “too close to call.” MSNBC and Fox called the election for Walker an hour after the polls closed with no more than 21% of the 100% of unverified computer results in, and people in three counties still voting. Let’s see, within one hour the election went from too close to call, to Walker winning by 7%, with only 21% of the votes counted and three counties still voting. In other words that 21% was the equivalent of 57% of the total vote. This is mathematically impossible; clearly the unadjusted exit polls in Wisconsin do not match the reported results, the adjusted results, of the popular vote.
Media, unlike the common man or woman, has access to the unadjusted polling data. Richard Charnin asks, “why did the media not provide the actual unadjusted exit poll data (the “crosstabs”) Was it because they knew that they would have to adjust the poll to match a bogus recorded vote and did not want the public to view the impossible adjustments?”
Exit polls are based on what is called unadjusted exit polling data; as per Charnin, “in every election pollsters force state and national exit polls to match the recorded vote.” In other words, mathematically impossible or not, the machine is always right. In Wisconsin, the state’s leading vendors of voting machines, election supplies, and distributors of Dominion Voting Systems is Command Central. Dominion is a veritable cartel of Republican backed voting technology and owns Diebold/Premier Election voting Systems, which it bought from Election Systems and Software (ES&S), and the British based Sequoia. Diebold/Premier, famous for the mess that was the 2004 Presidential election, and ES&S are owned and operated by a handful of Republican, super-rich, Christian Reconstructionists and control 80% of the vote counts in the United States.
The fact that 80% of the votes counted in this country are in the hands of Republican backed voting technology is probably the reason why whenever there’s a glitch in the voting machine it always skews red.
Now back to Wisconsin: “By law voting machines must be publicly tested prior to every election. A Programmable Read Only Memory (P.R.O.M.) pack or cartridge is used to reprogram the machines with the details of the current election. Clerks receive two PROM packs from Command Central: A PRE-LAT, which is used a week or so before the election for the public test, and an “Official” pack used on Election Day.”
Sue Wahl-Storbeck, one of the two people operating Command Central, the other being her step-son Aaron Storbeck, is the person responsible for programming 3,000 voting machines in 46 districts in the State of Wisconsin. Wahl-Storbeck’s resume includes a stint at ACS Enterprises, a data processing company out of Texas. I’m not sure what she did at the data processing company but I do know that she was fired for refusing to take the company’s annual ethics exam and when her unemployment was denied, because she refused to take the company’s annual ethics exam, she took it to court and lost. Given the fact that “whoever programs the PROM packs has the ability to inject all the machines with a virus that will flip votes only on Election Day,” I’d like to know that the person programming the machine was both ethical and incorruptible especially since, “with two different PROM packs in play, it’s easy to see how public tests could be flawless and the machines could still flip votes Election Day.”
Wisconsin election integrity investigator John Washburn has some history with Command Central. In July of 2011 he asked “to examine the PROM packs from the July 15, 2011 recall election in wards 1-4 in Fox Point. When they responded that it would cost him $450, Washburn filed a complaint alleging that Command Central LLC wasn’t cooperative in responding to the open records request.” Last September, 2011, Washburn discovered that Command Central had offered to replace the Optech Scanner for two DRE screen models. It has been proven over and over again how easy it is to hack both the DRE and the Optech, but at least with the Optech you have a paper trail, the ballot is fed into the machine, you have a receipt that you voted, and in case of a recount the election official can physically monitor the number of ballots to see it they match the machine total. The DRE is a touch screen, votes are recorded directly onto a memory cartridge, meaning there is no receipt or paper trail to confirm that your vote was counted; all the election official gets at the end of the day is a paper tape that shows the votes and vote totals. Without a verifiable paper trail, the votes can be easily flipped. Once again, “with two different PROM packs in play, it’s easy to see how public tests could be flawless and the machines could still flip votes Election Day.” I can find absolutely no evidence at all that the PROM packs for the Walker re-call election were checked by anyone other than Sue Wald-Storbeck.
According to John Washburn, Command Central’s DRE offer violated “the statutes issued by the GAB (Government Accountability Board) for the State approved system as described on the Government Accountability Board’s website that requires the inclusion of an Optech Insight Scanner. On January 13, 2010 Washbun emailed the GAB about this situation. When he did not receive an answer, he submitted and Open Records request to the GAB with no reply. On May 2, he submitted another, again, to no response. On May 4th, he turned the case over to Dane County Attorney, and on May 14th, he kicked it up to the Department of Justice.” I was pretty shocked that GAB didn’t respond to Washburn’s request immediately, given the subject had to do with the integrity of the Democratic process, that is until I discovered Judge Michael Brennan, one of the six judges on the board, was just tapped to chair Governor Scott Walker’s Judicial Selection Advisory Committee.
Thanks to Wisconsin Citizen Media Co-op and other groups, Wisconsin was informed of the twisted machinations of probable voter fraud threading through the re-call voting process and wrote down a simple list of ways to ensure your vote counted. Wisconsin voted mostly on paper ballots, what they had no control over however was how the votes were counted. The votes were counted by the same computer-optical scan systems famous for throwing out thousands of valid votes in New York City, failing to count the same ballots the same way in Oakland County, Michigan, and when hacked of entirely flipping the results of a mock election in Leon County, Florida. These failures, failures that can clearly determine elections, were discovered during state mandated, manual, post-election, spot checks. Wisconsin though does not manually post check ballots without a recount request and an order from a judge, unless it’s a presidential election, so there is no way to know if the results reported by the computers reflect what the actual ballots say. Clearly there’s a question here as the unadjusted exit polls do not match the reported results, the adjusted results, of the popular vote, results, which were in Sue Wahl-Storbeck’s hands and the machines she programmed.
John Simon writes, “We’ve seen this before, election after election, the familiar “Red Shift.” And it’s the exit polls that are always “off” because the Votecounts must always be “on.” Except the Votecounts are secret and in the full control of outfits with strong right-wing affiliations, like Dominion Voting and Command Central. Votes counted by partisans in complete secret – is this sane?”
No it’s not sane, it’s fraud, and it’s coming to a national election near you.
Live loud, love fierce, and suffer no fools. Katherine Manaan (MAWT)
