Source: http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/04/11/con04492.html
Sender, Berl & Sons Inc.
There seems to be a single cable news network journalist that sensed the fraud from its inception and is pursuing the issue. It shows you how a single voice properly positioned can made the case. What is the Bush/NWO cabal going to do to stop this course? Or has the scenario put to us by one of our readers in view of what we had presented at answer@senderberl.com, coming into play?
NOTE: WE HAVE ADDED BELOW A MUST READ E-MAIL JUST RECEIVED THIS MORNING FROM A SENDERBERL VALUED READER.
Source: http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/04/11/con04492.html
Incredible As It May Seem, MSNBC Covers Voting Problems
A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION
Just watched Keith Olbermann on MSNBC in which he did a story on election problems. He said that there were 90,000 more votes cast in Ohio than registered voters (he went through a list of counties and said how many voters were registered in each and how many extra thousands of votes were recorded).
He reported how in Florida counties, heavily-leaning dem counties went overwhelmingly for Bush -- the first time these counties have ever voted Repub. He showed charts with numbers, etc., it was very compelling.
He said that all the irregularities in Florida and Ohio have happened in counties using non-paper-trail e-voting from the companies run by Bush's friends.
He interviewed a reporter from the Cincinnati paper who discussed how homeland security barred reporters from witnessing the voting in some of the major minority areas in town, that this was the first time the press was ever kept out of and barred from witnessing the voting. The Sec of State in Ohio says that it was under orders from Bush's Homeland Security chief, who said that these cities in Ohio were under a highly increased threat of terrorism during the election. For this reason, only one entrance was open for the voting in these (largely democratic) areas, and the press was barred from coming in to see the voting, or to have the usual offices in the building they have had in every past year.
Olbermann then had Rep. John Conyers on and there are a dozen or so representatives demanding an investigation from the GAO. So it's Chicago-style voting taken to a national level -- the GOP dead vote, the GOP takes away votes from Dems and turned them into Bush votes, and they just add extra votes (for pres, not on the other issues or candidates) to the totals.
In Florida where Bush scored big, on the same ballots Democratic measures scored big, such as making a Florida minimum wage $1 above the federal level. In other words, all these people voted for Bush AND voted to pass these Democratic measures, which the GOP had tried to defeat. So this indicates that only the presidential election voting was rigged, they didn't rig the rest of the voting form.
Looks like maybe we're going to get some sort of investigation into the fraud that's gone down after all, even if Kerry caved in.
Also, some counties in Ohio where the press has always been allowed to inspect figures from voting -- have been taken away and they're not allowed to view them. They're filing something in court to force the Sec of State to release them for public review.
Also, one heavily-Dem county in Florida discovered a huge stack of absentee ballots that had not been counted and told the Sec of State's office about the ballots and said they would count them -- and the Sec of State told them to hold on, and then came and took the ballots away, so the officials in that county were never able to count them.
A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION
Source: http://www.consortiumnews.com/2004/110904.html
George W. Bush’s vote tallies, especially in the key state of Florida, are so statistically stunning that they border on the unbelievable.
While it’s extraordinary for a candidate to get a vote total that exceeds his party’s registration in any voting jurisdiction – because of non-voters – Bush racked up more votes than registered Republicans in 47 out of 67 counties in Florida. In 15 of those counties, his vote total more than doubled the number of registered Republicans and in four counties, Bush more than tripled the number.
Statewide, Bush earned about 20,000 more votes than registered Republicans.
By comparison, in 2000, Bush’s Florida total represented about 85 percent of the total number of registered Republicans, about 2.9 million votes compared with 3.4 million registered Republicans.
Bush achieved these totals although exit polls showed him winning only about 14 percent of the Democratic vote statewide – statistically the same as in 2000 when he won 13 percent of the Democratic vote – and losing Florida’s independent voters to Kerry by a 57 percent to 41 percent margin. In 2000, Gore won the independent vote by a much narrower margin of 47 to 46 percent.
[For details on the Florida turnout in 2000, see http://www.msnbc.com/m/d2k/g/polls.asp?office=P&state=FL. For details on the 2004 Florida turnout, see http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/states/FL/P/00/index.html]
Exit Poll Discrepancies
Similar surprising jumps in Bush’s vote tallies across the country – especially when matched against national exits polls showing Kerry winning by 51 percent to 48 percent – have fed suspicion among rank-and-file Democrats that the Bush campaign rigged the vote, possibly through systematic computer hacking.
Republican pollster Dick Morris said the Election Night pattern of mistaken exit polls favoring Kerry in six battleground states – Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada and Iowa – was virtually inconceivable.
“Exit polls are almost never wrong,” Morris wrote. “So reliable are the surveys that actually tap voters as they leave the polling places that they are used as guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third World countries. … To screw up one exit poll is unheard of. To miss six of them is incredible. It boggles the imagination how pollsters could be that incompetent and invites speculation that more than honest error was at play here.”
But instead of following his logic that the discrepancy suggested vote tampering – as it would in Latin America, Africa or Eastern Europe – Morris postulated a bizarre conspiracy theory that the exit polls were part of a scheme to have the networks call the election for Kerry and thus discourage Bush voters on the West Coast. Of course, none of the networks did call any of the six states for Kerry, making Morris’s conspiracy theory nonsensical. Nevertheless, some Democrats have agreed with Morris's bottom-line recommendation that the whole matter deserves “more scrutiny and investigation.” [The Hill, Nov. 8, 2004]
Erroneous Votes
Democratic doubts about the Nov. 2 election have deepened with anecdotal evidence of voters reporting that they tried to cast votes for Kerry but touch-screen voting machines came up registering their votes for Bush.
In Ohio, election officials said an error with an electronic voting system in Franklin County gave Bush 3,893 extra votes in suburban Columbus, more than 1,000 percent more than he actually got.
Yet, without a nationwide investigation, it’s impossible to know whether those cases were isolated glitches or part of a more troubling pattern.
If Bush’s totals weren’t artificially enhanced, they would represent one of the most remarkable electoral achievements in U.S. history.
In the two presidential elections since Sen. Bob Dole lost to Bill Clinton in 1996, Bush would have increased Republican voter turnout nationwide by a whopping 52 percent from just under 40 million votes for Dole to just under 60 million votes for the GOP ticket in 2004.
Such an increase in voter turnout over two consecutive election cycles is not unprecedented, but has historically flowed from landslide victories that see shifting voting patterns, with millions of crossover voters straying from one party to the other.
For example, in 1972, Richard Nixon increased Republican turnout by 73.5 percent over Barry Goldwater’s performance two elections earlier. But this turnout was amplified by the fact that Goldwater lost in 1964 to Lyndon Johnson by about 23 percentage points and Nixon trounced George McGovern by 23 percentage points.
What’s remarkable about Bush’s increase over the last two elections is that Democrats have done an impressive job boosting their own voter turnout from 1996 to 2004. Over this period, candidates Al Gore and John Kerry increased Democratic turnout by about 18 percent, from roughly 47.5 million votes in 1996 to nearly 56 million in 2004.
What this suggests is that Bush is not so much winning his new votes from Democrats crossing over, but rather by going deeper than many observers thought possible into new pockets of dormant Republican voters.
Bush’s Gains
But where did these new voters come from, and how did Bush manage to accelerate his turnout gains at a time when the Democratic ticket was also substantially increasing its turnout?
While the statistical analysis of these new voters is only just beginning, Bush’s ability to find nearly 9 million new voters in an election year when his Democratic opponent also saw gains of about 5 million new voters is the story of the 2004 election.
Exit polls also suggest that voters identifying themselves as Republicans voted as a greater proportion of the electorate than in 2000 and that Bush won a slightly greater percent of the Republican vote.
The party breakdown in 2000 was 39 percent Democrats, 35 percent Republicans, and 27 percent independents. In 2000, Bush won the Republican vote by 91 percent to 8 percent; narrowly won the independent vote by 47 percent to 45 percent and picked up 11 percent of the Democratic vote compared with Gore’s Democratic turnout of 86 percent. [See http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2000/epolls/US/P000.html for details.]
According to exit polls this year, the turnout broke evenly among Democrats and Republicans, with about 37 percent each. Independents represented about 26 percent of the electorate. Kerry actually did better among independents, winning that group of voters by a narrow 49 percent to 48 percent margin.
However, Bush did slightly better among the larger number of Republican voters, winning 93 percent of their vote, while matching his 2000 performance by taking about 11 percent of the Democratic vote.
Registration Up
While this turnout might strike many observers as unusual in an election year that witnessed huge voter registration and mobilization efforts by Democrats and groups aligned with Democrats, the increased GOP turnout does seem to fit with the campaign strategy deployed by the Bush team to run to the base.
From the start of the 2004 campaign, political strategist Karl Rove and the Bush team made its goals clear – maximize Bush’s support among social and economic conservatives – including Evangelicals and Club for Growth/anti-government conservatives – and turn them out by driving up Kerry’s negatives with harsh attacks questioning Kerry’s leadership credentials.
This strategy emerged from Rove’s estimate after the 2000 election that 4 million Evangelical voters stayed home that year. The Bush/Rove strategy in 2004 rested primarily on turning out that base of support.
But, even if one were to estimate that 100 percent of these Evangelical voters turned out for Bush in 2004 and that 100 percent of Bush’s 2000 supporters turned out again for him, this still leaves about 5 million new Bush voters unaccounted for.
Altogether, Bush’s new 9 million votes came mainly from the largest states in the country. But nowhere was Bush’s performance more incredible than in Florida, where Bush found roughly 1 million new voters, about 11 percent all new Bush voters nationwide and more than twice the number of new voters than in any other state other than Texas.
Bush increased his turnout in all 67 Florida counties, marking the second consecutive election in which Bush increased Republican vote totals in all Florida counties, and overall achieved a 34 percent increase in Florida votes over his 2000 total.
Since Bob Dole’s 1996 turnout of 2.24 million Florida votes, Bush has increased the GOP’s performance in the state by an astonishing 74 percent. Making Bush’s gains even more impressive, Kerry also saw gains in all but five Florida counties and in 22 counties earned at least 10,000 more votes than Gore earned in 2000.
Exceeding Kerry
But Bush’s vote gains exceeded Kerry’s in all the large counties in the state except in heavily Democratic Miami-Dade, where Kerry increased his turnout by 56,000 new votes compared with Bush’s 40,000 new votes. This Democratic improvement in Miami-Dade seems to have come in large part from Democratic success in registering new voters in the county by almost a 2-to-1 margin over Republicans.
In spite of this new-voter registration advantage, Kerry only earned a 7-to-5 increase of new voter turnout over Bush in Miami-Dade, a statistical oddity given the fact that Kerry did a better job than Gore in turning out his Democratic base, earning a vote total equaling 85 percent of all registered Democrats in the county compared with Gore’s total in 2000 equaling 83 percent of all registered Democrats.
In other Democratic strongholds of Broward and Palm Beach counties, Kerry gained 114,000 new voters, earning nearly 770,000 votes, and bested Bush by more than 320,000 votes. But, this was actually a modest improvement for Bush over 2000, thanks to Bush’s increase of 119,000 new voters in these counties, from 330,000 votes in 2000 to 449,000 votes in 2004.
Bush’s performance in these two counties is worth studying in greater detail. In both counties, Democrats saw a significant increase in new voter registration since 2000, more than 77,000 newly registered Democrats in Broward and 34,000 newly registered Democrats in Palm Beach.
Republicans on the other hand only registered 17,000 new voters in Broward and a bit more than 2,000 new voters in Palm Beach. While both counties saw substantial numbers of new unaffiliated or third party registered voters, the Democratic advantage in both counties combined of more than 111,000 newly registered Dems against fewer than 20,000 newly registered GOP voters, as well as the voter intensity that these new registration rates usually represent, suggested that Kerry should have done better than Bush relative to the 2000 election.
Instead, Bush actually increased his vote total in the two counties by earning about 5,000 more new voters than Kerry.
New Level
Beyond southern Florida, Bush took turnout throughout the state to a new level, testing the bounds of statistical probability by winning votes seemingly from every corner of the state, from the panhandle to the Gulf Coast, from the I-4 corridor to the Atlantic Coast from Jacksonville to Miami.
Another county worth examining in some detail is Orange County, a swing county home to Orlando in the center of the state. As in Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, and Broward counties, Democrats successfully registered substantially more new voters than Republicans, about 49,000 new Democrats against about 25,000 new Republicans.
These gains broke what was once a statistical tie in registered voters between the parties, giving Democrats a 214,000 to 187,000 advantage across the county. But Kerry only managed a narrow countywide victory with 192,030 votes against 191,389 votes for Bush. In 2000, Gore carried the county with 140,115 votes against 134,476 votes for Bush.
While it's conceivable Bush might have achieved these and other gains through his hardball campaign strategies and strong get-out-the-vote effort, many Americans, looking at these and other statistically incredible Bush vote counts, are likely to continue to suspect that the Republicans put a thumb on the electoral scales, somehow exaggerating Bush's tallies through manipulation of computer tabulations.
Only an open-minded investigation with public scrutiny would have much hope of quelling these rising suspicions.
SenderBerl: Again the above only confirms the electronic manipulation of reporting of exit poll data at the gateway to the truth.
E-MAIL RECEIVED EARLY AM NOVEMBER 10, 2004
Dr. Avi Rubin is
currently Professor of Computer Science at John Hopkins
University. He "accidently"got his hands on a copy of
the Diebold software program--Diebold's source code--which runs
their e-voting machines.
Dr. Rubin's students pored over 48,609 lines of code
that make up this software. One line in partictular stood out
over all the rest:
#defineDESKEY((des_KEY8F2654hd4"
All commercial programs have
provisions to be encrypted so as to protect them from having
their contents read or changed by anyone not having the key..The
line that staggered the Hopkin's team was that the method used to
encrypt the Diebold machines was a method called Digital
Encryption Standard (DES), a code that was broken in 1997 and is
NO LONGER USED by anyone to secure prograns.F2654hd4 was the key
to the encryption. Moreover, because the KEY was IN the source
code, all Diebold machines would respond to the same key. Unlock
one, you have then ALL unlocked.
I can't believe there is a person alive who wouldn't
understand the reason this was allowed to happen. This wasen't a
mistake by any stretch of the imagination. This was a fixed
election, plain and simple.
This second coup d'etat is either
stopped now or America ceases to be.
See: http://www.ilcaonline.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=961&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0
http://www.innovations-report.de/html/berichte/informationstechnologie/bericht-20184.html
Original Avi Rubin Presentation: http://vote.nist.gov/speeches/2%20-%20Security%20Panel/3%20-%20Rubin.pdf
My experience as an Election Judge in Baltimore County on November 2, 2004
by
On March 2, I served as an election judge in the Super Tuesday primary. When I got home that night, I wrote up my thoughts and published them on my web site. Yesterday, I worked as an election judge again for the general election, and I wanted to write down my thoughts the same way, but when I got home, I was too tired. My precinct had a 91% turnout, not counting absentee ballots, and I was quite busy most of the day. I woke up this morning at around 5:00 a.m. and tuned in to see if we had a President yet. The news said that it was still hanging on four states that were too close to call. I couldn't fall back asleep, so I'm up now at 5:30 a.m., writing about my experience yesterday.
Election judges in Baltimore County report to work at 6:00 a.m. The precinct where I was assigned, in Timonium, MD, is about 15 minutes from my house, so I set my alarm for 5:05 a.m., but I woke up at 4:30 pretty wired and ready to go. It was finally Election Day, and it seemed like the drama of the past year and a half since Adam Stubblefield, Yoshi Kohno, Dan Wallach and I wrote a paper about security problems in Diebold's voting machines was coming to a head. I was completely awake at that early hour, and I felt nervous and apprehensive about several things. One of my concerns was that something might go very wrong in the election. All of the polls indicated a virtual dead heat, and thus any glitches or disruption in a key state could mean the difference in the outcome.
However, I was worried about something else as well. In the past week, the media coverage of potential problems in e-voting has been unbelievable. I spent most of the week doing media interviews and appeared recently on the Today show, on 60 Minutes, on the cover of the Baltimore Jewish Times, in several major national newspapers, and on quite a few radio shows. The media was setting up the election as potentially marred by e-voting. There was a problem with this. The biggest threat posed by the current crop of electronic voting machines is a software problem, either malicious or due to an unintentional bug, that affects the outcome of the election in an undetectable way. The media, however, focus on detectable problems. To some extent, I felt that the election was going to be viewed as a referendum on electronic voting, despite the issue not appearing on any ballot. However, even if the election were viewed as "successful," it would not alleviate the vast majority of my concerns with the machines. Voting machines that are vulnerable to wholesale rigging can still perform perfectly normally. It is possible that nobody exploited the vulnerabilities this time around, and it is also possible that there was fraud or serious error, but that they went undetected. Electronic voting will be judged on the noticeable failures, and the unnoticeable ones are the most serious.
With these thoughts running through my head, I drove to my precinct before sunrise and prepared for a long workday. Election judges are not permitted to leave the poll site during the day, so I packed food for breakfast and lunch and arranged for my wife, Ann, to bring me dinner in the evening.
For the most part, my co-workers were the same judges as last time. The older Sandy was missing, as was Joy, the former trainer of chief judges. I learned yesterday that the reason why Joy was such an expert was that she had actually worked for Diebold before that election. There was also a new judge named Terry. This time, my fellow judges greeted me very warmly. Most of them had read my Op-Ed in the Baltimore Sun after the primary and were very pleased with my description of our shared experience. They had also seen the Op-Ed that I published last week. Chief judge Marie was quick to point out to me very proudly that Diebold had not set up the machines this time, but that she and her husband Bill (also an election judge in our precinct) had come in the night before to open them up. I asked her who was guarding the machines overnight, and she replied that the room in the church had been locked.
Before I go on, I should mention that I believe that all of the judges who worked with me are upstanding citizens, and I am sure that their only interest yesterday was to run our election smoothly and get the right outcome. I did, however, observe a vulnerability that I do not think would exist with non-DRE voting. It turned out that the new judge, Terry, was the security manager for the church where our election was held. He carried a large keyring to all the doors in the building. He was also in the same political party as chief judge Marie and her husband. One of the reasons why we have election judges from both major parties at each station at the polling center is to provide checks and balances. The night before the election, there was an imbalance. Two judges from the same party had set up the machines alone, and that night, someone from the same party had access to the room where the machines were left unguarded. Why is that a problem? The Diebold Accuvote TS machines were shown to be highly vulnerable to tampering. With physical access to the machines, for example, one could change a few bytes in the ballot definition file and votes for the two major Presidential candidates would be swapped. In that case, none of the procedures we had in place could detect that votes were tallied for the wrong candidates. At the end of the election, we packed up the machines and left them in the same room with the door locked. Any malicious changes that had been made the night before could have been undone then. Each machine had a plastic seal on it, but the seal did not look like something that would be impossible to find. In fact, our supply packet contained a number of extras. This is just an example; there are many other ways someone with unfettered access to the machines could tamper with the election. Clearly it would be easy to make it so that the machines did not work at all, e.g. using a hammer. Such attacks exist regardless of the voting technology. The big difference with DREs is that tampering that is undetectable can change the vote count. Again, let me stress that I do not have any reason whatsoever to believe that my fellow judges did anything untoward. In fact, I believe strongly that they did not. My only point here is to observe that there are vulnerabilities in the system, vulnerabilities that someone could exploit someday and that ought to be eliminated.
The lines started forming outside of our precinct at around 6:40 a.m. At 7:00, once again chief judge Jim cast the first vote to our applause. We opened the outside doors, and within a couple of minutes, a policeman who was guarding our precinct had to keep people outside and only let them in as people left. The lines of people zigzagged across the room. People were polite but seemed rushed for the most part. I worked as an A-K book judge once again and tried to check people in as efficiently as possible. From 7:00 - 8:00 a.m., the crowd did not let up, and I wondered if we would be that busy the whole day. During the end of that first hour, we had processed over half the number of people who had voted in the primary on Super Tuesday. Luckily, everything went smoothly, and eventually the pace slowed down. By noon, more than half of the registered voters in the precinct had voted. We had several minor glitches. Some of the smartcards did not work very well, and voters got unusual error messages on the screen. I did not see them, but one of the other judges told me they looked like "strange computer messages."
In the afternoon, when we were not as busy, I paid attention to the voters' reactions to the machines. We were required to post a sign on the wall that said that anybody who was eligible to vote on the machines was not allowed to cast a provisional ballot. A voter asked me about the sign, and I explained that if someone's name appeared in our registration book, they had to vote on the machine. He asked me why anyone would not want to vote on the machine, and I explained that some people preferred a paper ballot. He laughed and said, "People need to get a grip and join the 21st century. The world is about computers. Those machines make it so easy." As an election judge, I did not feel it would be proper to respond, so I just nodded. Several people commented on how much they enjoyed the voting experience. However, one couple tried to give me the third degree. The husband asked me in a very annoyed tone why he should have any confidence that the machine was actually recording his vote. Before I could figure out how to respond, his wife said that she felt the machines were susceptible to fraud. I told them that the machines were what we had, and that if they did not like them, that I strongly recommend that they write to their representatives. Ironically, I found myself wincing and hoping that none of the other voters had overheard them. As an election judge helping to run the operation, I did not want any disruptions. Yes, I believed that using these machines was a terrible way to conduct an election, but we were using them, and it was not the right moment for me to voice that concern. The only other related comment came from a voter who pulled something out of his pocket that he claimed was a large magnet, and he asked if I was worried that he could accidentally erase the hard drive on the machine with this powerful magnet. He then laughed and winked at me. I think he may have known who I was. He had already voted and was having some fun with me so I just replied, "I hope not!"
When I worked the primary, some of the press wanted to speak with me over chief judge Marie's objections, and the situation became unpleasant. However, this time, there was no media and very little presence of Diebold and the board of elections. A Diebold representative stopped by a couple of times just to ask how things were going. We told him that everything was fine.
At 8:00 p.m., we closed the polls and locked the outside doors. This time we did not have to call security because Terry had the keys. Every hour we had counted the number of people who had voted and posted the turnout on the door of the polling place. When we closed the doors, there had been 725 digital ballots cast, and the chief judges decided not to modem in the results because it would be too much of a hassle. Instead, when they left the precinct later that night, they drove the memory cards with the totals to the board of elections office. I stared at the five machines. Inside them were the little memory cards, not unlike the one in my digital camera at home, with 725 votes stored on them. One by one, we removed the memory cards from the machines. I held them in my hand as chief judge Marie was ready to load them into one of the machines that we designated as the accumulator. How fragile. All of the votes from the entire precinct in my hand. Substituting those cards with five identical looking cards, one could replace all of the ballots that were cast with bogus ones. Surely nobody in Maryland would try something like that. The outcome here was certain before the election. However, what about states like Ohio and New Mexico? 725 paper ballots would be much harder to swap than 5 small memory cards. In larger precincts, the cards could hold thousands of ballots, but they would be the same size.
My day at the polls was quite different than the first time I was a judge back in March. On Super Tuesday, I was in awe of the whole situation and the role that I was playing in our democracy. I was very emotional, and my only disappointment was that my precinct seemed a bit staged. We had nine judges in a precinct that totaled 199 votes. The president of Diebold Election Systems stopped by a couple of times, and the media kept showing up. By contrast, everything yesterday was more natural. There was no super judge so we had to figure everything out ourselves. We had many voters and were so busy that the day was about keeping up and providing the best customer service possible to the voters, while making sure everything ran smoothly.
When I arrived home last night, I had several email messages from reporters asking me about my experience. One of them really disturbed me: "After being an election judge, have you changed your opinion at all about these DREs?" I suppose it disturbed me because it implied that somehow my opinion on DREs was based on some superficial measure that could change when I saw them in action. I think the question ignores the expertise of computer scientists, including me, with respect to computer security. It is like asking a surgeon who states that a particular medical procedure is risky whether he might change his opinion because there was a successful operation using that procedure somewhere in the world. Imagine if, universally, all of the heart surgeons in the world said that a new medication was dangerous and could lead to heart attacks but that the drug's manufacturer claimed that it was safe. Would people feel comfortable taking the medication? Would doctors be asked whether they changed their opinion on the medication because somebody took it and did not die? It is a common problem. The press likes to simplify the issue and boil it down to sound bites from each side to produce what they consider "balanced" stories.
Well, for the record, here is my answer to questions like the ones emailed by that reporter: If we continue to use the kind of insecure DREs that were used in this election, it is only a matter of time before somebody exploits them. And the worst part is that we may never know it.
As I am writing this, CNN is reporting that Bush has 254 electoral votes and Kerry has 252. Three states are still up in the air, Ohio, Iowa, and New Mexico. Who knows when a final determination will be made. I worry that whenever we have close elections, paperless DREs will produce a cloud of uncertainty over the election. Without the capability for recounts, there will be little to do to satisfy the public about the outcome.