63 Documents the Government Doesn't Want You to Read - Jesse Ventura [26]
Having grown up in that era, though, this doesn’t really surprise me. Not when you learn about all the people the government had under surveillance, from Dr. King to Malcolm X to John Lennon. I thought we’d left those times behind, but everything seems to be circular. It’s worse than ever today, since 9/11, and we’ll get to that in a bit.
36 & 37
STOLEN 2000 ELECTION
The GES Emails and a CBS News Analysis
We all know how the Supreme Court awarded the disputed 2000 election to George W. Bush. What’s often forgotten is how, on election night, a computer “error” made it look like Al Gore had lost Florida—and prompted the media to announce prematurely that Bush was the winner. This happened in Volusia County, where an electronic voting machine company called Global Election Systems (GES) was tabulating things. GES turns out to have been run by Republicans who were only too eager to see Bush take over after eight years of Clinton. All of a sudden that night, 16,022 votes for Gore got subtracted from his total in Volusia County. It wasn’t until 2003, when a bunch of internal Global Election Systems memos got leaked, that it became clear company officials knew all about this at the time. “The problem precinct had two memory cards uploaded,” according to GES tech guy Tab Iredale in one memo. “There is always a possibility that ‘the second memory card’ came from an unauthorized source.” These emails follow.
I cry out to stop the electronic ballots, because any computer can be hacked into, as evidence clearly shows. I say, stick with handwritten ballots. If you can’t fill in the blank circle with a pencil, then you shouldn’t be voting because we’ve been doing that since the first grade! Maybe the ballots still need to be hand-counted, but at least you’d have a paper trail.
After persuing the emails, you’ll read a couple of pages from a report that CBS News prepared about the coverage of election night 2000—an apology, really, for going with the rest of the herd and calling the victory for Bush. This could be solved if something I’ve advocated was put in place, to allow no media coverage until the final polls close in Hawaii. Hell, they’re already predicting winners when it’s two o’clock in the afternoon in California. The polls are still open, but why do I need to go vote if I’m already told who’s going to be president? I suppose what I’m proposing infringes greatly on the First Amendment but what the heck, with all the documents you’re seeing in this book, what’s wrong with that?
CBS NEWS COVERAGE OF ELECTION NIGHT 2000
Investigation, Analysis, Recommendations
Analysis of the Call for Bush
The call was based entirely on the tabulated county vote. There were several data errors that were responsible for that mistake. The most egregious of the data errors has been well documented. Vote reports from Volusia County severely understated Gore’s actual total when a faulty computer memory card reported votes that were off by thousands. That precinct, Number 216, subtracted more than 16,000 votes from Gore’s total and added votes to Bush’s total. In addition, an apparent reporting error in Brevard County reduced Gore’s total by an additional 4,000 votes.
The mistakes, both of which originated with the counties, were critical, since there were only about 3 percent of the state’s precincts outstanding at this time. They incorrectly increased Bush’s lead in the tabulated vote from about 27,000 to more than 51,000. Had it not been for these errors, the CBS News call for Bush at 2:17:52 AM would not have been made. While the errors should have been caught by VNS and CBS News analysts through a comparison of VNS data with data from the AP or the Florida Secretary of State, VNS computers could also have had a more sophisticated program that would have constantly compared one set of numbers with the others and raised a warning signal. (Unlike the television networks, the Associated Press never called Florida for Bush, and, as we