Two Blast from the Past: Sleuthing Stolen Election 2004 with John Brakey with the "Hack and Stack" & A Movie called "Fatally Flawed"

To the late great Dr. David Griscom, a true friend to the end. I miss you. Auditor John Brakey.

Nov 24, 2024

Two Blast from the Past: Sleuthing Stolen Election 2004: John Brakey and the "Hack and Stack" & A Movie called "Fatally Flawed" on a Stolen Bond Election.

To the late great Dr. David Griscom, a true friend to the end. I miss you. Auditor John Brakey

Presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

In the wee hours of 3 November 2004, the day after Election Day, the CNN.com website showed an updated exit poll which had Kerry leading Bush nationally by 2.6%. But soon thereafter the vote counting equipment reported Bush ahead of Kerry by almost the mirror image: 2.8%. Simon & Baiman

Never before had the U.S. national exit polls been so wrong ...or WERE they?

On 11 November 2004, David Cobb and Michael Badnarik, the Green and Libertarian candidates for president, announced their intentions to file a formal demand for a recount of the ballots cast for president in the pivotal state of Ohio. This recount (conducted by Ohio SOS Kenneth Blackwell!) was officially terminated on 31 December 2005 after a recount of about 3% of the vote, which found 734 additional votes for Kerry and 449 additional votes for Bush.

Flash forward to 10 March 2006 the Associated Press told us that "[T]he third highest ranking employee at the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections has been indicted on charges of mishandling ballots during the 2004 presidential election recount."

And flash once more to 24 January 2007: Two election workers in Ohio's most populous county were convicted of illegally rigging the 2004 presidential election recount, allegedly so they could avoid a more thorough review of the votes.

So, what was the big deal about failing to randomly select precincts for recounting?

The answer lies in John Brakey's "Hack and Stack."

Let us return to Election Day 2004. John Brakey is going about his duties as Democratic Cluster Captain for four precincts in a heavily Hispanic, 80%-non-Republican district of Tucson, Arizona. When he entered these polling places to collect "tear sheets" (carbon copies of the record of the names of voters issued ballots) he was met with hostility by poll workers at three of them, and he observed irregular things going on at these three stations throughout the day.

Finally, more than an hour after the polls were closed, John returned to the Pct 324 polling place (his home precinct) where, to the mutual shock of all concerned, he stumbled upon the poll workers apparently in the process of altering the records.

These workers cursed and menaced John until he withdrew [see p. 132 in Mark Crispin Miller's book, Fooled Again - How the Right Stole the 2004 Election & Why They'll Steal the Next One Too (Unless We Stop Them)].

Like the "mild mannered Clark Kent" who became Superman when "truth, justice, and the American way" needed defending, John had risen up in the past to successfully sue a company that had been cheating subcontractors in Tucson. And, given that part of the court-ordered settlement required him to become publicly silent on what he knew, he headed "south of the border" for 14 years, where before long he was butting heads with crooked Mexican politicians in his successful defense of the Gulf of California against over fishing by commercial interests.

Now flash back once again to the morning of 3 November 2004. John Brakey took a page from election-theft-sleuth Greg Palast and went back to the Pct 324 polling place to poke in the trash. What he recovered there were the "ballot information slips" (3x3" slips of paper used by poll workers to record each arriving voter's registration number, party affiliation, and whether or not required to vote a provisional ballot). But these particular slips proved to be replete with non-standard indexing notations not normally used by poll workers. It was a consecutive numbering scheme (including some "alternate" consecutive numbers!!!), which would have enabled these poll workers to reorder (or alter) all other Election Day records at their whim.

What John did next was the most astonishing. He began working 18-hour days, seven days a week, collecting all public records relating to the nearly 2,000 voters registered at Pct 324—including those who didn't vote in 2004, as well as the 895 who officially voted (and 33 who signed a document at the polling place on Election Day but whose ballots were NOT counted). John manually entered these data into immense color-coded Excel spreadsheets which he and I began to pore over. By New Year's Day 2005, John had put in about 1,000 hours! My own contribution might have reached a paltry 300 hours.

By way of self-introduction, 2007 marks my 41st year as a research physicist. I am therefore well accustomed to sifting through Mother Nature's misleading clues in an ongoing struggle to understand some of the realities that she tries so hard to conceal from us. But, like Isaac Newton, I have to admit that own my successes owe largely to my "standing on the backs of giants." That is, physicists of the past provided me a legacy of proven theories as starting points. (In popular terms, I was spared having to "reinvent the wheel.")

But Karl Rove's election fraudsters appear to have created a system that, in retrospect, must have been designed specifically to confound crime scene investigators (at least until after the Joint Session of Congress met to accept the Electoral College results on January 6th). The laws of physics were of zero help to me here. I found myself sifting through misleading clues conjured, not by Mother Nature, but by human beings—ones possessed of especially criminal minds.

John Brakey found most of the irregular patterns in the data, and I dedicated myself to trying to decide which of these patterns were causes and which were effects. In particular, I wanted to be able to deduce which causes or effects were incidental/innocent and which were artifactual/criminal. I was greatly aided in this quest by bouncing my ideas off Tucson-voting-machine-expert and Ph.D. electrical engineer, Tom Ryan. Tom tended to be the devil's advocate for "incidental/innocent." His counterpoint to my suspicious nature forced me to assemble John's data into all possible quantifiable categories, and seriously consider possible innocent explanations of each. When the dust finally settled, my conclusion was that the evidence irrefutably favors of "artifactual/criminal.

I won't go deeper into my evidence or arguments, beyond emphasizing the following: The poll-worker-instigated annotations on the ballot information slips that John recovered from the morning-after-Election-Day trash at Pct 324 provided a workable mechanism for deliberately creating numerical patterns that are "statistically impossible" if they are supposed to have happened by random accident or poll-worker incompetence (longer story available on request).

Suffice it to say that we had found evidence that Pct-324 poll workers STUFFED the (optical scan) ballot box with HAND COUNTABLE PAPER BALLOTS (HCPBs) that had the effect of shifting the presidential vote in this precinct by at least 12.8%. I am supposing that if the paper ballots in the box had been recounted by hand, the votes on paper would have agreed with the votes counted by the (un-hacked) optical scanner—even though by my count 44 valid Kerry ballots were made to disappear and 80 Bush ballots were illegally created by the poll workers.

John calls such an act by colluding poll workers "the STACK." The type of person who would shamelessly commit such a crime against our democracy has been examined in immense detail by Mark Crispin Miller in his book Fooled Again. There are certainly enough of these folks (tens of millions) to have infiltrated most or all poll-worker positions in several percent of the polling stations nationwide.

I suppose that by now everyone knows about "the HACK" (specifically, the "Hursti Hack"):

But let my just give the technical summary. In 2004, approximately 40 million Americans voted on optical-scan voting machines employing 1.94w memory cards. The 1.94w card illegally contains "interpreted codes" which can be hacked to change the final ballot counts without leaving a trace ...EXCEPT for the HCPBs inside the ballot box.

So if just a few percent of the ballot boxes are stuffed in the manner that John Brakey and I have uncovered at Pct 324—and crooked election officials manage to pick only those precincts for recounts (which are SUPPOSED to have been randomly selected)—the more widely executed HACK would be covered up.

Is there evidence that this might have been what happened?

The reader should decide for him/herself by inspecting the accompanying graphic labeled "2004 Florida and Pennsylvania Registration and Voting". This graphic was picked from a now-defunct internet site, americanimage.com, which employed raw data found (and still available) at ustogether.org . Graphic available here.

American Image's unique contribution was to show (a) voter registration by party, (b) 2004 ballot tallies for president, (c) voting machine type, and (d) county size, ALL ON THE SAME GRAPH, by using a color scale to portray both (a) and (b). The most spectacular thing you will see in this graphic is that the 24 smallest counties in Florida THAT EMPLOYED DIEBOLD OPTICAL-SCAN machines were the most skewed toward Bush. That is, the dark-to-medium blue colors in the left-hand column signify that 10 to 30% of the electorate were registered Republican in these 24 counties, whereas the medium-green-to-red-magenta colors in the second column from the left signify that 45 to 80% of these same voters appeared to choose Bush in 2004.

Why should the pro-Bush skew be confined mostly to the smallest counties? And why is this skew mainly confined to voters who voted on optical-scan machines?

My answer to the first question is that (1) the smallest counties are probably the most vulnerable to takeovers of the polling places by colluding poll workers (the "STACK"), (2) small counties are less likely to be checked by exit polls, and (3) Karl Rove was thereby enabled to play on the myth of the "Dixiecrat effect" in small rural counties in Florida. As for the second question, it is easy to suppose that Karl knew that the touch-screen machines would the objects of much suspicion, so by minimizing vote theft on the touch screens (in 2004), an illusion of honesty was achieved.

Greg Palast believes that the 2004 Election was stolen by means of the disappearance of 3.6 million ballots that were cast but not counted. (The U.S. Census Bureau places the figure at 3.4 million.)

Nevertheless, a September 2005 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO Report) recognizes that there is evidence that security weaknesses in voting machines "...have caused problems with recent elections, resulting in the loss and MISCOUNT [emphasis added] of votes." So, while Palast focuses on the LOST votes, John Brakey and I have homed in on the MISCOUNTS.

One method of miscounting has been demonstrated by Harri Hursi (links above). Namely, it entails flipping votes for candidate A to candidate B and vice versa, by inserting executable codes into the 1.94w memory cards associated with the optical-scan ballot boxes (the "HACK").

When the HACK is covered up by the STACK (i.e., only precincts where the ballot boxes were stuffed by colluding poll workers are "randomly selected" for hand recounting), we become victims of a scam that John Brakey has termed the "HACK and STACK."

That is, a hand recount of the HCPBs in a STACKED precinct would be found to agree with the official ballot tally - even though the poll workers had shuffled ballots in and out in order to skew totals away from the way the voters actually voted.

On the other hand, the remaining, NON-STACKED precincts using optical-scan ballot boxes with 1.94w memory cards are vulnerable to HACKING, which could be adjusted to skew the official tallies to approximately the same degree as the STACKED ones. But big the difference is that any hand recount of a HACKED-but-NOT STACKED precinct would instantly reveal the actual MISCOUNT.

With 40 million voters voting on optical-scan machines in 2004, the HACK and STACK alone could have been sufficient to steal the election—despite the fact that voter-marked HCPBs were employed. If only about 10% percent of the precincts had only been truly RANDOMLY SELECTED for hand recounts, the HACK would have been detected. Then we would now be talking about a conspiracy to steal the election as a PROVEN FACT instead of denigrating election-integrity researchers as "conspiracy theorists."

Moral: As long as optical-scanners are with us, we must assure TRULY RANDOM RECOUNTS. N.B. There are several mathematically proven ways to decide how many precincts or ballots to recount in order to have high confidence of catching fraud. See, for example: ElectionArchive.Org or Election Defense Alliance

David L. Griscom, a Fellow of the American Physical Society, retired in 2001 from the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC, where he had been a research physicist for 33 years. He has subsequently held visiting professorships of research at the Universities of Paris, Lyon, and Saint-Etienne, France, and Tokyo Institute of Technology; he was also Adjunct Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at The University of Arizona in Tucson. By virtue of his collaboration with John Brakey, Griscom was an invited presenter at both the National Election Reform Conference (Nashville, April 2005) and the Election Protection Hearing (Houston, June 2005); he will be presenting the same material at the 2007 Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (San Francisco, February 2007).

This was published on the original INTERCEPT before it was sold to the new group.

1,546 views Oct 29, 2015

(AUDITAZ/AUDITUSA) investigator John Brakey and Jim March of Blackbox Voting learned first-hand of attempts by the Pima Elections Division to hide, alter and suppress elections evidence. The Pima Elections Division electronically manipulated existing database files, lost evidence containing an 'untainted' version of these files and illegally gained possession of the files during litigation.

This film allows you watch events as they unfold through the eyes of seasoned lawyer and activist Bill Risner. It quickly becomes evident that what initially appeared to be a public mandate to expand the city's roads was actually a top down mandate to run roughshod over the City of Tucson.

At every step of the way, citizens seeking answers are met with resistance from election facilitators, local politicians and the state's attorney general. The County's bizarre behavior in the lawsuit and new evidence of wrongdoing on the part of elections division personnel led to an equally suspicious, deeply flawed investigation by the Arizona Attorney General.

This investigation culminated in a recount that lacked a forensic inspection of the ballots any meaningful comparison historic numbers generated by precinct. You'll catch a unique glance at the unsettling relationships that exist between the various branches of state government unified by their common goal of evading justice.

Elected officials charged with oversight of the elections division refused to look into the problems with the county's elections. Bureaucrats handling the election were suspects in the case, but that didn't stand in the way with them having a prominent role in the Attorney General's investigation. All of these shenanigans became evidence in a lawsuit by the Pima County Democratic party for the release of database records.

After the data was finally released and events consistent with tampering were discovered, a long judicial pursuit attempting to restore the integrity of elections in Pima County culminated in an appellate court ruling in favor of prospective relief. This meant the courts can intervene when existing election laws and enforcement of existing election laws fail to protect the integrity of elections. Why won't Pima County comply with this ruling?

For more information, see below:

Elections Remain Compromised

(AUDITAZ/AUDITUSA

Elections Remain Compromised - AUDIT USA

By J.T. Waldron

On May 21st of this year, the Maricopa appellate court denied the Libertarian Party’s pursuit of injunctive relief for rigged elections. Stemming from litigation over the 2006 Regional Transportation Authority (RTA) election in Pima County, the Libertarian Party was well on its way towards pursuing their claim that the RTA election was fraudulent. Once fraud was established in the courts, the Libertarian party would obtain injunctive relief for rigged elections.

Back in 2010, the Libertarian Party had won an appellate court decision for that same claim in Pima County’s district. Pima County immediately requested the appellate court to reconsider its ruling, describing the rigging of the RTA election as “a discrete incident of past wrongdoing.” The request was denied.
Over the past four years, the promise of a resolution slowly withered as Pima County Superior Court judges kept ruling in defiance of the appellate court decision. They refused to hear the case, so the Libertarian Party was forced to appeal for a second time.

Pima County’s next legal maneuver may have ended their eight-year war of attrition against transparent fair elections. County operatives forced a change in appellate court venue by contriving an amicus brief through the Republican Party to develop a conflict of interest in the elections case. As a result, Pima County’s bureaucratic political machine finally achieved an appellate court decision to deny the pursuit of prospective relief for rigged elections in the courts. According to Rule 2.11 in the Arizona Supreme Court rules for judicial ethics:

A judge shall disqualify himself or herself in any proceeding in which the judge’s impartiality might reasonably be questioned.

Not so for Kent E. Cattani, one of three appellate court judges who served with the Arizona State Attorney General’s office until his appointment as a Maricopa appellate court judge on February 9th, 2013. He had worked at the Attorney General’s office at the time of Attorney General Terry Goddard’s dubious investigation of the RTA election.

Critically fortified and influenced by the growth industry, Pima County has spent millions of taxpayer’s dollars in a cover up that has soiled the Arizona Attorney General’s office and the state’s judicial system in an effort to prevent an authentic investigation of the 2006 RTA election. This election authorized a two billion dollar construction project financed by a raise in the area’s sales tax.

For the millions of taxpayers’ dollars spent by Pima County, key evidence in the form of RTA ballots stored for eight years without a forensic exam or a meaningful comparison to precinct totals, will be destroyed.

The money and effort spent to prevent these ballots from a simple hand lens inspection has become its own source of shame for not only the county, but for the press, for law enforcement and for the courts.

On that election day, May 16th, 2006, notable political party observers discovered suspicious activity in the tabulation room involving the manipulation of election database files. A lengthy records law suit confirmed that databases for that specific election were overwritten during the tabulation process. Subsequent illegal summary reports were printed immediately following the overwrites and the computer operator was known to remove election data from the tabulation center and take it home with him on a daily basis. Pima County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry, the person ultimately accountable for the elections division, is consistent in erroneously stating or implying that elections data was never taken home. Court testimony, however, identified computer operator Bryan Crane as the individual who took home elections data and identified the type of medium taken as attributed only to elections data. That same computer operator later made a barroom confession to a former Pima County employee who signed an affidavit with other witnesses. The operator stated that he rigged the election on the instruction of his bosses. Videotaped surveillance footage of the tabulation room during the key times in question were requested in litigation, stalled for an inordinate amount of time, then erased under the pretense that the requested footage was still in rotation and subject to normal recycling.

Attorney General Terry Goddard conducted an initial investigation using a subcontractor IBeta to examine the RTA database files. Pima County employee John Moffatt became involved with guiding the IBeta company through the investigation despite the fact that Pima County was formally named as the suspect. Goddard was aware of this arrangement and didn’t seem to mind how various inquiries suggested by Moffatt were either diversionary or irrelevant to discovering election fraud. Goddard also chose to ignore suggestions by those who filed the initial complaint, despite their high levels of expertise drawn from University of Arizona professors, an expert from blackboxvoting.org and a former NSA employee.

IBeta concluded in its report that the Diebold computer software used by Pima County (GEMS) “exhibits fundamental security flaws that make definitive valuation of data impossible.” The suspect’s influence on the outcome became evident in IBeta’s second key observation that the data was tampered with, but the lack of effort in covering their tracks suggests such tampering was a mistake.

John Moffatt was later caught absconding with key evidence from the county vault. He had somehow managed to obtain database records from that same 2006 RTA election in violation of a court order. Electronic data was not the only evidence potentially compromised. Attorney Bill Risner discovered through depositions that nobody was preventing access to the RTA paper election ballots, which were being held in storage during years of litigation. Any Pima County employee could have accessed those paper ballots or other paper records associated with that election.

When Bill Risner’s litigation team was finally set to examine individual printouts of precinct totals (called poll tapes), Terry Goddard intervened and confiscated all the paper evidence for an ostensible second examination of the 2006 RTA election. Initially, transparency activists were hopeful Goddard was acting in good faith and finally conducting a real investigation. Not so. Terry Goddard had initially promised to examine the poll tapes as part of his recount of the paper ballots in March, 2008. Once the count began, however, he refused to examine the tapes throughout his investigation. This move would postpone Risner’s examination of these printed totals for another year.

Goddard knew of John Moffatt’s previous mishandling of evidence in the court vault. He was also aware of PIma County’s ability to generate ballots on demand with a specialized ink jet printer. Despite sufficient cause, Goddard refused to perform a forensic exam of the ballots. Instead, he and his team performed a recount of the 2006 RTA ballots behind glass. Observers noticed major differences in paper thicknesses, which suggests a different print run was used despite the original vendor confirming a uniform thickness for all the ballots at the time of the election. During a press conference in April, 2008, Goddard announced that the count indicated similar results to the 2006 election. He therefore concluded that the election was not rigged.

Attorney General Terry Goddard’s investigation of the RTA election was rife with errors and missing whole precincts. Not only did it lack a forensic exam but there was no attempt to compare precinct totals to poll tapes or poll worker reports. One year later, Bill Risner’s team was finally able to access the poll tapes for that election. They finally understood why Goddard suddenly changed his mind. One third of the poll tapes were missing and more didn’t match their precinct totals. In totality, this discovery called into question almost half of the precincts counted. Those missing and errant poll tapes were closely correlated with an abnormally high number of malfunctioning memory cards detected in the electronic files won by the first records lawsuit. That same RTA records lawsuit revealed Pima County’s purchase of a tool used for circumventing normal function of those unique types of memory cards. That tool, sold to PIma County Elections as a “crop scanner”, was designed for measuring condensation on corn but demonstrated in 2004’s hit documentary “Hacking Democracy” as a handy device for altering the way a memory card records and reports elections outcome on a precinct level.

Database tampering was only one facet of this complex task to change an election outcome. On the paper side of the RTA election, missing and errant poll tapes were statistically significant as they correlated with memory cards exhibiting malfunctions in the electronic files won by the first records lawsuit. Malfunctioning memory cards indicate one rub in the mix when trying to rig an election in this fashion. Only very skillful technicians can reprogram close to 150 memory cards within a short window of time. Pima Elections obviously did not have the time to successfully perform the arduous task which is comparable to jamming copious amounts of code into a cheap calculator, but they certainly tried. Their failure required the Arizona State Attorney General and the entire local court system to help Pima County cover its tracks.

Pima Elections’ scheme began unravelling on election night as observers from behind the glass of the tabulation room noticed an open instruction manual that is banned from use in an official election. Quick-thinking observers used a telephoto lens to capture images that not only identified the contraband manual, but revealed the book open to the area demonstrating a key task for altering electronic database files. That night, observers requested that Elections Director Brad Nelson make a back-up of the elections systems, place the resulting CD into a sealed envelope and hand it over to the police until their observed violations are investigated. Brad Nelson refused. By ten that evening, Nelson indicated to the observers that election work was finished for the evening and that there was nothing more to observe. Electronic data would later reveal that once observers left, Pima Elections started up again at 10:13 pm and continued to tabulate votes until three the next morning.

Thus began eight years of litigation. Past articles in this blog provide a detailed history that starts with the RTA issue evolving into the pursuit of prospective relief in the courts. After seeing the movie, “Fatally Flawed” and reviewing this site’s coverage of past exchanges in the courts, at public meetings and behind closed doors. you will understand why there is no reliance upon the accuracy or fairness of elections within the United States.