Former Komen exec. who pushed to defund Planned Parenthood weighing Senate bid

Maybe Nebraska Republican Chuck Hagel honestly won two US Senate elections. Maybe it's true that the citizens of Georgia simply decided that incumbent Democratic Senator Max Cleland, a wildly popular war veteran who lost three limbs in Vietnam, was, as his successful Republican challenger suggested in his campaign ads, too unpatriotic to remain in the Senate. Maybe George W. Bush, Alabama's new Republican governor Bob Riley, and a small but congressionally decisive handful of other long-shot Republican candidates really did win those states where conventional wisdom and straw polls showed them losing in the last few election cycles.

Perhaps, after a half-century of fine-tuning exit polling to such a science that it's now sometimes used to verify how clean elections are in Third World countries, it really did suddenly become inaccurate in the United States in the past six years and just won't work here anymore. Perhaps it's just a coincidence that the sudden rise of inaccurate exit polls happened around the same time corporate-programmed, computer-controlled, modem-capable voting machines began recording and tabulating ballots.

But if any of this is true, there's not much of a paper trail from the voters' hand to prove it.

Velvet Revolution (“VR”), a non-profit dedicated to clean and honest elections, today offers a $100,000 reward for hard information leading to the arrest and conviction of any person or persons who helped to rig the 2002 Senate race in Georgia in favor of Saxby Chambliss. That election pitted the war hero Max Cleland, a popular incumbent, against far-right novice Saxby Chambliss. The pre-election polls showed Cleland with a comfortable lead–and yet Chambliss “won” by a wide margin. To date, the truth behind that upset “victory” (and the equally surprising win by Sonny Perdue, the rightist candidate for governor) has been confirmed by three different whistle-blowers–including Chris Hood, who worked for Diebold in 2002.

In a video interview with VR, Hood has stated that, not long before Election Day, he was ordered by Bob Urosevich, president of Diebold‘s voting-machine division (and a self-proclaimed GOP partisan) to place illegal software patches on hundreds of voting machines in the Democratic-leaning counties of Fulton and DeKalb. Hood, and the other Diebold employees involved in that stealth operation, were told not to discuss these patches with any state officials. Documents provided to VR by Hood show that Cathy Cox, then Georgia’s Secretary of State, had no knowledge of those patches at the time.

Hood’s account has been corroborated by cyber-security expert Stephen Spoonamore, who has stated that Hood gave him a copy of the Georgia patch, which he analyzed and then turned it over to the FBI Cyber Squad in Washington for investigation. According to Spoonamore, the patch could have been used to flip the votes cast on Diebold’s machines from Cleland to Chambliss. In his expert opinion, Max Cleland was the real winner of that election, which Saxby Chambliss stole with Diebold’s help.

One of my favorite mathematicians is Richard Charnin, who on his website, using readily available public information, calculates the odds of the so-called ‘red shift” occurring from the 1988 to 2008 presidential elections. The red shift refers to the overwhelming pick up of votes by the Republican Party in recorded votes over what actual voters report to exit pollsters.

In Charnin’s analysis of exit poll data, we can say with a 95% confidence level – that means in 95 out of 100 elections – that the exit polls will fall within an statistically predictable margin of error. Charnin looked at 300 presidential state exit polls from 1988 to 2008, 15 elections would be expected to fall outside the margin of error. Shockingly, 137 of the 300 presidential exit polls fell outside the margin of error.

What is the probability of this happening? “One in one million trillion trillion trlllion trillion trillion trillion,” said Charnin....132 of the elections fell outside the margin in favor of the GOP. We would expect eight.

-Bob Fitzrakis in The Free Press, 6/13/12