BadGimp

It's been a while but here is a summary of where we stand:

2008-04-07T20:55:00.000-07:00

Road to e-voting crisis paved with money, good intentions
Ars Technica: By Jon Stokes | Published: April 07, 2008 - 09:50PM CT

The story of how America got into its present e-voting mess is pretty well known among e-voting activists, and versions of it told by some who were there have shown up in my inbox before, but I've never had occasion to spell out this background explicitly in any of my regular e-voting coverage. However, a Maryland voting activist organization, SAVEOurVotes.org, has released a report [PDF] on the costs of e-voting that (quite unintentionally) provides a useful and vivid illustration of exactly how and why we arrived at the present point. In a nutshell, there's one single event that set in motion the years-long train wreck that has been America's experiment with electronic voting: the 2002 passage of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA).

Here's the story of how HAVA got us into this mess, told with a few charts and graphs from the SAVEOurVotes.org study.

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This is a pretty good article that should catch us up.

I've been too sad and beat down by this GOP movement to post regularly. I just went back to focusing on making money and shopping. Now I have lots of stuff and money but we are really in the shiter electioneering wise.

woo hoo

BadGimp

FLORIDA MOVES TO PAPER BALLOTS!

2007-05-03T18:32:00.000-07:00

A Huge Victory (Finally!) for Voters in the Sunshine State!
ALSO: Congress Asks GAO to Investigate Contested FL-13 Election...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: 3 May 2007

FLORIDA MOVES TO PAPER BALLOTS!

FLORIDA VOTERS COALITION CONGRATULATES GOVERNOR CRIST AND THE FLORIDA LEGISLATURE FOR ENDING PAPERLESS VOTING.

TALLAHASSEE: In a historic vote, the Florida House today unanimously passed CS/HB 537, already passed in the Senate, that provides almost all voters paper ballots in time for the 2008 Presidential election, and bans paperless DREs outright by 2012. The bill now goes to the Governor where he’s sure to sign it since it’s his initiative.

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THIS is a major postive development.

I have been too disheatened to post for a long time. Now maybe there is a light at the end of the tunnel.

Major Problems At Polls Feared :The mainstream media has been awakened to this problem.

2006-09-16T22:06:00.000-07:00

Major Problems At Polls Feared
Some Officials Say Voting Law Changes And New Technology Will Cause Trouble

By Dan Balz and Zachary A. Goldfarb
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, September 17, 2006; Page A01

An overhaul in how states and localities record votes and administer elections since the Florida recount battle six years ago has created conditions that could trigger a repeat -- this time on a national scale -- of last week's Election Day debacle in the Maryland suburbs, election experts said.

In the Nov. 7 election, more than 80 percent of voters will use electronic voting machines, and a third of all precincts this year are using the technology for the first time. The changes are part of a national wave, prompted by the federal Help America Vote Act of 2002 and numerous revisions of state laws, that led to the replacement of outdated voting machines with computer-based electronic machines, along with centralized databases of registered voters and other steps to refine the administration of elections.

But in Maryland last Tuesday, a combination of human blunders and technological glitches caused long lines and delays in vote-counting. The problems, which followed ones earlier this year in Ohio, Illinois and several other states, have contributed to doubts among some experts about whether the new systems are reliable and whether election officials are adequately prepared to use them.

In a polarized political climate, in which elections are routinely marked by litigation and allegations of incompetent administration or outright tampering, some worry that voting problems could cast a Florida-style shadow over this fall's midterm elections.

"We could see that control of Congress is going to be decided by races in recount situations that might not be determined for several weeks," said Paul S. DeGregorio, chairman of the federal Election Assistance Commission, although he added that he does not expect problems of this magnitude.

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The outcome addressed in the last para above is only the begining of what WILL happen. Make no mistake people the fix is in.

THE MAIN REASON WHY THEY WILL NOT LET THE VOTEs BE COUNTED

2006-04-24T08:46:00.000-07:00

From the TalkingPointsMemo

(April 23, 2006 -- 04:58 PM EST // link)

Dionne: "Here's the real meaning of the White House shake-up and the redefinition of Karl Rove's role in the Bush presidency: The administration's one and only domestic priority in 2006 is hanging on to control of Congress."

Another choice graf from E.J.'s Friday column ...

As one outside adviser to the administration said, the danger of a Democratic takeover of at least one house of Congress looms large and would carry huge penalties for Bush. The administration fears "investigations of everything" by congressional committees, this adviser said, and the "possibility of a forced withdrawal from Iraq" through legislative action.

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No chance they will let this happen. No chance in hell.

Abramoff helped Diebold corrupt HAVA from the getgo

2006-04-20T23:40:00.000-07:00

From the Rollingstone.com piece:
Meet Mr. Republican: Jack Abramoff

The article lays bare the gargantuan web of corruption that is the work product of Jack Abramoff.

The part that droped my jaw..

"..now it comes out that Diebold, the notorious voting-machine company, paid some $275,000 to Abramoff's firm, Greenberg Traurig, with the apparent aim of keeping legislation requiring paper trails in the voting process from getting into the Help America Vote Act."

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Now it makes sense how they got the HAVA act turned into an instrument for stealing elections.

Read it and weep people. Come Nov 2006 you will see the next big payoff for the GOP.

As Alito takes Supreme Court seat, Ohio GOP guts election protection

2006-02-05T15:26:00.000-08:00

By Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman
Online Journal Guest Writers

Feb 3, 2006, 16:06

Ohio's GOP-controlled legislature has passed a repressive new law that will gut free elections here and is already surfacing elsewhere around the US. The bill will continue the process of installing the GOP as America's permanent ruling party.

Coming with the swearing in of right-wing extremist Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, it marks another dark day for what remains of American democracy.

Called HB3, the law now demands discriminatory voter ID, severely cripples the possibility of statewide recounts and actually ends the process of state-based challenges to federal elections -- most importantly for president -- held within the state.

In other words, the type of legal challenge mounted to the theft of Ohio's electoral votes in the 2004 election will now be all but impossible in the future.

Section 35-05.18 of HB3 requires restrictive identification requirements for anyone trying to vote in an Ohio election. Photo ID, a utility bill, a bank statement, a government check or other government document showing the name and current address of the voter will be required.

This requirement is perfectly designed to slow down the voting process in inner city precincts. It allows Republican "challengers" to intimidate anyone who turns up to vote in heavily Democratic precincts. It virtually eliminates the homeless, elderly and impoverished from the voting rolls. Election protection advocates estimate this requirement will erase 100,000 to 200,000 voters in a typical statewide election. By way of reference, George W. Bush allegedly carried Ohio -- and the presidency -- by less than 119,000 votes in 2004.

The ID requirement is the direct result of intervention by two high-powered Republican attorneys with ties to the White House and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.). Congressman Bob Ney allowed the Bush-Cheney re-election national counsel Mark "Thor" Hearne to testify last March as a so-called "voting rights advocate." Hearne, whose resume shows no connection to voting rights organizations, was responsible for advising the Bush-Cheney campaign on national litigation and election law strategy during the 2004 election.

Hearne, with the help of Republican attorney Alex Vogel, concocted a story that the problem with the 2004 elections in Ohio was the NAACP paying people with crack cocaine to register voters. Vogel's front group, the Free Enterprise Coalition, even indemnified a local Republican operative, Mark Rubrick, to file an Ohio corrupt practices act suit against the NAACP, the AFL-CIO, ACT-Ohio and ACORN, The suit was later quietly withdrawn after discovery showed that the operatives behind it were linked to the top levels of the Republican Party.

Ironically, the Republican Party engaged in racist and massive voter repression in Ohio and are now institutionalizing that very Jim Crow-style repression and selling it as an election reform bill.

HB3 also ends the ability of the public to conduct meaningful audits of voting machines. Election protection activists recently forced the adoption of an auditable paper trail into the Ohio election process. In a state where virtually all ballots are cast and/or counted on electronic equipment, this cuts to the core of the ability to monitor an election's outcome. The new provision in HB3 will make the paper trail virtually meaningless.

HB3 further imposes a huge jump in the cost of forcing a recount. In 2004, the charge was $10 per precinct, with some 11,366 precincts in the state. Thus the Green and Libertarian Parties, which paid for it, had to pay somewhat more than $113,660. Now the charge will be $50 per precinct, jumping the charge to some $568,300.

Finally, and perhaps most astonishingly, HB3 eliminates the state statutes that have allowed citizens to challenge the outcome of federal elections within the state. After the 2004 election, election protection advocates filed a challenge to Bush's victory. Their attorneys were attacked with an official attempt to levy sanctions, and then were thwarted from an effective suit when GOP Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell locked up the state's voter records.

But HB3 would now entirely eliminate any possibility of a state-based legal challenge. The only alleged recourse for those wishing to officially question the vote count in a presidential, US Senate or US House race in Ohio would be at the United States Congress. There is now no recourse whatsoever on the state level.

Despite grassroots protests and bitter opposition from Common Cause, the League of Women Voters and other pro-democracy groups, HB3 passed with only one Republican vote against it (all Ohio Democratic senators and representatives voted against).

So the Ohio GOP has taken another giant step toward ending the possibility of any other party ever taking power in the Buckeye State. When combined with new campaign finance laws that allow huge chunks of private and corporate money to flow virtually unregulated into GOP coffers, HB3 may have all but ended free elections in Ohio -- at least until election protection forces can somehow reverse the trend. .

Since the Civil War, only one presidential candidate -- John F. Kennedy in 1960 -- has won the White House without carrying Ohio. This and the other repressive legislation passed by the Ohio GOP will make it virtually impossible for anyone but a Republican to carry the Buckeye State in future statewide and federal elections.

Bills like HB3 are also being lined up to flow through Republican-controlled legislatures throughout the US, including a very similar one in Georgia. "This comes straight from Karl Rove," says Cliff Arnebeck, one of Ohio's leading election protection attorneys. "This legislation originates with a demand that one-party rule by made permanent throughout the United States."

With today's passage of Ohio HB3, along with the seating of Justice Alito, the GOP grip on the American throat has very significantly tightened.

Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of "How the GOP Stole America's 2004 Election and Is Rigging 2008". They are co-editors, with Steve Rosenfeld, of "What Happened in Ohio?" forthcoming from the New Press.

Voting machine source code must be made open

2006-01-05T08:34:00.000-08:00

WTN News • Published 01/04/

Madison, Wis. — Among the 15 bills governor Jim Doyle signed into law on Wednesday will require the software of touch-screen voting machines used in elections have its source code opened up to public viewing.

Municipalities that use electronic voting machines are responsible for providing to the public, on request, the code used.

Any voting machines to be used in the state already had to pass State Elections Board tests. Electronic voting machines, in particular, already were required to maintain their results tallies even if the power goes out, and to produce paper ballots that could be used in case of a recount. The new law also requires the paper ballots to be presented to voters for verification before being stored.

But of this bill's provisions, perhaps the more influential in a wider sense is the requirement that municipalities provide source code, and the more general condition that "the coding for the software that is used to operate the system on election day and to tally the votes cast is publicly accessible and may be used to independently verify the accuracy and reliability of the operating and tallying procedures to be employed at any election."

The bill passed the Assembly 91-4 and the Senate 29-2.

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Let's all move to Wissonsin. Better yet, demand these changes to your local elections processes. Better hurry.

A Government Hijacked: Baltimore Chronicle Book Review

2006-01-01T21:41:00.000-08:00

Reviewed by William E. Betz
Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election & Why They'll Steal the Next One Too (Unless We Stop Them)
by Mark Crispin Miller
364 pages; New York, Basic Books, 2005; $24.95 hardback

There is no joy in this book. It documents in excruciating detail overwhelming evidence of the broad-ranging election fraud that took place in the United States in connection with the 2004 national election. Unfortunately, the reaction of the typical naïve American to the fact that the election was stolen by the right-wing Republicans who are currently in power in this country has been an insistent disbelief. The indisputable facts have been either roundly disputed or assiduously ignored by the mainstream print and broadcast media, and the proponents of this ugliest of truths have been relegated to the status of tinfoil hat conspiracy theorists.

The subject of this book is self-marginalizing. It utterly destroys the reflexive "It can't happen here" response of those of us who refuse to believe that it HAS happened here. I say "those of us" because acknowledgement of the basic premise of the book is the most revolutionary of thoughts for anyone who has learned to believe in the sanctity of our electoral system, and the basic premise is extremely painful to admit in spite of the overwhelming proof: Our government has been hijacked by undemocratic forces that manipulated election results to reinstall the Bush administration, an illegitimate administration initially installed by a Supreme Court decision that invalidated the results of the 2000 election, an administration dedicated to world domination and the destruction of American democracy, the U.S. Constitution and the individual rights that made this country the envy of striving people throughout the world.

hy do we refuse to believe that it can happen here and, indeed, that it has happened here? The reason is that the inevitable conclusion that American democracy has been fatally compromised can lead to only one reaction: and that reaction is action. "And what if it's true?" people ask. "What can we do?" Indeed, what can we do? Can we go on as before? Certainly not. Can we ignore it? No. (Only the press can ignore it.) We as citizens have several options: vote the bastards out, have them removed by impeachment, or take up arms against them. Yet if elections, with the help of Diebold, Sequoia, ES&S and the other private machine proprietors and counters of votes, are permanently fixed, the first option is eliminated. In that case, we are truly doomed.

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I am becomming more and more encouraged by the many voices of much higher profile and journalistic capacity then my own, who have made this their cause celeb.

Maybe there is cause for hope.

State quiet on voting machines

2006-01-01T21:33:00.000-08:00

TheReporter.Com letter to the Editor
12/31/2005

Before anyone breaths easier that the state won't be decertifying voting machines used in Solano County and 10 other counties ("Solano's voting machines OK," The Reporter, Dec. 30), don't voters have a right to know whether the machine's problems truly have been fixed?

Anyone who believes they are entitled to have their vote counted accurately should be concerned about the revelation that some Election Systems & Software machines didn't proper record people's votes in the November 2005 election. Despite being aware of the issue since mid-November, Secretary of State Bruce McPherson has yet to publicly disclose the problems with the machines or, more importantly, how ES&S plans to fix the problems and why voters should have confidence in those proposed solutions.

You do not build people's confidence in voting systems by refusing to talk about the problems with the machines in public and for the Secretary of State to continue to withhold this information is as outrageous as it is unacceptable. The decisions about the types of voting equipment Californians are going to use to elect their representatives and approve or defeat proposed initiatives need to be made in public, in the open, right here in California.

The Help American Vote Act was designed to make it easier for people to cast their ballots and improve the accuracy of the vote count. If the Secretary of State simply makes it easier to vote without ensuring every voter's vote will be accurately counted, California will have wasted millions of taxpayer dollars and pulled the rug out from under our democracy in the process.

Debra Bowen, Redondo Beach

The author, a Democrat, is the chairwoman of the state Senate Elections, Reapportionment and Constitutional Amendments Committee - Editor.

Voting 2.0 - Will Your E-Vote Count?

2006-01-01T16:34:00.000-08:00

By Cheryl Gerber

Imagine this: A Trojan Horse unleashes thousands of illegitimate votes and disappears without a trace, election commissioners bypass laws, uninvestigated computer glitches and easily picked locks in voting systems, no federal oversight holding e-voting vendors accountable—yes folks, elections can be stolen.

Since the 2000 Presidential election, problems stemming from the use of electronic voting machines have called into question the foundation of American democracy—the US voting system. At the forefront of concerns are security issues surrounding the use of Direct Recording Electronics [DREs], better known as touch screen computer voting machines, and their lack of a paper trail in the form of an auditable paper ballot. Widely reported irregularities from voting districts around the US have alarmed many and opened claims of stolen elections. Some even doubt the legitimacy of the outcome of recent US elections. A team of top computer scientists has been working diligently to resolve the many underlying design problems in the e-voting system that leave it open to cheating. Stalled by the federal government, and with doubts about e-voting continuing to spread, these scientists have instead turned to state governments and the National Science Foundation for help.

"Maryland, where I live, uses Diebold DREs, which are an ideal opportunity for cheating," said Dr. Avi Rubin, Technical Director, Information Security Institute, Johns Hopkins University. "In fact, you couldn't come up with a better opportunity for cheating. There's no ability to audit or recount, and the entire process takes place inside the computer, which is not transparent."

In May 2004, Rubin co-authored an analysis of electronic voting systems, raising concerns about lack of security, for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the world's largest professional organization for technical standards. He also served in 2004 as a poll worker and election judge in Baltimore County, Maryland, where he lives. These and other experiences have only served to raise his concerns about the possibility for cheating via the use of electronic voting machines.

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This is an excellent all in one primer and update on the issue of electronic voting irregularities.

Diebold Hack Hints at Wider Flaws

2005-12-21T09:37:00.000-08:00

By Kim Zetter | Also by this reporter

02:00 AM Dec. 21, 2005 PT

Election officials spooked by tampering in a test last week of Diebold optical-scan voting machines should be equally wary of optical-scan equipment produced by other manufacturers, according to a computer scientist who conducted the test.

Election officials in Florida's Leon County, where the test occurred, promptly announced plans to drop Diebold machines in favor of optical-scan machines made by Election Systems & Software, or ES&S. But Hugh Thompson, an adjunct computer science professor at the Florida Institute of Technology who helped devise last week's test, believes other systems could also be vulnerable.

"Looking at these systems doesn't send off signals that ... if we just get rid of Diebold and go to another vendor we'll be safe," Thompson said. "We know the Diebold machines are vulnerable. As for ES&S, we don't know that they're bad but we don't know that they're (good) either."

Thompson and Harri Hursti, a Finnish computer scientist, were able to change votes on the Diebold machine without leaving a trace. Hursti conducted the same test for the California secretary of state's office Tuesday. The office did not return several calls for comment.

Information about the vulnerability comes as states face deadlines to qualify for federal funding to replace punch-card and lever machines with new touch-screen or optical-scan machines. In order to get funding, states must have new machines in place by their first federal election after Jan. 1, 2006.

Optical-scan machines have become the preferred choice of many election officials due to the controversy over touch-screen voting machines, many of which do not produce a paper trail. Optical-scan machines use a paper ballot on which voters mark selections with a pen before officials scan them into a machine. The paper serves as a backup if the machine fails or officials need to recount votes.

The hack Thompson and Hursti performed involves a memory card that's inserted in the Diebold machines to record votes as officials scan ballots. According to Thompson, data on the cards isn't encrypted or secured with passwords. Anyone with programming skills and access to the cards -- such as a county elections technical administrator, a savvy poll worker or a voting company employee -- can alter the data using a laptop and card reader.

To test the machines, Thompson and Hursti conducted a mock election on systems loaded with a rigged memory card. The election consisted of eight ballots asking voters to decide, yes or no, if the Diebold optical-scan machine could be hacked.

Six people voted "no" and two voted "yes." But after scanning the ballots, the total showed one "no" vote and seven "yes" votes.

Diebold did not return several calls for comment.

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More evidence.

Bush Picks Controversial Nominees for FEC

2005-12-17T10:52:00.000-08:00

President Bush nominated two controversial lawyers to the Federal Election Commission yesterday: Hans von Spakovsky who helped Georgia win approval of a disputed voter-identification law, and Robert D. Lenhard, who was part of a legal team that challenged the constitutionality of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law.

In addition, Bush proposed a second term for commissioner David M. Mason and nominated Steven T. Walther, a Nevada lawyer with close ties to Democratic Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.).
....
In a letter to Senate Rules Committee Chairman Trent Lott (R-Miss.), Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) wrote that he is "extremely troubled" by the von Spakovsky nomination. Kennedy contends that von Spakovsky "may be at the heart of the political interference that is undermining the Department's enforcement of federal civil laws."

Career Justice Department lawyers involved in a Georgia case said von Spakovsky pushed strongly for approval of a state program requiring voters to have photo identification. A team of staff lawyers that examined the case recommended 4 to 1 that the Georgia plan should be rejected because it would harm black voters; the recommendation was overruled by von Spakovsky and other senior officials in the Civil Rights Division.

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It goes all the way to up to the office of the President. Make not mistake people, the Fix is In.

New tests fuel doubts about vote machines

2005-12-15T13:47:00.000-08:00

A top election official and computer experts say computer hackers could easily change election results, after they found numerous flaws with a state-approved voting-machine in Tallahassee.

BY MARC CAPUTO AND GARY FINEOUT
mcaputo@herald.com

TALLAHASSEE - A political operative with hacking skills could alter the results of any election on Diebold-made voting machines -- and possibly other new voting systems in Florida -- according to the state capital's election supervisor, who said Diebold software has failed repeated tests.

Ion Sancho, Leon County's election chief, said tests by two computer experts, completed this week, showed that an insider could surreptitiously change vote results and the number of ballots cast on Diebold's optical-scan machines.

After receiving county commission approval Tuesday, Sancho scrapped Diebold's system for one made by Elections Systems and Software, the same provider used by Miami-Dade and Broward counties. The difference between the systems: Sancho's machines use a fill-in-the-blank paper ballot that allows for after-the-fact manual recounts, while Broward and Miami-Dade use ATM-like touchscreens that leave no paper trail.

''That's kind of scary. If there's no paper trail, you have to rely solely on electronic results. And now we know that they can be manipulated under the right conditions, without a person even leaving a fingerprint,'' said Sancho, who once headed the state's elections supervisors association.

The Leon County test results are likely to further fuel suspicions that the new electronic voting systems in Florida, in place since the 2002 elections, are susceptible to manipulation.

When the debate hit fever pitch before last year's presidential election, many conservatives said questions about the machinery were a liberal ploy to undermine confidence in the voting system.

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The last paragraph in the above snippet from the actual story is very telling. They don't dare say the assertions are not true. They simply use a smear technique, and try to vilify the "liberals".

Diebold insider alleges company plagued by technical woes, Diebold defends 'sterling' record

2005-12-12T23:07:00.000-08:00

Miriam Raftery

In an exclusive interview with RAW STORY, a whistleblower from electronic voting heavyweight Diebold Election Systems Inc. raised grave concerns about the company’s electronic voting technology and of electronic voting in general, bemoaning an electoral system the insider feels has been compromised by corporate privatization.

The Diebold insider, who took on the appellation “Dieb-Throat” in an interview with voting rights advocate Brad Friedman (BradBlog.com), was once a staunch supporter of electronic voting’s potential to produce more accurate results than punch cards.

But the company insider became disillusioned after witnessing repeated efforts by Diebold to evade meeting legal requirements or implementing appropriate security measures, putting corporate interests ahead of the interests of voters.

“I’ve absolutely had it with the dishonesty,” the insider told RAW STORY. Blasting Wally O’Dell, the current president of Diebold, the whistleblower went on to explain behind-the-scenes tactics of the company and its officers.

“There’s a lot of pressure in the corporation to make the numbers: `We don’t tell you how to do it, but do it.’ [O’Dell is] probably the number one culprit putting pressure on people,” the source said.

Diebold spokesman David Bear rebuts the charges. “Diebold has a sterling reputation in the industry," Bear said. "It’s a 144-year-old company and is considered one of the best companies in the industry."

Previous revelations from the whistleblower have included evidence that Diebold’s upper management and top government officials knew of backdoor software in Diebold’s central tabulator before the 2004 election, but ignored urgent warnings—such as a Homeland Security alert posted on the Internet.

“This is a very dangerous precedent that needs to be stopped—that’s the corporate takeover of elections,” the source warned. “The majority of election directors don’t understand the gravity of what they’re dealing with. The bottom line is who is going to tamper with an election? A lot of people could, but they assume that no one will.”

Concerns about Georgia, Ohio elections

The insider harbors suspicions that Diebold may be involved in tampering with elections through its army of employees and independent contractors. The 2002 gubernatorial election in Georgia raised serious red flags, the source said.

“Shortly before the election, ten days to two weeks, we were told that the date in the machine was malfunctioning,” the source recalled. “So we were told 'Apply this patch in a big rush.’” Later, the Diebold insider learned that the patches were never certified by the state of Georgia, as required by law.

“Also, the clock inside the system was not fixed,” said the insider. “It’s legendary how strange the outcome was; they ended up having the first Republican governor in who knows when and also strange outcomes in other races. I can say that the counties I worked in were heavily Democratic and elected a Republican.”

In Georgia’s 2002 Senate race, for example, nearly 60 percent of the state’s electorate by county switched party allegiances between the primaries and the general election.

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A definite must read. It will curl your hair.

Why Election Fraud Should be Our #1 Issue

2005-11-25T22:25:00.000-08:00

by deerskie cross posted from DailyKos
Fri Nov 25, 2005 at 08:33:08 AM PDT

If the GOP can truly steal a national election, it won't matter how low Bush's poll numbers are ... how many Repubs are indicted ... how many Neocon crimes are uncovered ... or how many great progressive candidates we can field in '06.

I truly believe that if we don't reclaim at least one congressional majority in '06, it will be too late for our democracy, so there's not much time left.

Unfortunately, most Americans don't even know about this because there has been a media blackout on this issue ...

See the flip to find out what you can do:

deerskie's diary :: ::

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Go read this post! I am encouraged by what I see as the momentum.

POLL SHOCK - By Robert C. Koehler - Tribune Media Services

2005-11-24T10:47:00.000-08:00

POLL SHOCK
By Robert C. Koehler
Tribune Media Services

One of the most wildly inaccurate pre-election polls in memory, which was off by over 40 points on some predictions, may prove to be deadly accurate as an indicator of the problems we face as a nation with our voting process - and democracy itself.

But you won't learn this by reading the Columbus Dispatch, the newspaper that conducted the poll just prior to Ohio's Nov. 8 election. The paper's public affairs editor conceded to me that the poll results the Dispatch wrote about, wrongly indicating massive public support for several proposed constitutional amendments, were, in essence, the journalistic equivalent of the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger.

"Much like the American space program, both our triumphs and our shortcomings are out there for all to see," Darrel Rowland said in an e-mail. Unlike NASA, however, which did manage to find that faulty O-ring, the newspaper's powers that be don't seem particularly interested in learning how their big public flop occurred. "We'll certainly double-check the poll mechanics," he said, "but see no reason to discontinue a methodology that's proven accurate for decades."

And Rowland's right, as far as I can tell: The Columbus Dispatch's survey of voters, conducted by mail, has historically been a reliable poll; it has been cited for its precision in the scholarly journal Public Opinion Quarterly and is considered far more accurate than telephone surveys. There is no faulty O-ring, in other words; the methodology doesn't need changing.

And that's why there's a story here that must not be allowed to vanish.

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You have to read this entire piece. It more clearly illustrates the magnitude of the election corruption issues we face than any other I've read.

GAO report upholds Ohio vote fraud claims

2005-11-20T09:38:00.000-08:00

It was nice to see this Illinois newspaper (RockRiver Times) article being passed around on the internet! What I don't understand is why no one is saying, "Get out of office, George; Kerry won."

GAO report upholds Ohio vote fraud claims
By Joe Baker, Senior Editor
From the Nov. 2-8, 2005, issue

As if the indictment of Lewis “Scooter” Libby wasn’t enough to give the White House some heavy concerns, a report from the Government Accounting Office takes a big bite out of the Bush clique’s pretense of legitimacy.

This powerful and probing report takes a hard look at the election of 2004 and supports the contention that the election was stolen. The report has received almost no coverage in the national media.

The GAO is the government’s lead investigative agency, and is known for rock-solid integrity and its penetrating and thorough analysis. The agency’s agreement with what have been brushed aside as “conspiracy theories” adds even more weight to the conclusion that the Bush regime has no business in the White House whatever.

Read the rest at: http://tinyurl.com/8ouor

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What would happen is the main stream media actually ran with this earth shaking news??

URGENT CALL TO ACTION

2005-11-20T00:15:00.000-08:00

November 20,2005
Sheri Myers, CitizensAct

MY FRIENDS,

Believe me, I really don't want to ruin your day. But you need to hear this. This is an URGENT ACTION ALERT. The rally/protest is this Monday in Sacramento, we have ONLY next week to voice our concerns so they go on the record.

If you don't read this and take action, you are allowing your vote to be stolen. California will turn red.

If you read this and do nothing, you are giving up your rights as a citizen. Do it for your country. Your children. Our future.

All Californians who care about the sanctity of their vote must let Secretary of State McPherson know that they WILL NOT ALLOW him to certify Diebold machines, that they are OUTRAGED that he is undermining our democracy.

McPherson was appointed by Schwarzenegger to replace Democrat Kevin Shelley.Folks, if they can't win legally, they WILL steal the votes they need. THAT'S YOUR VOTE.

This is a Republican coup, and they are counting on YOU, and ME to do NOTHING. Is it worth FIVE MINUTES OF YOUR TIME to send a FAX, an email or make a call? PLEASE TAKE THIS SERIOUSLY.

Onward, furiously!
Sheri Myers

Call or write:
Secretary Bruce A. McPherson
1500 11th Street 5th floor
Sacramento, CA95814
elections@ss.ca.gov
916-653-6814 (main menu, press 6, then 3 - starting at 8:00 am Monday)
916-653-3214 (the FAX is on tis weekend)

Tell McPherson we demand an extension of the HAVA Deadlines. The California Election Law says:

19205. The Secretary of State shall establish the specifications for and the regulations governing voting machines, voting devices, vote tabulating devices, and any software used for each, including the programs and procedures for vote tabulating and testing. The criteria for establishing the specifications and regulations shall include, but not be limited to, the following:
(a) The machine or device and its software shall be suitable for the purpose for which it is intended.
(b) The system shall preserve the secrecy of the ballot.
(c) The system shall be safe from fraud or manipulation.

Please contact your CA congressperson: www.congress.org

Here's the info the Rally on Monday:

Monday Nov. 21, 10 a.m. May be your last chance to block Diebold
Secretary of State's Office, 1500 11th Street, Sacramento, CA 95814

more info: http://www.califelectprotect.net/DieboldNov21Hearing.ht...

Please show up to speak your mind about Diebold. You have two minutes. The vendor has had hours, days, months. Shut up, you're just a taxpayer. Even if you feel a bit intimidated by the prospect of speaking at a podium, it will feel great to muster the courage to speak your mind and make a difference. You just put your name on a card before the hearing. Speak your mind. Show up a few minutes early. However we recommend for best results, show up by 9:00 a.m. on the west steps of the Capitol building. Just a heads up, something may happen.

Full article with the latest appalling info on Diebold:
http://www.blackboxvoting.org

California Election Protection Web site:
http://www.califelectprotect.net/home.html

BACK STORY - HOW McPherson is Sticking it to California.

California Sec. of State Disbands Voting Panel, Leans Toward Reversal of Previous Stance Against Diebold! Recertification Hearing on E-Voting Machines Changed at Last Minute, Participants Not Notified

JUST IN: Something very rotten suddenly seems to be occurring in the state of California! RAW STORY has the story, we explain it quickly...

URL: http://www.bradblog.com/archives/00002038.htm

----------

URL FOR THIS ACTION ALERT:
http://www.solarbus.org/election/articles/051120-myers.shtml

Diebold Accused Of Skirting Election Law Again...

2005-11-19T21:36:00.000-08:00

Legal Issues Contributed by Mike on Friday, November 18th, 2005 @ 04:48PM
posted from TechDirt:
http://techdirt.com/articles/20051118/1648200_F.shtml

from the what-are-they-hiding? dept.

Diebold never seems to think the law applies to it. The maker of electronic voting machines, has a long history of questionable activity when it comes to those machines. After it was discovered that internal documents proved that the company knew about security flaws in their own software, they sued, claiming copyright infringement -- basically confessing that the documents were legit. There were additional stories about Diebold illegally changing their software at the last minute, leaving default passwords, threatening extortionate prices to add a paper trail, and mostly hiding the fact that the main person who wrote most of the voting machine software had been jailed for fraud in the past. With all that in mind, you would think that (1) the company's e-voting machines would deserve extra scrutiny and (2) the company would bend over backwards to assist in that scrutiny to prove their systems were fine. It appears that's not the case. Over in North Carolina, where a new law says e-voting companies need to hand over their source code, Diebold somehow convinced a judge to exempt it from obeying that law. The EFF is now suing Diebold for evading the law in North Carolina. They may have a tough case, but it still should be scary for anyone still using electronic voting machines that this is still happening. It's entirely possible that Diebold has a legitimate reason for getting the exemption -- but it would seem like they should be pretty forthcoming in explaining just what that is.

.........................

Link over and read the article - they have a number of imbedded links that are worth a look..

More on Ohio's Staggeringly Impossible '05 Results

2005-11-19T10:56:00.000-08:00

Cross Posted from BradBlog

The Corporate Media Continues to Not Care, But a Rightwing Blogger Finally Does...

The Corporate Mainstream Media may not give a damn about our democracy. Neither might the bulk of our politicians on both the Left and Right side of the aisle. But...

The Corporate Mainstream Media may not give a damn about our democracy. Neither might the bulk of our politicians on both the Left and Right side of the aisle. But clearly the citizens do, and even one rightwing blogger who has recently seen at least some of the light...

The response to our article on the "staggeringly impossible" results of last week's election in Ohio on several Election Reform initiatives which would have struck deep into the heart of far-right Republican Ohio Sec. of State J. Kenneth Blackwell has been notable to say the least.

We felt the report was notable enough that we decided to cross-post it both at BRAD BLOG and at HuffPo, where -- though it was never added to the front page as a "featured blog" -- it has already received an extraordinary 93 comments as of this posting.

To give you an idea of what that story documented, here are the numbers from just one of the four Election Reform initiatives which all ended up failing by numbers which defy reasonable explanation when compared to the historically accurate Columbus Dispatch poll, completed and published just days before the Election in the Buckeye state:

ISSUE 3 (Revise campaign contribution limits)
PRE-POLLING: 61% Yes, 25% No, 14% Undecided
FINAL RESULT: 33% Yes, 66% No

The results on that issue alone was so far askew that it was enough to give the usually dubious Mark Blumenthal of Mystery Pollster pause enough to comment, "These results had MP seriously wondering whether the pollsters or election officials had mistakenly transposed 'yes' and 'no' in their tables."

See the original post for a comparison of Polling vs Final Results for all of the initatives, but suffice to say while the one above was the most inexplicably out-of-whack, the others, with the exception of Issue 1 -- which was the only one supported by Ohio's Republican Governor and on which the Dispatch poll was virtually right on the money on "Yes" voters -- all of the initiative Final Results bring the entire election machinery in Ohio once again under deservedly fresh scrutiny.

(We'll remind you that Ohio's results in the '04 Presidential Election squeeker, where just 6 votes for Kerry instead of Bush at each precinct would have changed the entire result for the nation. And also that the results from that election remain completely suspect, largely uncounted, and never recounted according to state law even while several elections officials have either been indicted or remain under investigation for their role in gaming that fiasco...the one in the state which gave Bush enough electoral votes to claim the Presidency).

The original report we filed, discussed an article by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman of the Free Press in Columbus where they've been detailing an extraordinary amount of the election chicanery and "irregularities" under the iron-fisted rule of Blackwell, the Ohio elections arbiter and Bush/Cheney '04 Co-Chair in a state which is currently a snakepit of Republican machinery and out-and-out corruption.

Amongst the comments at both BRAD BLOG and HuffPo where the blog item was posted, a few, as expected, have knee-jerked that it must have been the Columbus Dispatch polling that was wrong, rather than the Final Results reported by the State which added brand-spankin' new, and wholly unaccountable, unrecountable, untransparent, and undemocratic Electronic Voting Machines for the first time in this election to 44 of its 88 counties. Machines which use secret software on which voters are asked to trust -- but not verify -- that their votes will be recorded accurately...or at all.

In addition to those 44 counties (41 of them using the same machines by Diebold, Inc. that the Republican Sec. of State in California recently decertified for their 20% failure rate), several other counties already use Electronic Voting Machines, and nearly all of them use electronic tabulating machines of one brand or another to count those votes.

We spoke yesterday to Fitrakis about the Dispatch poll's "historic accuracy" (which he described as "legendary" in our phone call) and about the various wingnuts who predictably presume the polling, instead of the election results, were wrong...

Fitrakis commented himself on The BRAD BLOG in response to some of folks who he suspects are part of a "deliberate campaign" to spread enough disinformation to put an end to the entire discussion. If so, we will work hard to ensure that they fail at that. Here's the bulk of Fitrakis' response, from which he also pulls information from some of noted-pollster Blumenthal's posts on the matter:

Fact: The Dispatch has always used a mailed-in ballot poll. It was completed on Thursday Nov. 3, just prior to Election Day. The Dispatch poll is so accurate at least two academic studies have been published in Public Opinion Quarterly (POQ). The first paper documents that the Dispatch mail-in poll between 1980-1984 was far more accurate than telephone polling. The study showed the Dispatch error rate at only 1.6 percentage points versus phone error rates of 5%. A companion study published in POQ in 2000 dealt specifically with the question of statewide referenda. A quote from the study: "The average error for the Dispatch forecast of these referenda was 5.4 percentage points, compared to 7.2 percentage points for the telephone surveys."

The academic study concluded that the Dispatch's mail survey outperformed telephone surveys for both referenda and candidate's races.

The fact that the Dispatch was nearly 30 points off in predicting the "YES" vote on Issue 3, which reduced campaign contributions from $10,000 to $2,000, has nothing to do with their widely-respected polling technique. Their astonishingly inaccurate poll can best be explained by the introduction of brand new private partisan company-controlled e-voting machines using secret source code in 44 Ohio counties and the chaos that resulted from untrained election workers being totally reliant on Diebold technicians for results.

People need to look at the recent AP story that describes the massive breakdown at the polling places and the Board of Elections wherever these new e-voting machines were introduced.

Bob Fitrakis,
Free Press Editor
Ph.D. Political Science

We still wait for the Dispatch to investigate the matter themselves. It is, after all their credibility at stake. At least if they wish for anybody to ever take one of their polls seriously again.

In the meantime, Mystery Pollster Blumenthal -- who had pooh-poohed the concerns many of us have about the historically accurate Exit Poll descrepancy with the Final Results in last year's Presidential Election, where they were accurate virtually everywhere...except in the key swing states -- has again decided that it must be the polls that are wrong, never the Election Results:

the venerable Columbus Dispatch mail-in poll, which after decades of outperforming conventional telephone surveys turned in one of the more spectacularly inaccurate performances in recent memory.

While Blumenthal extols the accuracy of the Dispatch polling over the years, whose methodology has been honed for decades, he again takes for granted that results counted on newly invented and programmed voting machines, verified and double-checked for accuracy by nobody, should be trusted instead. That, despite U.S. Homeland Security warnings from just prior to last year's election verifying that Diebold's central vote tabulators are hackable by just a single malicious user, and the non-partisan GAO Report, released barely a month ago after a year-long investigation, which showed that Electronic Voting Machines are not secure, not properly certified and indeed confirming that "[C]oncerns about electronic voting machines have been realized and have caused problems with recent elections, resulting in the loss and miscount of votes."

Hello?! Earth to AP...NY Times...Reuters...WaPo...Anybody out there in Corporate Mainstream Medialand...[thump, thump]...Is this thing on?

But not all is lost. Perhaps the message is getting out despite ostriches like Blumenthal, and democracy haters like those commenters who would do anything to try and discredit those who might put forward information which gives doubt to the legitmacy of elections like those which handed George W. Bush the "Presidency" and showed that Ohio voters are actually crazy about the terrific way that elections are being run in their state!

Readers who follow our work closely know that we have never personally made the charge that Bush stole the '04 election. We have documented for months a mountain of evidence to suggest that it was quite likely stolen for him by somebody, or at least contained enough screaming, troubling and unexplained "irregularities" to put the entire election wholly into doubt.

So with that in mind, we are delighted to see that John Cole, the proprietor of the far-Right leaning blog "Balloon Juice" has displayed enough intellectual honesty and courage in a post yesterday to at least concur that "While none of this means that it actually happened, it certainly means vote manipulation with electronic voting machines could happen and could have happened."

Right. If Cole's pride requires he avoid out-and-out acknowledging the mountain of documented problems with our recent elections (he had previously pounded relentless on those of us who had been making these points), we're okay with that. However, he arrived at his conclusion, we'll take it: "Electronic voting needs to go the way of the Edsel," said Cole, "if enough of the electorate thinks the vote has been manipulated...that in and of itself does a great deal of damage and should be avoided at all cost."

Thank you. That is no small news from a rightwing blogger who regularly refers to those who question such matters as "moonbats" and "tin foil hat wearers." So in that spirit, we congratulate "wingnut" Cole for understanding at least what is at stake here.

Cole says he is currently reading Mark Crispin Miller's FOOLED AGAIN: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election & Why They'll Steal the Next One Too (Unless We Stop Them). So perhaps it's because Cole has bothered to actually educate himself on some of these matters -- unlike most of his rightwing brethren -- that he goes on to add about the damage done to our democracy if only due to the growing perception that something is going horribly awry.

I generally am of the belief that in government, if the truth is on your side, perceptions should take a back seat. This is not one of those cases.

It certainly isn't. And even Cole's commenters seem to be finally seeing the light now that they've been given the permission by one of their own.

All of which leads us once again to dust off one of our oft-used phrase: This isn't a matter of Right versus Left, it's a matter of Right versus Wrong.

And furthermore, in hopes that you might help to spread this article, and others like it, far and wide -- while the entirety of the Corporate Mainstream Media still refuses to mention even one word about that GAO Report or last years' Homeland Security Warning about Diebold or just about anything else on these matters: Be the Media...cuz someone's got to!

The Staggeringly Impossible Results of Ohio's '05 Election

2005-11-14T08:15:00.000-08:00

Is this the Election that will finally break the camel's back?

With so much going on, few have noticed the extraordinary outcome of last Tuesday's election in Ohio where the crooked state that brung you -- by hook and by crook -- a second term for George W. Bush may have turned in results so staggeringly impossible, that perhaps even the Mainstream Corporate Media (if only in Ohio?!) will have no choice but to look into it.

As usual, the Free Press' heroic Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman are on the case. Their article on what happened on ballot issues 1 through 5 last week is A MUST READ for anybody who still gives the slightest damn about whatever democracy might be left in America.

I'll try to summarize here briefly. There were five initiatives on the ballot last week. Issue 1 was a controversial proposition for $2 billion in new state spending. The Christian Right was opposed (because some of the new funds might go to stem cell research), but otherwise, the Republican Governor Taft's Administration (he recently plead guilty to several counts of corruption) was pushing it hard alongside progressives in the state.

The Columbus Dispatch's pre-election polling, which Fritrakis and Wasserman describe as "uncannily accurate for decades", called the race correctly within 1% of the final result. The margin of error for the poll was +/- 2.5% with a 95% confidence interval. On Issue 1, the Dispatch poll was right on the money. They predicted 53% in favor, the final result was 54% in favor.

But then came Issues 2 through 5 put forward ReformOhioNow.org -- a bi-partisan coalition pushing these four initiatives for Electoral Reform in the Buckeye State largely in response to their shameful '04 Election performance led by the extremely partisan Secretary of State (and Bush/Cheney '04 Co-Chair) J. Kenneth Blackwell.

On those four issues, which Blackwell and the Christian Right were against, the final results were impossibly different -- and we mean impossibly! -- from both the Dispatch's final polling before the election and all reasoned common-sense. Take a look:

ISSUE 1 ($2 Billion State Bond initiative)
PRE-POLLING: 53% Yes, 27% No, 20% Undecided
FINAL RESULT: 54% Yes, 45% No

ISSUE 2 (Allow easier absentee balloting)
PRE-POLLING: 59% Yes, 33% No, 9% Undecided
FINAL RESULT: 36% Yes, 63% No

ISSUE 3 (Revise campaign contribution limits)
PRE-POLLING: 61% Yes, 25% No, 14% Undecided
FINAL RESULT: 33% Yes, 66% No

ISSUE 4 (Ind. Comm. to draw Congressional Districts)
PRE-POLLING: 31% Yes, 45% No, 25% Undecided
FINAL RESULT: 30% Yes, 69% No

ISSUE 5 (Ind. Board instead of Sec. of State to oversee elections)
PRE-POLLING: 41% Yes, 43% No, 16% Undecided
FINAL RESULT: 29% Yes, 70% No

Now, you tell us...What could possibly explain such unheard of differences between the Dispatch's poll and the final results?

Now, we'll tell you...This was the year that Ohio, under the encouragement and mandates of Blackwell, rolled out new Electronic Touch-Screen Voting Machines in 44 of its 88 counties...41 of them employeeing the same Diebold Touch-Screen Machines that California's Republican Sec. of State decertified in this state when 20% of them failed this summer in the largest test of its kind ever held.

Those would be the very same Electronic Voting Machines which a recent GAO Report (still unmentioned by a single wire-service or mainstream American newspaper) confirmed to be easily hackable.

Will the absurdly skewed results from last Tuesday's Ohio Election finally light a fire under the media -- either nationally or just in Ohio alone -- to look into what the hell is going on here?! We remain hopeful...if not optimistic.

The Free Press article is a must read, as mentioned, but we'll share their closing thoughts here on the possible reasons for the wildly unexplained discrepancy between the final polling and the final results which, as they posit, are due to either a completely inexplicable breakdown of the Dispatch's historically accurate polling methods wildly beyond the margin-of-error for all initiatives except Issue 1...or...somebody hacked that vote count:

If the latter is true, it can and will be done again, and we can forget forever about the state that has been essential to the election of every Republican presidential candidate since Lincoln.

And we can also, for all intents and purposes, forget about the future of American democracy.

Anybody in the Mainstream Media ready to give a damn yet?

end......................

So let me go on record again: This will not end until the United States Congress acts on the content of the GAO report. And that can't happen untill the Dems take back the Congress.

O6 will be a repeat o fthe 04 election. That fact that Blackwell and his minions are so blatant and audacious that they would steal the elections on only the ballot initiatives they really cared about show how far they are prepared to go.

Where is the outrage in the mainstream media?

Election Fraud Continues in the US

2005-08-29T07:00:00.000-07:00

New Data Shows Widespread Vote Manipulations in 2004
By Peter Phillips

In the fall of 2001, after an eight-month review of 175,000 Florida ballots never counted in the 2000 election, an analysis by the National Opinion Research Center confirmed that Al Gore actually won Florida and should have been President. However, coverage of this report was only a small blip in the corporate media as a much bigger story dominated the news after September 11, 2001.

New research compiled by Dr. Dennis Loo with the University of Cal Poly Pomona now shows that extensive manipulation of non-paper-trail voting machines occurred in several states during the 2004 election.

The facts are as follows:

In 2004 Bush far exceeded the 85% of registered Florida Republican votes that he got in 2000, receiving more than 100% of the registered Republican votes in 47 out of 67 Florida counties, 200% of registered Republicans in 15 counties, and over 300% of registered Republicans in 4 counties. Bush managed these remarkable outcomes despite the fact that his share of the crossover votes by registered Democrats in Florida did not increase over 2000, and he lost ground among registered Independents, dropping 15 points. We also know that Bush "won" Ohio by 51-48%, but statewide results were not matched by the court-supervised hand count of the 147,400 absentee and provisional ballots in which Kerry received 54.46% of the vote. In Cuyahoga County, Ohio the number of recorded votes was more than 93,000 greater than the number of registered voters.

More importantly national exit polls showed Kerry winning in 2004. However, It was only in precincts where there were no paper trails on the voting machines that the exit polls ended up being different from the final count. According to Dr. Steve Freeman, a statistician at the University of Pennsylvania, the odds are 250 million to one that the exit polls were wrong by chance. In fact, where the exit polls disagreed with the computerized outcomes the results always favored Bush - another statistical impossibility. .

Dennis Loo writes, "A team at the University of California at Berkeley, headed by sociology professor Michael Hout, found a highly suspicious pattern in which Bush received 260,000 more votes in those Florida precincts that used electronic voting machines than past voting patterns would indicate compared to those precincts that used optical scan read votes where past voting patterns held."

There is now strong statistical evidence of widespread voting machine manipulation occurring in US elections since 2000. Coverage of the fraud has been reported in independent media and various websites. The information is not secret. But it certainly seems to be a taboo subject for the US corporate media.

Black Box Voting reported on March 9, 2005 that voting machines used by over 30 million voters were easily hacked by relatively unsophisticated programs and audits of the computers would not show the changes. It is very possible that a small team of hackers could have manipulated the 2004 and earlier elections in various locations throughout the United States. Irregularities in the vote counts certainly indicate that something beyond chance occurrences has been happening in recent elections.

That a special interest group might try to cheat on an election in the United States is nothing new. Historians tell us how local political machines from both major parties have in the past used methods of double counting, ballot box stuffing, poll taxes and registration manipulation to affect elections. In the computer age, however, election fraud can occur externally without local precinct administrators having any awareness of the manipulations - and the fraud can be extensive enough to change the outcome of an entire national election.

There is little doubt key Democrats know that votes in 2004 and earlier elections were stolen. The fact that few in Congress are complaining about fraud is an indication of the totality to which both parties accept the status quo of a money based elections system. Neither party wants to further undermine public confidence in the American "democratic" process (over 80 millions eligible voters refused to vote in 2004). Instead we will likely see the quiet passing of legislation that will correct the most blatant problems. Future elections in the US will continue as an equal opportunity for both parties to maintain a national democratic charade in which money counts more than truth.

Peter Phillips is a Professor of Sociology at Sonoma State University and Director of Project Censored. Dennis Loo's report "No Paper Trail Left Behind: the Theft of the 2004 Presidential Election," can be viewed at http://www.projectcensored.org/newsflash/voter_fraud.html

end.......................

More proof as if it's any longer necessary for thoses of us who are watching this wholesale theft of the US electoral system.

KRUGMAN: What They Did Last Fall

2005-08-19T17:16:00.000-07:00

August 19, 2005

What They Did Last Fall
By PAUL KRUGMAN

By running for the U.S. Senate, Katherine Harris, Florida's former secretary of state, has stirred up some ugly memories. And that's a good thing, because those memories remain relevant. There was at least as much electoral malfeasance in 2004 as there was in 2000, even if it didn't change the outcome. And the next election may be worse.

In his recent book "Steal This Vote" - a very judicious work, despite its title - Andrew Gumbel, a U.S. correspondent for the British newspaper The Independent, provides the best overview I've seen of the 2000 Florida vote. And he documents the simple truth: "Al Gore won the 2000 presidential election."

Two different news media consortiums reviewed Florida's ballots; both found that a full manual recount would have given the election to Mr. Gore. This was true despite a host of efforts by state and local officials to suppress likely Gore votes, most notably Ms. Harris's "felon purge," which disenfranchised large numbers of valid voters.

But few Americans have heard these facts. Perhaps journalists have felt that it would be divisive to cast doubt on the Bush administration's legitimacy. If so, their tender concern for the nation's feelings has gone for naught: Cindy Sheehan's supporters are camped in Crawford, and America is more bitterly divided than ever.

Meanwhile, the whitewash of what happened in Florida in 2000 showed that election-tampering carries no penalty, and political operatives have acted accordingly. For example, in 2002 the Republican Party in New Hampshire hired a company to jam Democratic and union phone banks on Election Day.

And what about 2004?

Mr. Gumbel throws cold water on those who take the discrepancy between the exit polls and the final result as evidence of a stolen election. (I told you it's a judicious book.) He also seems, on first reading, to play down what happened in Ohio. But the theme of his book is that America has a long, bipartisan history of dirty elections.

He told me that he wasn't brushing off the serious problems in Ohio, but that "this is what American democracy typically looks like, especially in a presidential election in a battleground state that is controlled substantially by one party."

So what does U.S. democracy look like? There have been two Democratic reports on Ohio in 2004, one commissioned by Representative John Conyers Jr., the other by the Democratic National Committee.

The D.N.C. report is very cautious: "The purpose of this investigation," it declares, "was not to challenge or question the results of the election in any way." It says there is no evidence that votes were transferred away from John Kerry - but it does suggest that many potential Kerry votes were suppressed. Although the Conyers report is less cautious, it stops far short of claiming that the wrong candidate got Ohio's electoral votes.

But both reports show that votes were suppressed by long lines at polling places - lines caused by inadequate numbers of voting machines - and that these lines occurred disproportionately in areas likely to vote Democratic. Both reports also point to problems involving voters who were improperly forced to cast provisional votes, many of which were discarded.

The Conyers report goes further, highlighting the blatant partisanship of election officials. In particular, the behavior of Ohio's secretary of state, Kenneth Blackwell - who supervised the election while serving as co-chairman of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio - makes Ms. Harris's actions in 2000 seem mild by comparison.

And then there are the election night stories. Warren County locked down its administration building and barred public observers from the vote-counting, citing an F.B.I. warning of a terrorist threat. But the F.B.I. later denied issuing any such warning. Miami County reported that voter turnout was an improbable 98.55 percent of registered voters. And so on.

We aren't going to rerun the last three elections. But what about the future?

Our current political leaders would suffer greatly if either house of Congress changed hands in 2006, or if the presidency changed hands in 2008. The lids would come off all the simmering scandals, from the selling of the Iraq war to profiteering by politically connected companies. The Republicans will be strongly tempted to make sure that they win those elections by any means necessary. And everything we've seen suggests that they will give in to that temptation.

E-mail: krugman@nytimes.com

Thomas L. Friedman is on vacation.

end.......................................

Too important not to post the entiure article. Sorry NYT.

Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Elections, & Why They Will Steal the Next One Too

2005-07-31T11:43:00.000-07:00

Mark Crispin Miller has a new book out. Mark is a great writer and in this new book he lays out an over powering case. The title says it all:

Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Elections, & Why They'll Steal the Next One Too

Book Description:

For Republicans, the 2004 presidential election was little short of miraculous: Behind in the Electoral College tally in the days leading up to the election, behind even on the very afternoon of the vote, the Bush ticket staged a stunning comeback. The exit polls, usually so reliable, turned out to be wrong by an unprecedented 5 percent in the swing states. Conservatives argued-and the media agreed-that "moral values" had made the difference.

In his new book renowned critic and political commentator Mark Crispin Miller argues that it wasn't moral values that swung the election-it was theft. While the greatest body of evidence comes from the key state of Ohio-where the Democratic staff of the House Judiciary Committee found an extraordinary onslaught of Republican-engineered vote suppression, election-day irregularities, old-fashioned intimidation tactics, and illegal counting procedures-similar practices (and occasionally worse ones) were applied in Florida, Oregon, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, and even New York. A huge array of anomalies, improper practices, and blatant violations of the law all, by a truly remarkable coincidence, happened to swing in the Bush ticket's favor.

This pattern-not one overwhelming fraud but thousands of little ones-is, in Miller's view, the new Republican electoral strategy. This incendiary new book presents massive documentation that the election was stolen and describes the mind-set, among both the major parties and the media, that could permit it to happen again.

About the Author
Mark Crispin Miller is a professor of media studies at New York University and a well-known public intellectual. His writings on film, television, propaganda, advertising, and the culture industries have appeared in numerous journals and newspapers, including The Nation and the New York Times. He is the author of The Bush Dyslexicon: Observations on a National Disorder (2001) and Cruel and Unusual: Bush/Cheney's New World Order (2004). A frequent commentator on TV, radio, and the Internet, Miller has appeared on "Frontline," "The PBS Newshour," "The O'Reilly Factor," "Washington Journal," and Bill Moyers's "The Public Mind," as well as many other television shows, and has been a guest on countless radio programs. He is a regular commentator on Air America, appearing often on "Morning Sedition" and "The Al Franken Show." He lives in New York City.

An Introduction to E-Voting - WIRED.com

2005-07-07T19:31:00.000-07:00

An Introduction to E-Voting
By Kim Zetter

02:00 AM Jul. 07, 2005 PT

In municipalities across the country, election officials are employing computerized voting machines in lieu of paper ballots.

Fans of electronic ballots say the technology produces faster and more accurate results than other types of voting equipment. Critics say the machines are not sufficiently secure and can appear to work correctly but record votes inaccurately. Following are some key facts and issues pertaining to e-voting technology.

What is e-voting?

E-voting, or electronic voting, refers to computerized voting machines that use electronic ballots rather than paper ones. They're also known as direct-recording electronic machines, or DREs. E-voting machines consist of three types: touch-screen machines that let voters cast votes by touching an electronic ballot on an LCD screen, punch-key machines that use a keypad for making selections on an electronic ballot, and wheel machines that require voters to rotate a wheel and press a button.

Aren't optical-scan machines also electronic machines?

Optical-scan machines use an electronic reader to record the vote, but not to cast it. The machines require voters to mark their choices on a paper ballot, which is then scanned into an electronic reader to record the vote. Since voters are not directly recording their vote into the computer, the machine is not a DRE. This doesn't mean that optical-scan machines are free of the glitches and programming errors that can plague e-voting machines. The paper ballots, however, give officials the ability to catch problems if they examine the ballots through a hand count and compare them against the digital votes.

Are computerized voting machines new?

Sort of. Computers have played a role in elections since the 1960s, when they were used to tabulate votes marked on paper punch cards. Optical-scan and punch-key machines were also introduced in the '60s and '70s. Touch-screen machines appeared in the '90s but weren't widely used until after the 2000 presidential election debacle. Problems during that election were attributed to punch-card voting machines. So, in 2002, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act, which, among other things, designated about $4 billion to states to improve election procedures and replace punch-card machines with new e-voting or optical-scan machines.

How many voters cast their ballots on e-voting machines?

The numbers are shifting as counties continue to upgrade, but the latest statistics from Election Data Services, a political consulting firm, estimate that 29 percent of registered voters live in districts that currently use e-voting machines. By comparison, about 39 percent of voters use optical-scan machines, 10 percent still use punch-card machines and about 13 percent use lever machines.

How do e-voting machines work?

E-voting machines contain a memory chip and a removable memory card. When voters cast their ballot, votes are recorded to the chip and the removable memory card. At the end of an election, poll workers remove the memory card and take it to a tabulation center, where the cards are loaded onto a computer and the votes are tabulated to produce unofficial election results. Over the next couple of days when official tallies are made, election officials compare votes stored on the memory chip with those tabulated from the memory cards to ensure that no one changed votes on the cards after they were removed from the machines.

Some e-voting machines have modems that allow poll workers to send unofficial results through a phone line to the tabulation center. Critics say this method is insecure, however, since it could allow intruders to access machines through the line and alter votes or the machine's software.

What's good about e-voting?

Election officials say the machines save printing costs (to produce paper ballots), make it simpler to produce ballots in multiple languages, and let them make last-minute ballot changes easily. The machines also allow most disabled voters to cast ballots without assistance (the machines have an adapter that turns ballot text into speech for visually impaired voters and allows movement-impaired voters to cast ballots with a mouth pointer). Election officials also say the machines produce faster and more accurate results than other types of voting machines.

So what's the problem?

Critics of e-voting, among them many respected computer security experts, say the machines are badly programmed and prone to hacking. The voting software is proprietary, so no one really knows what's inside the machines except the voting-machine makers, who have fought in court to prevent anyone from examining their software. E-voting machines sometimes fail to boot up, fail to record votes or even record them for the wrong candidates -- that is, in cases when someone notices a problem. A machine can appear to perform properly from the outside, but record votes inaccurately. Without a paper backup trail or some other means to verify votes, there is no meaningful way to determine the integrity of the machines or an election.

Aren't the machines tested and certified?

Labs examine and test the systems according to standards developed in 1990 and rewritten in 2002. But the standards, which are currently being rewritten again, have been problematic, since they demand little in the way of security and contain loopholes that allow parts of voting systems to slip past certifiers without being tested. The labs generally test the machines for functionality but don't thoroughly examine them for rogue software that could alter votes.

Once machines are tested, voting vendors constantly update the software. Until now, procedures for tracking and securing certified software have been extremely poor, so no one could ensure that the software tested was the same, unaltered, software used in elections. California encountered this problem when officials discovered that Diebold Election Systems installed uncertified software on its machines in 17 of the state's counties.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology recently installed a new voting software library to address this problem, but it's unclear whether it will work in practice. The library will store checksums, which are measures used to protect the integrity of data, for certified software. Election officials can then compare their software against stored versions to ensure that it wasn't altered. But election officials plan to use the library only when an election dispute arises, not as a matter of course before elections.

The "independent testing labs," or ITAs, that test voting systems are not completely independent of the companies that make voting equipment. The ITAs are private, for-profit labs that receive money from voting vendors to test their systems, giving the vendors control over such parts of the testing process as who gets to view the test results. This lack of transparency means that state officials who buy voting machines seldom know about problems that occurred with machines during testing. Until now there has been no oversight of the testing labs and no clearinghouse for tracking problems with voting systems.

Is it true what some election officials say, that e-voting machines are faster and more accurate?

The speed depends on whom you ask. In 2003 in Fairfax County, Virginia, problems with e-voting systems prevented officials from releasing results until 21 hours after the polls closed. Similarly, San Bernardino County, California, wasn't able to report results during last year's primary until the next morning.

As for accuracy, during the Fairfax election, voters reported that when they touched the screen to choose a candidate, the machine marked an "X" next to a different candidate. Voters in Florida last November reported the same problem. There's no way to know if machines caused the same problem for other voters who failed to notice.

There's currently no way to determine if an e-voting machine recorded votes exactly as cast. Some studies have attempted to measure the reliability of voting systems by counting residual votes, also called over votes and under votes. Over votes occur when a ballot has more than the allowed number of votes in a race -- for example, a ballot has votes marked for both the Republican and Democratic candidates for president -- thus canceling the vote. Under votes occur when there is no discernible vote in a race -- either the voter marked the ballot in such a way that it can't be read, forgot to mark the race or deliberately left the race blank.

Residual votes can help determine if one type of voting system is better at helping voters cast their ballot correctly, but they can't determine if a machine recorded votes accurately or if a voter intended to leave a race blank.

Touch-screen voting machines, for example, are supposed to be programmed to prevent voters from choosing more candidates than allowed in a race and to ask voters to be sure they intend to leave a race blank before casting their ballot. But this works only if they're programmed correctly.

Last year, during Florida's primary, machines made by Election Systems and Software recorded that 134 voters cast blank ballots. Some officials speculated that Democratic voters cast blank ballots once they realized there were only Republican candidates on the ballot. But in a North Carolina county in 2002 that used the same voting system, officials discovered that touch-screen machines failed to record 436 ballots. The machines didn't just fail to record votes; they failed to record the ballots as being cast. The issue in that case turned out to be a programming problem. Officials were able to determine the problem only because voters filled out paper ballots before casting touch-screen ballots, a procedure sometimes used for early voting. This provided a paper trail indicating the voters' intent.

Are there any solutions to problems with e-voting?

Voting activists want the federal government to mandate that all e-voting machines have a voter-verified paper audit trail -- a paper printout that would allow voters to check their vote on the paper before it drops into a secure box. The paper trail works, however, only if states are required to manually recount a certain percentage of the paper votes to compare them against the digital votes and check for anomalies. California, one of the first states to require e-voting machines to provide a paper trail, requires counties to perform a 1 percent mandatory manual recount of all elections. For paper-trail legislation to be effective, it should also designate the voter-verified paper trail as the final word in cases where it differs from the digital vote, since it would be easy for someone to program the machines to print out one vote but record a different one digitally.

Opponents of the paper-trail solution say it would slow the voting process, since voters would have to take time to review their vote. Some election officials complain that the printers would jam or run out of paper, causing problems for election workers. They also complain that it would cost them more money to secure and store the paper after an election until it can be destroyed.

Still others say the paper trail won't work because voters won't bother to look at them and can't be relied on to read them accurately. A limited study (.pdf) conducted by an MIT graduate student recently found that few of 36 test voters were able to detect errors in the paper trail they viewed, and they were more likely to notice when a vote wasn't recorded at all than when a vote was recorded improperly.

Alternative, technological solutions to a paper trail have been proposed, but they have not caught on with voting activists because they're complicated mathematical solutions, and the proponents have had a difficult time winning over election officials and voting activists.

"The Silence of the Scams: Psychological resistance to facing election fraud"

2005-05-29T16:47:00.000-07:00

From a post on SeeingTheForest.com:

If you want to know why most people, including our purported "leaders", are ignoring the obvious evidence of vote fraud, it's worth checking out "The Silence of the Scams: Psychological resistance to facing election fraud" by psychologist Diane Perlman. Her article appeared in one version here Perlman discusses various aspects of the psychology of electoral domination--what is being done to people and how they allow it. What we should be trying to figure out is how to get people to stop allowing themselves to be misled and intimidated, and willfully shutting down their critical faculties.

Posted by: Kate Forrest at May 27, 2005 08:36 PM

.............................

******* From the article *************

Some Links for Detailed Accounts of Voter Fraud

For a proper psychological understanding of suppression, it is necessary to recognize the quantity and quality of information being suppressed. The extent of fraud and ignorance of it are mind-boggling. Below are some links with detailed information.

Links for detailed information about voter fraud

A Guide to Ohio and New Mexico Recounts: Statistical Anomalies and Evidence of Voting Machine Malfunction and Fraud in the 2004 Presidential Election January 5, 2005
By: Audit the Vote and Help America Recount

Analysis of 2004 Election Irregularities

TV Networks Officially Refuse to Release Exit Poll Raw Data
By Gary Beckwith, The Columbus Free Press, 22 December 2004

Thom Hartmann in “Dialing for Democracy—Now Is Critical
January 3, 2005, CommonDreams.org

20 Amazing Facts About Voting in the USA

Partial list of incidents reported in the news

Ten preliminary reasons why the Bush vote does not compute, and why Congress must investigate rather than certify the Electoral College (Part One of Two)
by Bob Fitrakis, Steve Rosenfeld and Harvey Wasserman

end .................

Read and weep. It illustrates the real size the fight that lay ahead. It's the Sheeple again darnit.

Buy This God Dammed Book NOW!! - What Went Wrong In Ohio:

2005-05-28T23:36:00.000-07:00

What Went Wrong In Ohio:
The Conyers Report on the 2004 Presidential Election

Introduction by Gore Vidal
Edited by Anita Miller
Category: Politics/Current Affairs
Format: Trade paperback, 160pp, 5 1/2 x 8 1/2
ISBN: 0-89733-535-x
Price: $10.95

About the Book
This fascinating and disturbing book is the official record of testimony taken by the Democratic Members and Staff of the House Judiciary Committee, presided over by Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, the Ranking Member. Originally released in January, 2005 by the Committee and now available in print for the first time.

Witnesses included both Republicans and Democrats, elected officials, voting machine company employees, poll observers, and many voters who testified about the harassment they endured, some of which led to actual vote repression.

While shreds of the electoral chaos in Ohio were reported in the press, the issue soon faded from public view. What Went Wrong In Ohio provides new insights into the abuse and manipulation of electronic voting machines and the arbitrary and illegal behavior of a number of elected and election officials which effectively disenfranchised tens of thousands of voters in order to change the outcome of an election.

Reviews
“I urge every American citizen to recognize that the integrity of our electoral process is at stake. We must face the hard truth that the system in its present form is too easily subverted. We must address this continuing erosion so that, in Abraham Lincoln’s immortal words, ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.’ What Went Wrong in Ohio should be required reading for all who believe the right to vote is fundamental to freedom and the spirit of democracy.” —Bob Kerrey, President, New School University

“The only relevant civics lesson to emerge from the swindle that was last year’s presidential election. Any citizen who neglects to read it does so at his or her peril.”—Lewis Lapham, Harper’s Magazine

“An entirely new kind of ‘how to’ book: a ‘how to steal an election’ book. Forget Denmark—there was something infinitely more rotten in Ohio, where GOP election mechanics, not content to let the Supreme Court declare him president a second time, did all they could to help George W. Bush once more hijack the highest office in the land. John Conyers deserves the Congressional Medal of Honor—if there is even a shred of it left in that once noble institution.”—Larry Gelbart, Writer

end..................

Now go buy the book and read it.

Eschaton Reports: What Went Wrong In Ohio

2005-05-28T23:32:00.000-07:00

The Conyers Report on the 2004 Presidential Election

Introduction by Gore Vidal - Edited by Anita Miller

This fascinating and disturbing book is the official record of testimony taken by the Democratic Members and Staff of the House Judiciary Committee, presided over by Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, the Ranking Member. Originally released in January, 2005 by the Committee and now available in print for the first time.
Amendment: Rep. Conyers' blog.

In re some of the discussion in the comments, I've written a number of posts on this topic, particularly just after the election, notably and here and here. (You'll find other, shorter posts on the subject on the same archive page.) More recently, this post looks at the response to the Edison/Mitofsky evaluation.

-Avedon 11:37 PM

end ..................

Do as the man says...read, read and read!

Fla. County Urged to Ditch Voting Machines

2005-05-28T18:21:00.000-07:00

MIAMI - Miami-Dade County's elections chief has recommended ditching its ATM-style voting machines, just three years after buying them for $24.5 million to avoid a repeat of the hanging and dimpled chads from the 2000 election.

Elections supervisor Lester Sola said in a memo Friday that the county should switch to optical scanners that use paper ballots, based on declining voter confidence in the paperless touch-screen machines and quadrupled election day labor costs.

Fifteen of Florida's 67 counties chose touch-screen machines after the 2000 election fiasco. The machines have caused problems during at least six elections, including the September 2002 primary, when some polls could not open and close on time and Democratic primary results for governor were delayed by a week.

Miami-Dade would be the first place in the nation to ditch the iVotronics machines for paper-based balloting, said Ken Fields, a spokesman for Election Systems & Software of Omaha, Neb., the company that makes the devices.

Sola said it would cost $9.4 million to $12.3 million to equip the entire county with optical scan machines.

His report was forwarded to the county commissioners who must decide whether to get rid of the machines. The touch-screen machines will be used in elections while the issue is decided, officials said.

end..............

Finally...talk about requesting the obvious.

Wathc this go nowhere.

Better Interviews Said Key to Exit Polls

2005-05-15T13:08:00.000-07:00

Better Interviews Said Key to Exit Polls
By WILL LESTER, Associated Press Writer
Sun May 15, 3:55 AM ET

MIAMI BEACH, Fla. - Better training of interviewers to get a proper sample of voters after they cast ballots will be key to improving the performance of exit polls, one pollster who handled the 2004 election surveys said Saturday.

Exit polls on Election Day 2004 overstated support for Democrat John Kerry overall and in many key states, which led to widespread confusion that day about the election eventually won by President Bush.

The exit polls contacted more supporters of Kerry than of Bush because of "the failure of interviewers to follow the selection rate," said Warren Mitofsky, who conducted the exit polls along with Joe Lenski of Edison Media Research.

In exit polling, properly trained interviewers are supposed to follow a carefully designed strategy of contacting voters, such as every fourth or fifth voter, to get a random sample.

Mitofsky has said the discrepancy between exit polls and the vote count was caused by several problems with the polls done for the television networks and The Associated Press.

Highlighting findings of a report made public in January, he told the national meeting of the American Association for Public Opinion Research that even though the exit poll data did not line up with actual vote counts, the exit pollsters and members of the National Election Pool did not "project" an incorrect winner.

"All our projections were correct," he said.

The early — and unauthorized — release of exit poll data on Web sites and blogs helped create the perception that Kerry was going to win the election. Mitofsky said he wants to restrict the release of exit poll findings within the NEP news organizations until 6 p.m. to reduce such confusion in the future.

In past elections, early results often become more accurate as additional results are tabulated, but the polls remained skewed toward Kerry until late in the evening — heightening confusion.

Kathy Frankovic, head of polling at CBS News, said bad calls were avoided because of stringent new safeguards put in place by several media organizations after difficulties in the 2000 election and exit polls.

Mitofsky said the 2004 problems could have been caused by several factors:

_haphazard choice of voters to interview

_lengthy questionnaires

_legal restrictions that kept exit poll interviewers 50 feet or more from voting locations

_hiring of too many young interviewers

_inadequate monitoring of interviewers

Some researchers are still quarreling whether the problems were with the exit poll or the vote count and possible fraud.

Much of the attention has focused on Ohio, which had reports of technology failures, voter confusion and overcrowded polling stations in minority neighborhoods.

Ron Baiman, a research professor from the University of Illinois at Chicago, questioned whether the difference between the exit polls and vote count had been adequately explained and called for further investigation.

But Steven Hertzberg, a nonpartisan researcher investigating election results in Ohio, said "we're not seeing significant shifts in one direction or another" that one have changed the outcome of the election in that state.

___

On the Net: Exit Poll report:
http://www.exit-poll.net/election-night/EvaluationJan192005.pdf

end ....................................

By defanging the believability of Exit Poling data, they set the stage for 06 and 08.

Prediction: After the 06 elections they will claim that the changes that were made to improve the relaiability of the resulting data, actually caused errors. The GOP wins and the Dems loose, again.

I hate that every major prediction I have made has come true. In 06, you will see me proven right again.

BG..

Tom Feeney/Clint Curtis/Yang Enterprises, Inc. Vote-Rigging Scandal...

2005-04-18T11:55:00.000-07:00

CLICK HERE FOR A QUICK SUMMARY OF "THE STORY SO FAR"!

On December 6th, 2004 , The BRAD BLOG (www.bradblog.com) published a sworn affidavit by Florida software programmer Clint Curtis. In his affidavit and videotaped sworn testimony presented before members of the U.S. House Judiciary committee, Curtis claims to have been asked by U.S. Congressman Tom Feeney (R-FL) to design a "vote-rigging software prototype". This request took place in October 2000 during a meeting at Yang Enterprises, Inc. (YEI), a computer consulting firm in Oviedo, Florida.

GO read this - it's mind blowing stuff!

condt...................

The Silence of the Scams: Psychological Resistance to Facing Election Fraud

2005-04-17T17:16:00.000-07:00

Monday, April 11, 2005 - 03:18 PM
BY DIANE PERLMAN

Invisible History

Few Americans know about the historic event that happened on January 6, 2005, the official date for counting electoral votes. For the first time since 1877, congressmembers challenged the electoral count. Representative Stephanie Tubbs-Jones of Ohio, accompanied by the lone senator, Barbara Boxer of California, led the challenge of the Ohio vote count. Although massive fraud was reported around the country, only Ohio was officially cited.

It is curious that an issue so profound and consequential is barely on the radar screens of most Americans, especially those who voted for Kerry.

Though we are not certain of the actual outcome, statistically impossible discrepancies exist between results of exit polls and official counts in counties without paper trails. Also documented are patterns of anecdotes about corrupted procedures and accounts of strange behaviors, phenomena and illegal interventions in Ohio as well as other places. Many say there is fraud in every election, but there was far more in 2004 than in any previous year, and if the errors were random, about half would go in Kerry’s favor. Virtually all went in Bush’s favor.

But rather than demanding a thorough investigation, the American people seem eager to forget the incidents and put the election behind them, thus implicitly supporting such corruption.

condt...................

Very telling and hard hitting piece.

Means, Motive, Opportunity

2005-04-12T07:27:00.000-07:00

April 12, 2005
By Ernest Partridge, The Crisis Papers

The 2006 mid-term election - a scenario:

By late summer, 2006, the United States is in a desperate condition. Following the collapse of the dollar in international currency markets, there has been a cascade of business failures and mortgage foreclosures, and a precipitous rise in unemployment, as the US economy slides inexorably into a depression. Meanwhile, the June 2005 American attack on Iran and the continuing war in Iraq has made the United States an international pariah state; thus the community of nations shows no inclination whatever to rescue the United States from its economic collapse.

In the run-up to the 2006 election, the mainstream media has once again fallen in line behind the Republicans, blaming the depression on the Clinton Administration, al Qaeda, and/or betrayal by "Old Europe." The crimes and outrages of the Bush/GOP syndicate have been unreported by the media, as Democratic war veterans running for office against GOP draft-dodgers have once again been castigated as "unpatriotic."

For their part, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and the religious right have proclaimed that these economic and diplomatic catastrophes manifest God's judgment on the American people for their toleration of gays, abortion, the ACLU, the teaching of evolution, and independent judges.

This time, the public is unconvinced by the GOP propaganda, as massive protest demonstrations erupt throughout the country. Finally fed up with the lies and greed of the GOP, and finally aware of just how much their livelihood and their future has been plundered by Bushenomics, more than two-thirds of the voters are about to go to the polls determined to throw out the Republican Congress.

While a few honest polls forecast a landslide victory for the Democrats, most of these polls have not been published.

The Republican-owned and Republican-coded "black-box" voting machines once again perform as intended, and the Republicans retain control of Congress.

The astonished and disappointed public is once again told to "get over it."

Beyond that, my crystal ball becomes cloudy.

The implied question in this scenario is clear: if GOP partisans own the voting machines, count the votes, refuse to allow independent validation of the tallies, and if the Republicans choose to take advantage of this opportunity for fraud, is there any way – any way at all – that the Democrats could win the 2006 election and regain control of Congress?

condt.............................

As long as the GOP controls the machines, they win. End of story.

Ghost in the Machine: a collection of e-voting facts

2005-04-04T20:07:00.000-07:00

Ghost in the Machine: a collection of e-voting facts

by LITBMueller - FROM dAILYkOS.COM

Thu Mar 17th, 2005 at 07:20:54 PST

Why should more people be scratching their heads when looking at electronic voting? Well, let's put it this way... If it was found that Wawa's (an East cost convenience store) touch screen kiosks were misreporting the sandwiches and hoagies people ordered or were completely failing at levels between 5-15%, wouldn't Wawa get upset and stop using them? Also, if ATM machines misreported the amount of money in accounts, made in withdrawals and deposits, or were completely failing at a rate of 5-15%, would they still be in use today?
I think not.

Below is a collection of facts about e-voting companies and voting irregularities that are attributed to e-voting. Is this evidence of a conspiracy? Of course not, but it does at least raise eyebrows.

More below the fold (and this is only the tip of the iceberg - there's a ton out there on the net)...

Diaries :: LITBMueller's diary ::

To sum up, in a general sense, why carefully looking into e-voting in this country is important, let us keep in mind the words of Josef Stalin who said "Voters decide nothing; people who count votes decide everything." And also let us remember that it was Congressman Peter King (R-NY) who said: "It's already over. The election's over. We won. It's all over but the counting and we'll take care of the counting." (The video of King making this remark can be seen at www.velvetrevolution.us)

Diebold and Electronic Systems & Softway (ES&S)

ES&S and Diebold count 80% of all votes in America. (http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0503/S00127.htm)

Diebold also makes ATM machines. Their ATM machines, unlike their electronic voting machines during the 2004 election, provide paper receipts. (http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2005-03-15-advanced-atms_x.htm)

ES&S managed many aspects of the 2004 election, including voter registration, printing of ballots, the programming of their voting machines, tabulation of votes (often with armed guards keeping the media and members of the public who wished to witness the count at bay) and the first reporting of the results -- for 60 million voters in 47 states. Actual counting of votes by citizens is very rare in the U.S., except for a few counties in Montana and other states, where paper ballots are still hand-counted. (http://valleyadvocate.com/gbase/News/content?oid=oid:91516)

The largest investors in ES&S, Sequoia (another voting machine company), and Diebold are government defense contractors Northrup-Grumman, Lockheed-Martin, Electronic Data Systems (EDS) and Accenture. Diebold hired Scientific Applications International Corporation (SAIC) of San Diego to develop the software security in their voting machines. A majority of officials on SAIC's board are former members of either the Pentagon or the CIA including (http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=5517):

- Army Gen. Wayne Downing, formerly of the NSC
- Bobby Ray Inman; former CIA Director
- Retired Adm. William Owens, former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
- Robert Gates, another former director of the CIA.

The U.S.'s largest voting machine company, ES&S, is owned by The Omaha World Herald. (http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0503/S00127.htm)

Diebold has its corporate headquarters in Ohio. (http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=5359)

Diebold chairman, president, and C.E.O., Walden O'Dell, is a prominent Bush supporter and fund-raiser who proclaimed in 2003 that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." (See "Hack the Vote," by Michael Shnayerson, Vanity Fair, April 2004.) (http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=5359)

The vice president of E.S.&S. and the president of Diebold are brothers. (http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/042804Landes/042804landes.html)

Diebold and ES&S's other major "competitor", Sequoia, is owned by a partner member of the Carlyle Group, which has substantial ties to the Bush family and friends. (http://valleyadvocate.com/gbase/News/content?oid=oid:91516)

Republican Senator Chuck Hagel used to be chairman of AIS, which later became ES&S. He became Senator based on votes counted by ES&S machines in Nebraska in what was a major upset. (http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2004/03/03_200.html)

Senator Hagel, who was on the short-list of G.W. Bush's VP candidates, was caught concealing information about his ownership of ES&S by the Senate Ethics Committee, even though he was officially absolved of improperly hiding information. (http://www.hillnews.com/news/012903/hagel.aspx and http://www.businessweek.com/2000/00_28/b3689130.htm)

One of the longest-serving Diebold directors is W.R. "Tim" Timken. Since 1991 the Timken Company and members of the Timken family have contributed more than a million dollars to the Republican Party and to GOP presidential candidates such as George W. Bush. Between 2000 and 2002 alone, Timken's Canton-based bearing and steel company gave more than $350,000 to Republican causes, while Timken himself gave more than $120,000. In 2004, he was one of George W. Bush's campaign Pioneers, and pulled in more than $350,000 for the president's reelection bid. (http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2004/03/03_200.html)

In 2003, a cadre of computer scientists showed that the software running Diebold's new machines can be hacked with relative ease. (http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2004/03/03_200.html)

On a CNBC cable TV program, Black Box Voting (which opposes electronic voting) executive Bev Harris showed guest host Howard Dean how to alter vote totals within 90 seconds by entering a two-digit code in a hidden program on Diebold's election software. "This is not a bug or accidental oversight," Harris said. "It is there on purpose." (http://valleyadvocate.com/gbase/News/content?oid=oid:91516)

Managers of a subsidiary of Diebold once included a cocaine trafficker, a man who conducted fraudulent stock transactions and a programmer jailed for falsifying computer records. The programmer, Jeffrey Dean, wrote and maintained proprietary code used to count hundreds of thousands of votes as senior vice president of Global Election Systems, or GES. Diebold purchased GES in January 2002. According to a public court document released before GES hired him, Dean served time in a Washington state correctional facility for stealing money and tampering with computer files in a scheme that "involved a high degree of sophistication and planning." He left when Diebold acquired GES. (http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,61640,00.html)

Voting irregularities in Maryland:

According to a report to the Montgomery County Election Board, dated December 13, 2004, there were two broad levels of problems with Diebold machines. 7% of units (189) failed. This included failure to boot up, screen freezes and a variety of other problems. Screen freezes, which occurred on 106 voting units were "the most serious of errors" because many "froze when the voter pressed the Cast Ballot button." As a result "election judges are unable to provide substantial confirmation that the vote was in fact counted." In addition there were "122 suspect units (5%) were identified because the unit had few votes captured compared to other voting units in the polling place. (http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/WO0503/S00147.htm)

Also in Montgomery Co., computer memory cards where vote totals are stored inside each voting machine were unreadable in multiple counties. (http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/WO0503/S00147.htm)

Voting irregularities in Ohio

More than 35 Ohio counties used electronic voting machines made by Diebold and up to 50,000 Diebold touch-screen machines and 20,000 scanners of paper ballots were used in 38 states during the November 2004 election. (http://valleyadvocate.com/gbase/News/content?oid=oid:91516)

In Butler County, a Democrat running for the State Supreme Court chief justice received 61,559 votes. The Kerry-Edwards ticket drew about 5,000 fewer votes, at 56,243. This judicial candidate also outpolled the Kerry-Edwards ticket in 11 other counties. (http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=5359)

In Cuyahoga County, which includes the city of Cleveland, two largely black precincts on the East Side voted like this: In Precinct 4F: Kerry, 290; Bush, 21; Peroutka, 215. In Precinct 4N: Kerry, 318; Bush, 11; Badnarik, 163. Mr. Peroutka and Mr. Badnarik are, respectively, the presidential candidates of the Constitution and Libertarian Parties. By way of contrast, in 2000, Ralph Nader's best year, the total vote received in Precinct 4F by all third-party candidates combined was eight. (http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=5359)

In Montgomery County, two precincts recorded a combined undervote of almost 6,000. An "undervote" means the voter made selections for lesser offices, but did not vote for President. In these two precincts alone, that number represents an undervote of 25%, in a county where undervoting averages out at just 2%. Democratic precincts had 75% more undervotes than Republican ones. (http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=5359)

In Precinct lB of Gahanna, in Franklin County, a computerized voting machine recorded a total of 4,258 votes for Bush and 260 votes for Kerry. In that precinct, however, there are only 800 registered voters, of whom 638 showed up. (http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=5359)

In Miami County, the Concord Southwest and Concord South precincts boasted incredibly high 98.5% and 94.27% turnouts, respectively, both of them registering overwhelming majorities for Bush. Miami County also managed to report 19,000 additional votes for Bush after 100% of the precincts had reported on Election Day. (http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=5359)

In Mahoning County, Washington Post reporters found that many people had been victims of "vote hopping," i.e., voting machines highlighted a choice of one candidate after the voter had recorded a preference for another. (http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=5359)

Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, a Republican, arranged for ample voting booths in GOP areas and a shortage in liberal college towns and minority precincts. Despite the huge increase in new voter registration (91% of which was Democratic), Blackwell provided fewer total voting machines than were used in 2000. (http://valleyadvocate.com/gbase/News/content?oid=oid:91516)

Christopher Hitchens: "In practically every case [in Ohio] where lines were too long or machines too few the foul-up was in a Democratic county or precinct, and in practically every case where machines produced impossible or improbable outcomes it was the challenger who suffered and the actual or potential Democratic voters who were shortchanged, discouraged, or held up to ridicule as chronic undervoters or as sudden converts to fringe-party losers." (http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=5359)

At least of 40 of 798 ES&S machines that were personally monitored in Ohio shut down and flashed a message that repair was needed during the 2004 election. These machines could not be made to report a final printed vote tally. (http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,65757,00.html)

Voting irregularities in Florida

In the 2000 election, in Volusia County, Florida, a Diebold-made central ballot-counting computer showed a Socialist Party candidate receiving more than 9,000 votes and Vice President Al Gore getting minus 19,000. Another 4,000 votes poured into the plus column for Bush that didn't belong there. (http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2004/03/03_200.html)

ES&S voting machines in Florida may have awarded George W. Bush up to 260,000 more votes than he should have received, according to a statistical analysis conducted by University of California, Berkeley graduate students and a professor. The total number of excessive votes ranged between 130,000 and 260,000, depending on what kind of problem caused the excess votes. The counties most affected by the anomaly were heavily Democratic. A sociology professor said the chance for such a discrepancy to occur was less than 1 in 1,000. (http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,65757,00.html)

While the approximated Florida discrepancy would not overcome a reported 350,000 vote Bush lead, no meaningful recount can ever be carried out because Diebold machines do not leave a paper trail of any sort. (http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,65563,00.html)

Kathy Dopp examined the State of Florida's county-by-county record of votes cast and people registered by party affiliation in the days immediately following the election. Tthe numbers Dopp looked at showed widespread election anomalies in 47 of the state's 67 counties. The discrepancies did not occur so much in the touch-screen counties, where public scrutiny would naturally be focused, but in counties where optically screened paper ballots were fed into a central tabulator PC, which is highly vulnerable to hacking. Colin Shea of Zogby International analyzed and double-checked Dopp's figures and confirmed that optical-scan counties gave Bush 16% more votes than he should have gotten. "This 16% would not be strange if it were spread across counties more or less evenly," Shea explains, but it is not. In 11 different counties, the "actual" Bush tallies were 50-100% higher than expected. In one county, where 88% of voters are registered Democrats, Bush got nearly two-thirds of the vote -- three times more than predicted by Shea's statistical model. "In 21 counties, more than 50% of Democrats would have to have defected to Bush to account for the results," Shea says. "In four counties at least 70% [defection] would have been required. These results are absurdly unlikely." (http://valleyadvocate.com/gbase/News/content?oid=oid:91516)

In 47 Florida counties, initial vote tallies showed that the total number of presidential votes exceeded the total number of voters who showed up at the polls. Palm Beach County recorded 90,774 more votes than voters and Miami Dade had 51,979 more, while relatively honest Orange County had only 1,648 more votes than voters. Overall, Florida reported 237,522 more presidential votes (7.59 million) than citizens who turned out to cast ballots (7.35 million). These anomalies evaporated, without explanation, when Florida issued its last set of poll numbers. (http://valleyadvocate.com/gbase/News/content?oid=oid:91516)

In Broward Country, the central tabulating machine was incorrectly programmed to expect only 32,000 votes from each precinct; when more votes were received, the machine started counting backwards. The problem existed in the 2002 elections in Broward County but was never fixed. Throughout Florida, as in most tossup states, poll monitors saw prospective voters leaving because of long lines. There were numerous reports of sub-par facilities and faulty equipment in minority neighborhoods. (http://valleyadvocate.com/gbase/News/content?oid=oid:91516)

Several dozen voters in six states -- particularly Democrats in Florida -- said the wrong candidate appeared on their touch-screen machine's checkout screen (i.e. they voted one way and the result which appeared was the opposite). (http://valleyadvocate.com/gbase/News/content?oid=oid:91516)

Keith Olbermann demonstrated on MSNBC's Countdown program that many Florida counties where Democrats allegedly "crossed over" were voting Republican for the first time. He also poked another hole in the theory that these voters were "Dixiecrats" when he noted, "On the same Florida Democratic ballots where Bush scored big, people supported highly Democratic measures -- such as raising the state minimum wage $1 above the federal level. This indicates that only the presidential voting was rigged." (http://valleyadvocate.com/gbase/News/content?oid=oid:91516)

Moreover, the 18 switchover Florida counties were not in the panhandle or near the Georgia border, but were scattered throughout the state. For instance, voters in Glades County (Everglades region) registered 64.8% Republican but cast 38.3% more votes for Bush than for Kerry. Hardee County (between Bradenton and Sebring) registered 63.8% Democratic but officially gave Bush 135% more votes than Kerry. (http://valleyadvocate.com/gbase/News/content?oid=oid:91516)

The discrepancies between exit polls and vote tabulations where electronic voting was used:
- Concerning the discrepancies between exit polls and the final vote tally in 2004, Dr. Steven F. Freeman, faculty member of the University of Pennsylvania determined that the likelihood of Kerry receiving only 47.1% in Florida, given that the exit polls indicated 49.7% is less than 3 in 1,000. Although Kerry did carry Pennsylvania, the likelihood of his receiving only 50.8% given that the exit polls indicated 54.1% is less than 2 in 1,000. Similarly the likelihood of Kerry receiving only 48.5% in Ohio, given the exit polls indicated 52.1% is less than 1 in 1,000 (.0008). Freeman says, "The likelihood of any two of these statistical anomalies occurring together is on the order of one-in-a-million. The odds against all three occurring together are 250 million to 1. As much as we can say in social science that something is impossible, it is impossible that the discrepancies between predicted and actual vote counts in the three critical battleground states could have been due to chance or random error." (http://www.yuricareport.com/ElectionAftermath04/ThreeResearchStudiesBushIsOut.htm)
- In 10 states where there were verifiable paper trails -- or no electronic machines -- the final results hardly differed from initial exit polls. Exit polls and final counts in Missouri, Louisiana, Maine and Utah, for instance, varied by 1% or less. In non-paper-trail states, however, there were significant differences. Florida saw a shift from Kerry +1% in the exit polls to Bush +5% at evening's end. In Ohio, Kerry went from +3% to -3%. Other big discrepancies in key states were: Minnesota (from +10% to +4%), New Mexico (+4 to -1), Nevada (+1 to -3), Wisconsin (+7 to +0.4), Colorado (-2 to -5), North Carolina (-4 to -13), Iowa (+1 to -1), New Hampshire (+14 to +1) and Pennsylvania (+8 to +2). Exit polls also had Kerry winning the national popular vote by 3%. (http://valleyadvocate.com/gbase/News/content?oid=oid:91516)

Miscellaneous:

- On November 10, 2004, Keith Olbermann reported that computerized balloting in North Carolina was so thoroughly messed up that all statewide voting may have to be recounted. A Craven County, N.C. district recorded 11,283 more votes than there were voters, overturning the results of a regional race. (http://valleyadvocate.com/gbase/News/content?oid=oid:91516)

The Ultimate Felony Against Democracy

2004-11-04T21:43:00.000-08:00

Published on Thursday, November 4, 2004 by CommonDreams.org
The Ultimate Felony Against Democracy
by Thom Hartmann

The hot story in the Blogosphere is that the "erroneous" exit polls that showed Kerry carrying Florida and Ohio (among other states) weren't erroneous at all - it was the numbers produced by paperless voting machines that were wrong, and Kerry actually won. As more and more analysis is done of what may (or may not) be the most massive election fraud in the history of the world, however, it's critical that we keep the largest issue at the forefront at all time: Why are We The People allowing private, for-profit corporations, answerable only to their officers and boards of directors, and loyal only to agendas and politicians that will enhance their profitability, to handle our votes?

Maybe Florida went for Kerry, maybe for Bush. Over time - and through the efforts of some very motivated investigative reporters - we may well find out (Bev Harris of www.blackboxvoting.org just filed what may be the largest Freedom of Information Act [FOIA} filing in history), and bloggers and investigative reporters are discovering an odd discrepancy in exit polls being largely accurate in paper-ballot states and oddly inaccurate in touch-screen electronic voting states Even raw voter analyses are showing extreme oddities in touch-screen-run Florida, and eagle-eyed bloggers are finding that news organizations are retroactively altering their exit polls to coincide with what the machines ultimately said.

dondt...........

Please read this article in it's entirety.

I shouldn't say I told you so, but I told you so. They used the machines to steal the election. That is why the exit polls were "all wrong". Of course the exit polls were right, the GOP used the machines to change the results. You'll see, and then I can say I told you so all over again.

So long for now. I doubt there is much more I can do or say that will actually add any value real value so I may simlpy pack it in and focus my energies on things I can have a positive effect on, like my own quality of life and personal fortunes.

Good Luck friends and welcome the The Republic of Fubar.

BadGimp
Over and Out

BBC TV REVEALS NEW FLORIDA VOTE SCANDAL REPUBLICAN "CAGING LIST"

2004-10-28T21:35:00.000-07:00

BBC TV REVEALS NEW FLORIDA VOTE SCANDAL REPUBLICAN "CAGING LIST"
BBC Television News On-Line
Tuesday Oct 26, 2004

New Florida Vote Scandal Feared - Greg's Latest Report For BBC Newsnight TV

A secret document obtained from inside Bush campaign headquarters in Florida suggests a plan - possibly in violation of US law - to disrupt voting in the state's African-American voting districts, a BBC Newsnight investigation reveals.

Two e-mails, prepared for the executive director of the Bush campaign in Florida and the campaign's national research director in Washington DC, contain a 15-page so-called "caging list".

It lists 1,886 names and addresses of voters in predominantly black and traditionally Democrat areas of Jacksonville, Florida.

An elections supervisor in Tallahassee, when shown the list, told Newsnight: "The only possible reason why they would keep such a thing is to challenge voters on election day."

Ion Sancho, a Democrat, noted that Florida law allows political party operatives inside polling stations to stop voters from obtaining a ballot.

Mass challenges

They may then only vote "provisionally" after signing an affidavit attesting to their legal voting status.

Mass challenges have never occurred in Florida. Indeed, says Mr Sancho, not one challenge has been made to a voter "in the 16 years I've been supervisor of elections."

"Quite frankly, this process can be used to slow down the voting process and cause chaos on election day; and discourage voters from voting."

Sancho calls it "intimidation." And it may be illegal.

In Washington, well-known civil rights attorney, Ralph Neas, noted that US federal law prohibits targeting challenges to voters, even if there is a basis for the challenge, if race is a factor in targeting the voters.

The list of Jacksonville voters covers an area with a majority of black residents.

condt.....................

Florida Computers Snatch Thousands of Votes from Kerry

2004-10-28T21:34:00.000-07:00

CONGRATULATIONS, MR. PRESIDENT!
FLORIDA'S COMPUTERS HAVE ALREADY COUNTED THOUSANDS OF VOTES FOR GEORGE W. BUSH

Before one vote was cast in early voting this week in Florida, the new touch-screen computer voting machines of Florida started out with a several-thousand vote lead for George W. Bush. That is, the mechanics of the new digital democracy boxes "spoil" votes at a predictably high rate in African-American precincts, effectively voiding enough votes cast for John Kerry to in a tight race, keep the White House safe from the will of the voters.

Excerpted from the current (November) issue of Harper's Magazine by Greg Palast

To understand the fiasco in progress in Florida, we need to revisit the 2000 model, starting with a lesson from Dick Carlberg, acting elections supervisor in Duval County until this week. "Some voters are strange," Carlberg told me recently. He was attempting to explain why, in the last presidential election, five thousand Duvalians trudged to the polls and, having arrived there, voted for no one for president. Carlberg did concede that, after he ran these punch cards through the counting machines a second time, some partly punched holes shook loose, gaining Al Gore160 votes or so, Bush roughly 80.

"So, if you ran the 'blank' ballots through a few more times, we'd have a different president," I noted. Carlberg, a Republican, answered with a grin.

So it was throughout the state - in certain precincts, at least. In Jacksonville, for example, in Duval precincts 7 through 10, nearly one in five ballots, or 11,200 votes in all, went uncounted, rejected as either an 'under-vote' (a blank ballot) or 'over-vote' (a ballot with extra markings). In those precincts, 72 percent of the residents are African-American; ballots that did make the count went four to one for Al Gore. All in all, a staggering 179,855 votes were "spoiled" (i.e., cast but not counted) in the 2000 election in Florida. Demographers from the U.S. Civil Rights Commission matched the ballots with census stats and estimated that 54 percent of all the under- and over-voted ballots had been cast by blacks, for whom the likelihood of having a vote discarded exceeded that of a white voter by 900 percent.

Votes don't "spoil" because they are left out of the fridge. Vote spoilage, at root, is a class problem. Just as poor and minority districts wind up with shoddy schools and shoddy hospitals, they are stuck with shoddy ballot machines. In Gadsden, the only black-majority county in Florida, one in eight votes spoiled in 2000, the worst countywide record in the state. Next door in Leon County (Tallahassee), which used the same paper ballot, the mostly white, wealthier county lost almost no votes. The difference was that in mostly-white Leon, each voting booth was equipped with its own optical scanner, with which voters could check their own ballots. In the black county, absent such "second-chance" equipment, any error would void a vote.

The best solution for vote spoilage, whether from blank ballots or from hanging chads, is Leon County's: paper ballots, together with scanners in the voting booths. In fact, this is precisely what Governor Bush's own experts recommended in 2001 for the entire state. His Select Task Force on Elections Procedures, appointed by the Governor to soothe public distrust after the 2000 race, chose paper ballots with scanners over the trendier option -- the touch-screen computer.

Although the computer rigs cost eight times as much as paper with scanners, they result in many more spoiled votes. In this year's presidential primary in Florida, the computers had a spoilage rate of more than 1 percent, as compared to one-tenth of a percent for the double-checked paper ballots.

Apparently some Bush boosters were not keen on a fix so inexpensive and effective. In particular, Sandra Mortham - a founder of Women for Jeb Bush, the Governor's re-election operation - successfully lobbied on behalf of the Florida Association of Counties to stop the state the legislature from blocking the purchase of touch-screen voting systems. Mortham, coincidentally, was also a paid lobbyist for Election Systems & Strategies, a computer voting-machine manufacturer. Fifteen of Florida's sixty-seven counties chose the pricey computers, twelve of them ordered from ES&S which, in turn, paid Mortham's County Association a percentage on sales.

Florida's computerization had its first mass test in 2002, in Broward County. The ES&S machines appeared to work well in white Ft. Lauderdale precincts, but in black communities, such as Lauderhill and Pompano Beach, there was wholesale disaster. Poll workers were untrained, and many places opened late. Black voters were held up in lines for hours. No one doubts that hundreds of Black votes were lost before they were cast.

Broward county commissioners had purchased the touch-screen machines from ES&S over the objection of Elections Supervisor Miriam Oliphant; notably, one commissioner's campaign treasurer was an ES&S lobbyist. Governor Bush responded to the Broward fiasco by firing Oliphant, an African-American, for "misfeasance."

Even when computers work, they don't work well for African-Americans. A July 2001 Congressional study found that computers spoiled votes in minority districts at three times the rate of votes lost in white districts.

Based on the measured differential in vote loss between paper and computer systems, the fifteen counties in Florida, can expect to lose at least 29,000 votes to spoilage-some 27,000 more than if the counties had used paper ballots with scanners.

Given the demographics of spoilage, this translates into a net lead of thousands for Bush before a single ballot is cast.

---

For the full story, read "Another Florida" in the November issue of Harper's, out now. Mr. Palast, a contributing editor to the magazine, is author of the New York Times bestseller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. See the film of his investigative reports for BBC Television, "Bush Family Fortunes," out now on DVD.

Watch a segment at www.gregpalast.com/bff-dvd.htm

Even with a paper trail you could not do a recall.

2004-10-25T13:02:00.000-07:00

Even with a paper trail you could not do a recall.

the problem is 2 fold:

1) The software that counts the votes does not produce an internal audit trail. There is no log of what votes were counted. The damn things only tally numbers. They do not record who voted, when and for what. That is the essence of an audit trail. Without that there can be no recount.

Once the machines are finished the election day, they are hooked up to a computer in the precinct and the tallies are uploaded. Then the machines are wiped clean...poof goes the proof.

The computers upload to the state level computers which report the results.

2) The software is secret and not open to inspection or forced to comply withy any standards for accuracy or security.

If you wanted to steal an election you'd do it this way:
- You'd get GOP Congress to write legislation allowing that the machines not produce an audit trail, and allowing the companies to keep the source code used to count the votes secret.
- You'd then give the contracts to GOP controlled companies.

This way if the software allowed manipulation of the results the truth could not come out and you could do what you wanted and never get caught.

No audit trail, no public disclosure of the very mechanisms used to count our votes.

Congratulations America. While we slept they put in place the technology and mechanisms to endue GOP control of Congressional, Senate and Presidential elections for a generation to come, unless of course we take over this process from them.

Please visit
www.verifiedvoting.com and www.blackboxvoting for more and much deeper insight that I can provide here

Judge Dismisses Touch-Screen Voting Suit

2004-10-25T11:37:00.000-07:00

Fla. Judge Rules State Won't Have to Create Paper Trail for Votes Cast by Touch-Screen Machines

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. Oct 25, 2004 — The state will not be forced to create a paper record in case of recounts in elections on touch-screen voting machines, a federal judge ruled Monday.

U.S. District Judge James I. Cohn ruled in favor of Secretary of State Glenda Hood and Palm Beach County Elections Supervisor Theresa LePore.

The suit, filed by U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler, a Boca Raton Democrat, sought a paper record for manual recounts in close elections like the contentious 2000 presidential race. He had been seeking a way to help determine voter intent when no votes were recorded, known as "undervotes."

The state issued a new rule Oct. 14 for manual recounts to replace one thrown out by a state judge.

However, Wexler argued recounts aren't possible with the paperless machines because there is nothing to review by hand. The machines produce a form showing votes and instances where no votes were recorded.

Cohn heard three days of testimony in the trial, calling it a "case is of great public importance" and promising a written order subject to quick appeal by the losing side.

In his ruling, Cohn said Wexler didn't meet the legal burden required for issuing an injunction.

Copyright 2004 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

- end -

Guess that settle that now dosen't it?

Sit your ass dowen and stfu because you don't have a right to a recount no matter what.

I am having the BadGimp "I Fucking Told You So" t-shirts done as we speak.

Jeb Bush Ignored Felon List Advice - "going live this weekend"

2004-10-16T19:25:00.000-07:00

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) -- Florida Gov. Jeb Bush ignored advice to throw out a flawed felon voter list before it went out to county election offices despite warnings from state officials, according to a published report Saturday.

In a May 4 e-mail obtained by the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, Florida Department of Law Enforcement computer expert Jeff Long told his boss that a Department of State computer expert had told him "that yesterday they recommended to the Gov that they 'pull the plug'" on the voter database.

The e-mail said state election officials "weren't comfortable with the felon matching program they've got," but added, "The Gov rejected their suggestion to pull the plug, so they're 'going live' with it this weekend."

condt .................

Well now, ain't this a surprise, NOT! Remember folks the GOP will stop at nothg to make sure GW stays at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for four more years.

Bush Lawyer Anticipates Delay in Tally (Planting the seeds for the theft of the election)

2004-10-16T14:45:00.000-07:00

sub required

By Jo Becker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, October 16, 2004; Page A07

President Bush's top campaign lawyer said yesterday that the winner of next month's presidential vote may not be known for "days or weeks" after Election Day if the contest is close.

Experts predict that a large number of absentee ballots will be cast, which could take time to count. For the first time nationwide, voters whose names do not appear on the rolls will be allowed to cast "provisional ballots," which will be counted only after a post-Election Day review determines their eligibility.

In addition, some battleground states will count overseas military ballots received after Election Day as long as they are postmarked before Nov. 3. In Florida, for instance, military ballots received through Nov. 12 will be counted.

Tom Josefiak, the Bush-Cheney campaign's general counsel, said he worries that the uncertainty caused by potential delays could undermine confidence in the outcome. "If it's a close election in any one state, it may be days or weeks before we know who actually is the winner," he said. "I hope that doesn't happen.

Josefiak's comments came as most national polls show Bush and Democrat John F. Kerry in a dead heat. Four years ago, a similarly close race between Bush and Vice President Al Gore deadlocked in Florida and produced a 36-day whirlwind of lawsuits as Democrats sought to recount votes and Republicans pushed to stop while Bush was ahead.

Democratic National Committee spokeswoman Jenny Backus denounced Josefiak's comment. "It seems like the Republicans want people to somehow think that the results they see on election night aren't accurate, which is a far cry from where they were in 2000," she said. "Maybe they think they're going to be behind."

During a conference call with reporters, Josefiak and Bush-Cheney campaign manager Ken Mehlman said that the Democratic legal strategy to keep third-party presidential candidate Ralph Nader off the ballot is aimed at disenfranchising overseas military voters, who may be more inclined to vote for Bush.

Mehlman charged that "in target states . . . Democrats, led by the Kerry campaign, have waited until the last minute" to file lawsuits to keep Nader off the ballot. "The effect of this litigation has been to prevent state and local elections officials from printing and mailing ballots overseas," he said. Mehlman noted that in 2000 Democrats fought to disqualify overseas military ballots in Florida.

Bob Bauer, the DNC's national counsel for voter protection, called Mehlman's charge against the Kerry campaign a "shameful accusation that is utterly without merit."

Mehlman pointed to Pennsylvania as a case study, but Bauer said the court there threw Nader off the ballot for good reason, citing thousands of fraudulent signatures including those of cartoon characters Mickey Mouse and Fred Flintstone.

"Nobody is conspiring against any class of voters by seeking to have the law upheld," Bauer said. "And to the extent there are issues around this Nader effort, the Republicans and their henchmen who funded the effort to get him on the ballot bear the responsibility."

end..............

The settng of lower expectations.

Thousands in Florida may be turned away at polls due to faulty registration

2004-10-02T23:17:00.000-07:00

(10-01) 16:38 PDT TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) --

Thousands of Floridians who think they're registered to vote could be turned away at the polls Nov. 2 because their voter registration forms weren't completely filled out, officials said Friday.

Secretary of State Glenda Hood said some groups registering voters are turning in application forms with information missing, such as unchecked boxes asking whether applicants are citizens, mentally incompetent or felons.

A group that's been seeking copies of the incomplete applications in an effort to help people complete them said Hood's office, citing state law, has begun blocking them.

"Clearly, way over the number that could determine the election" won't be able to vote, said Judith Browne, a lawyer with the Washington-based Advancement Project, which promotes multiracial participation in voting. She was referring to President Bush's disputed 537-vote victory in Florida that gave him the presidency in 2000.

During that election, state and local election officials were criticized on a host of issues, from people mistakenly removed from voter rolls to the infamous "butterfly ballot" in Palm Beach County that may have led Al Gore supporters to vote for third-party candidate Pat Buchanan instead.

condt...

Here we GO again..

Unreal, except it's really happening.

State (California) Joins Suit Over Voting Machines

2004-09-09T07:47:00.000-07:00

sub required so ...

---------------------------------------------------
Activists (Bev Harris of BlackBoxVoting.com and others) allege the maker sold equipment that was vulnerable to ballot tampering.

By Stuart Pfeifer, Times Staff Writer

California Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer on Tuesday said he will join a lawsuit against voting machine manufacturer Diebold Election Systems for allegedly lying to state regulators about the security of some of its equipment.The lawsuit was filed in November by two voting-rights activists who contend that Texas-based Diebold sold vote-counting equipment to Alameda County that was susceptible to tampering.

The lawsuit seeks damages under the state false claims act, which allows "whistle-blowers" to sue companies for defrauding the state and to share a portion of any damages that the state collects. Lockyer's staff investigated and decided there was enough evidence of misconduct to take on the lawsuit, a spokesman said."These cases boil down to allegations of lying to receive taxpayer money," said Lockyer spokesman Tom Dresslar. "The allegations are that they didn't tell the truth to the state or the county in providing electronic voting systems. They misrepresented material facts related to those systems."The lawsuit alleges that one version of
Diebold's vote-tabulating software, used to count both paper and electronic ballots, lacked adequate security and was susceptible to tampering. There has been no evidence of tampering in California.A Diebold official issued a statement that said the company, the nation's largest producer of touch-screen voting systems, intends to cooperate with the state. He did not address the allegations."The company is confident that the state's decision to intervene will aid in a fair and dispassionate examination of the issues," said Thomas Swidarski, a Diebold senior vice president. "We will continue to work with California officials in an effort to put these issues behind us, build trust with the state and move forward with … safe, accurate and reliable elections."The lawsuit does not specify the amount of damages sought by the state.

Lowell Finley, a Berkeley attorney who filed the lawsuit on behalf of the activists, said Diebold has potential liability of three times the $11 million that Alameda County spent on the equipment. He noted that the state could pursue damages on behalf of other counties that purchased the equipment.

The system's key vulnerability is that county election workers or others with access to the machines could type in a two-digit code and create a second set of results that would then be forwarded to the state as the county's official tally, said Bev Harris, one of the activists who filed the case. She said the Diebold vote-tabulating equipment at the center of the lawsuit is used in 19 California counties, including Los Angeles County.Diebold also makes touch-screen electronic voting devices used in some California counties.Lockyer's decision to join in the lawsuit comes six months after a March primary election in which

Diebold systems malfunctioned and caused voting delays at polling places in Alameda and San Diego counties. Secretary of State Kevin Shelley later accused Diebold of using software in that election that had not been approved by federal and state regulators and he called on Lockyer to consider pursuing criminal and civil charges against the company.

The attorney general has decided not to file criminal charges, Dresslar said.Harris said her lawsuit has nationwide significance. She said Diebold has sold the same equipment and software to counties in 30 states.

"I'm absolutely delighted," she said. "Again, California is leading the nation."
end---------------------------------

I like the way they added to code that allows someone (who knows how) to add a simple 2 digit code that creates and entire NEW set of vote results. That's all the proof I need to know for certain the technology is rigged to allow GOP friendlies to hand victories to the GOP candidates.

This one is in the bag for the gop this time around folks. Best we focus our efforts on 06 and 08.

The Diebold GEMS central tabulator contains a stunning security hole

2004-09-02T13:05:00.000-07:00

from BlackBoxVoting.com - this warrants coverage here..

-------------------------------------

Submitted by Bev Harris on Thu, 08/26/2004 - 11:43.

Issue: Manipulation technique found in the Diebold central tabulator -- 1,000 of these systems are in place, and they count up to two million votes at a time.
By entering a 2-digit code in a hidden location, a second set of votes is created. This set of votes can be changed, so that it no longer matches the correct votes. The voting system will then read the totals from the bogus vote set. It takes only seconds to change the votes, and to date not a single location in the U.S. has implemented security measures to fully mitigate the risks.

This program is not "stupidity" or sloppiness. It was designed and tested over a series of a dozen version adjustments.

Public officials: If you are in a county that uses GEMS 1.18.18, GEMS 1.18.19, or GEMS 1.18.23, your secretary or state may not have told you about this. You're the one who'll be blamed if your election is tampered with. Find out for yourself if you have this problem: Black Box Voting will be happy to walk you through a diagnostic procedure over the phone. E-mail Bev Harris or Andy Stephenson to set up a time to do this.

For the media: Harris and Stephenson will be in New York City on Aug. 30, 31, Sep.1, to demonstrate this built-in election tampering technique.

Members of congress and Washington correspondents: Harris and Stephenson will be in Washington D.C. on Sept. 22 to demonstrate this problem for you.

Whether you vote absentee, on touch-screens, or on paper ballot (fill in the bubble) optical scan machines, all votes are ultimately brought to the "mother ship," the central tabulator at the county which adds them all up and creates the results report.

These systems are used in over 30 states and each counts up to two million votes at once.

condt.......................

Get over there and read this stuff..of course it may already be too late.

Theresa LePore looses!!! (OMG this is great)

2004-09-01T00:21:00.000-07:00

Wow the snide little election stealing political weasel hack has been beaten.

Thank you Floridians!

SUPERVISOR OF ELECTIONS
Completed Precincts: 693 of 693 (100.00%)
Vote Count Percent
Arthur 'Art' ANDERSON 91,134 51.45%
Theresa LEPORE 85,601 48.32%
WRITE-IN 402 0.23%
Total 177,137 100.00%

more news as it becomes available..

end..............

Thx to Greg Palast for the heads up on this one..
see post below

Too bad this was not the fate that met Kathrine Harris in her previous Congressional bid.

Oh well...I'll take it nonetheless.

Greg Palast on how Theresa LePore ...

2004-08-30T21:45:00.000-07:00

Greg Palast on how Theresa LePore is making sure she gets to count the ballots in her own re-election campaign:

This time, Theresa's in a hurry to get to the counting. She began tallying absentee ballots on Friday in her own re-election race. Not to worry: the law requires the Supervisor of Elections in each county to certify poll-watchers to observe the count. But Theresa has a better idea. She refused to certify a single poll-watcher from opponents' organizations despite the legal requirement she do so by last week. She'll count her own votes herself, thank you very much!
And so far, she's doing quite well. Although 37,000 citizens have requested absentee ballots, she says she'd only received 22,000 when she began the count. Where are the others? Don't ask: though she posts the names of requesters, she won't release the list of those who have voted, an eyebrow-raising deviation from standard procedure.

And she has no intention of counting all the ballots received. She has reserved for herself the right to determine which ballots have acceptable signatures. Her opponent, Democrat Art Anderson, had asked Theresa to use certified hand-writing experts, instead of her hand-picked hacks, to check the signatures.

Unfortunately, while Federal law requires Theresa to allow a voter to correct a signature rejection when registering, the Feds don't require her to permit challenges to absentee ballot rejections.

I know what you're thinking. How could Madame Butterfly know how people are voting? Well, she's printed PARTY AFFILIATION on the OUTSIDE of each return envelope. That certainly makes it easier to figure out which ballot is valid, don't it?

And dear Reader, please take note of the implications of this story for the big vote in November. Millions have sought refuge in absentee ballots as a method to avoid the dangers of the digitizing of democracy. Florida and other states are reporting 400%-plus increases in absentee ballot requests due to fear of the new computer voting machinery. Some refuge. LePore is giving us an early taste of how the Bush Leaguers intend to care for your absentee ballot.

condt..........

For the uninitiated, this is the woman who designed the infamous Butteryfly Ballot in the 2,000 election that cost Al Gore the election. Of course to be fair it's only one of the many ways the state of Florida swung the entire election to W.

$100 says they do it again...

THIS IS HOW YOU WIN AN ELECTION GOP STYLE

2004-08-23T12:56:00.000-07:00

Vote count at mercy of clandestine testing
Monday, August 23, 2004 Posted: 1440 GMT (2240 HKT)

HUNTSVILLE, Alabama (AP) -- The three companies that certify the nation's voting technologies operate in secrecy, and refuse to discuss flaws in the ATM-like machines to be used by nearly one in three voters in November. ..

"I find it grotesque that an organization charged with such a heavy responsibility feels no obligation to explain to anyone what it is doing," Michael Shamos, a Carnegie Mellon computer scientist and electronic voting expert, told lawmakers in Washington, D.C.

The system for "testing and certifying voting equipment in this country is not only broken, but is virtually nonexistent," Shamos added.

Although up to 50 million Americans are expected to vote on touchscreen machines on November 2, federal regulators have virtually no oversight over testing of the technology. The certification process, in part because the voting machine companies pay for it, is described as obsolete by those charged with overseeing it. ..

But critics led by Stanford University computer science professor David Dill say it's an outrage that the world's most powerful democracy doesn't already have an election system so transparent its citizens know it can be trusted.

"Suppose you had a situation where ballots were handed to a private company that counted them behind a closed door and burned the results," said Dill, founder of VerifiedVoting.org. "Nobody but an idiot would accept a system like that. We've got something that is almost as bad with electronic voting."
condt......

You have to hand it to the GOP. They have managed to make is such that we do not even have the right to know how our votes are being counted and the machines that count them are certified. It's all fucking secret.

So shut the fuck up people and watch them work.

CBS News: E-Voting: Is The Fix In?

2004-08-07T11:23:00.000-07:00

CBS) To avoid a fiasco in this fall's election, Congress offered the states $3.9 billion to buy modern voting equipment, reports David Pogue, technology editor of The New York Times.

This fall, 30 percent of us will cast our votes by touching a screen on a computerized voting machines. No muss, no fuss - and no chads.

This year, instead of being handed a ballot, some of these voters will receive a smart card.

"They simply touch the name of the candidate that they'd like to vote for," says Alfie Charles, a spokesman for Sequoia, the second-largest voting-machine maker.

Simplicity is only one of the virtues.

"It prevents voters from over-voting, it prevents or notifies voters if they under vote, it also allows them to see all the selections they've made before casting a ballot," says Charles.

You can even vote unassisted if you can't read, you don't know English, or you're blind.

Maryland used these machines in three recent elections. Gilles Burger, Maryland's election-board chairman, gives them his vote of confidence.

"Voters are delighted with the system," he says. "We have completely accurate results, so we're very high on the system."

The good news is, these machines don't have any of the problems of paper ballots. The bad news is, they may have much worse problems all their own.

California's experience was nothing like Maryland's, according to Secretary of State Kevin Shelley.

"There was a wholesale breakdown in the election last March in one of our major counties that most Americans are familiar with, San Diego," says Shelley. "And untold thousands of individuals were turned away and denied their right to vote because the voting equipment couldn't start."

condt....................

If you ask me, the FIX is definitely in.

Lost Record '02 Florida Vote Raises '04 Concern

2004-07-28T12:54:00.000-07:00

By ABBY GOODNOUGH
NYTimes.com 7/28/04

IAMI, July 27 - Almost all the electronic records from the first widespread use of touch-screen voting in Miami-Dade County have been lost, stoking concerns that the machines are unreliable as the presidential election draws near.

The records disappeared after two computer system crashes last year, county elections officials said, leaving no audit trail for the 2002 gubernatorial primary. A citizens group uncovered the loss this month after requesting all audit data from that election.

A county official said a new backup system would prevent electronic voting data from being lost in the future. But members of the citizens group, the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition, said the malfunction underscored the vulnerability of electronic voting records and wiped out data that might have shed light on what problems, if any, still existed with touch-screen machines here. The group supplied the results of its request to The New York Times.

"This shows that unless we do something now - or it may very well be too late - Florida is headed toward being the next Florida," said Lida Rodriguez-Taseff, a lawyer who is the chairwoman of the coalition.

After the disputed 2000 presidential election eroded confidence in voting machines nationwide, and in South Florida in particular, the state moved quickly to adopt new technology, and in many places touch-screen machines. Voters in 15 Florida counties - covering more than half the state's electorate - will use the machines in November, but reports of mishaps and lost votes in smaller elections over the last two years have cast doubt on their reliability.

Like "black boxes" on airplanes, the electronic voting records on touch-screen machines list everything that happens from boot-up to shutdown, documenting in an "event log" when every ballot was cast. The records also include "vote image reports" that show for whom each ballot was cast. Elections officials have said that using this data for recounts is unnecessary because touch-screen machines do not allow human error. But several studies have suggested the machines themselves might err - for instance, by failing to record some votes.

After the 2002 primary, between Democratic candidates Janet Reno and Bill McBride, the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida conducted a study that found that 8 percent of votes, or 1,544, were lost on touch-screen machines in 31 precincts in Miami-Dade County. The group considered that rate of what it called "lost votes" unusually high.

Voting problems plagued Miami-Dade and Broward Counties on that day, when touch-screen machines took much longer than expected to boot up, dozens of polling places opened late and poorly trained poll workers turned on and shut down the machines incorrectly. A final vote tally - which narrowed the margin first reported between the two candidates by more than 3,000 votes - was delayed for a week.

Ms. Reno, who ultimately lost to Mr. McBride by just 4,794 votes statewide, considered requesting a recount at the time but decided against it.

Seth Kaplan, a spokesman for the Miami-Dade elections division, said on Tuesday that the office had put in place a daily backup procedure so that computer crashes would not wipe out audit records in the future.

The news of the lost data comes two months after Miami-Dade elections officials acknowledged a malfunction in the audit logs of touch-screen machines. The elections office first noticed the problem in spring 2003, but did not publicly discuss it until this past May.

The company that makes Miami-Dade's machines, Election Systems and Software of Omaha, Neb., has provided corrective software to all nine Florida counties that use its machines. One flaw occurred when the machines' batteries ran low and an error in the program that reported the problem caused corruption in the machine's event log, said Douglas W. Jones, a computer science professor at the University of Iowa whom Miami-Dade County hired to help solve the problem.

In a second flaw, the county's election system software was misreading the serial numbers of the voting machines whose batteries had run low, he said.

The flaws would not have affected vote counts, he said - only the backup data used for audits after an election. And because a new state rule prohibits manual recounts in counties that use touch-screen voting machines except in the event of a natural disaster, there would likely be no use for the data anyway.

State officials have said that they created the rule because under state law, the only reason for a manual recount is to determine "voter intent" in close races when, for example, a voter appears to choose two presidential candidates or none.

Touch-screen machines, officials say, are programmed not to record two votes, and if no vote is recorded, they say, it means the voter did not cast one.

But The Sun-Sentinel of Fort Lauderdale, in a recent analysis of the March presidential primary, reported that voters in counties using touch-screen machines were six times as likely to record no vote as were voters in counties using optical-scan machines, which read markings on paper ballots.

The A.C.L.U. of Florida and several other voting rights groups have sued to overturn the recount rule, saying it creates unequal treatment of voters. Counties that use optical-scan machines can conduct recounts, though only in extremely close races.

Mr. Kaplan says that the system crashes had erased data from other elections besides Ms. Reno's, the most recent being municipal elections in November 2003. Under Florida law, ballot records from elections for state and local office need be kept for only a year. For federal races, the records must be kept for 22 months after an election is certified. It was not immediately clear what the consequences might be of breaching that law.

Mr. Kaplan said the backup system was added last December.

An August 2002 report from Miami-Dade County auditors to David Leahy, then the county elections supervisor, recommended that all data from touch-screen machines be backed up on CD's or elsewhere. Professor Jones said it was an obvious practice long considered essential in the corporate world.

"Any naïve observer who knows about computer system management and who knows there is a requirement that all the records be stored for a period of months," Professor Jones said, "would say you should obviously do that with computerized voting systems."

Buddy Johnson, the elections supervisor in Hillsborough County, which is one of the state's largest counties and which also uses touch-screen machines, said his office still had its data from the 2002 elections on separate hard drives.

Mr. Kaplan of the Miami-Dade elections office could not immediately explain on Tuesday afternoon the system crashes in 2003.

Martha Mahoney, a University of Miami law professor and member of the election reform group, said she requested the 2002 audit data because she had never heard an explanation of the supposedly lost votes that the A.C.L.U. documented after the Reno-McBride election.
"People can never be sure their vote was recorded the way it was cast, but these are the best records we've got," she said. "And now they're not there."

end----------------------------

I am sickened when I read this. It's over.

Touchscreen Vote Records Lost in Florida

2004-07-28T11:06:00.000-07:00

how magnificently convenient for the Bushistas..

MIAMI (AP) - A computer crash erased detailed records from Miami-Dade County's first widespread use of touchscreen voting machines, raising again the specter of elections troubles in Florida, where the new technology was supposed to put an end to such problems.
The crashes occurred in May and November of 2003, erasing information from the September 2002 gubernatorial primaries and other elections, elections officials said Tuesday.

The malfunction was made public after the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition, a citizen's group, requested all data from the 2002 gubernatorial primary between Democratic candidates Janet Reno and Bill McBride. In December, officials began backing up the data daily, to help avoid similar data wipeouts in the future, said Seth Kaplan, spokesman for the county's elections supervisor, Constance Kaplan.

Florida counties without the touchscreen machines use optiscan technology, in which computers read voters' pencil marks on paper ballots, and would be able to do physical recounts in tight races.

Administrative Law Judge Susan B. Kirkland has 30 days to make her decision after receiving the hearing transcript, which is due back in 10 working days.

Florida's voting system has been under scrutiny since the 2000 debacle, when it took five weeks of legal maneuvering and some recounting before Republican George W. Bush (website - news - bio) was declared president.
end-----------------------------------------------

If the data had not been requested would the FLA folks have ever acknowledged the loss of the data? This is such a damming indictment of the fruad and corruption present in FLA and plain and simple evidence of how they will steal this election for GWB.

Fear of Fraud (By PAUL KRUGMAN NYTimes.com)

2004-07-27T08:00:00.000-07:00

It's election night, and early returns suggest trouble for the incumbent. Then, mysteriously, the vote count stops and observers from the challenger's campaign see employees of a voting-machine company, one wearing a badge that identifies him as a county official, typing instructions at computers with access to the vote-tabulating software.

When the count resumes, the incumbent pulls ahead. The challenger demands an investigation. But there are no ballots to recount, and election officials allied with the incumbent refuse to release data that could shed light on whether there was tampering with the electronic records.
This isn't a paranoid fantasy. It's a true account of a recent election in Riverside County, Calif., reported by Andrew Gumbel of the British newspaper The Independent. Mr. Gumbel's full-length report, printed in Los Angeles City Beat, makes hair-raising reading not just because it reinforces concerns about touch-screen voting, but also because it shows how easily officials can stonewall after a suspect election.

Some states, worried about the potential for abuse with voting machines that leave no paper trail, have banned their use this November. But Florida, which may well decide the presidential race, is not among those states, and last month state officials rejected a request to allow independent audits of the machines' integrity. A spokesman for Gov. Jeb Bush accused those seeking audits of trying to "undermine voters' confidence," and declared, "The governor has every confidence in the Department of State and the Division of Elections."

Should the public share that confidence? Consider the felon list.

Florida law denies the vote to convicted felons. In 2000 the state hired a firm to purge supposed felons from the list of registered voters; these voters were turned away from the polls. After the election, determined by 537 votes, it became clear that thousands of people had been wrongly disenfranchised. Since those misidentified as felons were disproportionately Democratic-leaning African-Americans, these errors may have put George W. Bush in the White House.

This year, Florida again hired a private company - Accenture, which recently got a homeland security contract worth up to $10 billion - to prepare a felon list. Remembering 2000, journalists sought copies. State officials stonewalled, but a judge eventually ordered the list released.

The Miami Herald quickly discovered that 2,100 citizens who had been granted clemency, restoring their voting rights, were nonetheless on the banned-voter list. Then The Sarasota Herald-Tribune discovered that only 61 of more than 47,000 supposed felons were Hispanic. So the list would have wrongly disenfranchised many legitimate African-American voters, while wrongly enfranchising many Hispanic felons. It escaped nobody's attention that in Florida, Hispanic voters tend to support Republicans.

After first denying any systematic problem, state officials declared it an innocent mistake. They told Accenture to match a list of registered voters to a list of felons, flagging anyone whose name, date of birth and race was the same on both lists. They didn't realize, they said, that this would automatically miss felons who identified themselves as Hispanic because that category exists on voter rolls but not in state criminal records.

But employees of a company that prepared earlier felon lists say that they repeatedly warned state election officials about that very problem.

Let's not be coy. Jeb Bush says he won't allow an independent examination of voting machines because he has "every confidence" in his handpicked election officials. Yet those officials have a history of slipshod performance on other matters related to voting and somehow their errors always end up favoring Republicans. Why should anyone trust their verdict on the integrity of voting machines, when another convenient mistake could deliver a Republican victory in a high-stakes national election?

This shouldn't be a partisan issue. Think about what a tainted election would do to America's sense of itself, and its role in the world. In the face of official stonewalling, doubters probably wouldn't be able to prove one way or the other whether the vote count was distorted - but if the result looked suspicious, most of the world and many Americans would believe the worst. I'll write soon about what can be done in the few weeks that remain, but here's a first step: if Governor Bush cares at all about the future of the nation, as well as his family's political fortunes, he will allow that independent audit.

end -----------------------------------

subscription required so I posted the entire thing - so sue me - it's too damed important.

House Leaders to Bush: Don't Even Think of Delaying Election

2004-07-20T12:27:00.000-07:00

By Staff and Wire ReportsJul 20, 2004, 05:46
capitolhillblue.com/

House leaders called Monday for Congress to affirm that presidential elections, to be held this year on Nov. 2, will never be postponed because of a terrorist attack.
The move comes after the chairman of a federal election commission suggested to congressional leaders last week that there should be a process for canceling or rescheduling an election interrupted by terrorism. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice said the administration is considering no such plan.

Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge recently warned that intelligence indicates that the al-Qaida terrorist network wants to disrupt the upcoming elections.

A congressional resolution by Rep. Bob Ney, R-Ohio, chairman of the House Administration Committee, says "the actions of terrorists will never cause the date of any presidential election to be postponed" and "no single individual or agency should be given the authority to postpone the date of a presidential election."

The resolution is supported by House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., and more than 60 other lawmakers. Ney said he would introduce it on Tuesday.

No national election has ever been postponed, the resolution says, noting that federal elections took place as scheduled during the Civil War, World War I and World War II.

"Postponing an election in the aftermath of a terrorist attack would demonstrate weakness, not strength, and would be interpreted as a victory for the terrorists," the resolution says.

Ney said the resolution would restore confidence in the electoral process. Hastert agreed, saying: "This resolution will send a message around our nation and around the world that the United States will not be bullied by terrorism."

Unlike a bill, a House resolution is not binding if passed and does not have the force of law. It merely expresses the sentiment of members of the House.

Separately, about 190 House members, mostly Democrats, wrote to Ridge insisting that he take no further steps in postponing the Nov. 2 elections.

"We must ensure that in the fight against terrorism we do not lose the values and freedoms that we're fighting for in the first place," said Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Calif.

© Copyright 2004 by Capitol Hill Blue
end------------------------------------------

What is important what is not being said: that there is even a need to say this, hat there are still many in the GOP who will not sign this, that many in Congress support postponing or canceling the upcomming election.

This news is mnore scarry than comforting...to mer at least.

How about you?

Kerry Building Legal Network for Vote Fights

2004-07-19T11:54:00.000-07:00

By DAVID M. HALBFINGERPublished: July 19, 2004

Mindful of the election problems in Florida four years ago, aides to Senator John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, say his campaign is putting together a far more intricate set of legal safeguards than any presidential candidate before him to monitor the election.

Aides to Mr. Kerry say the campaign is taking the unusual step of setting up a nationwide legal network under its own umbrella, rather than relying, as in the past, on lawyers associated with state Democratic parties. The aides said they were recruiting people based on their skills as litigators and election lawyers, rather than rewarding political connections or big donors.

Lawyers for the campaign are gathering intelligence and preparing litigation over the ballot machines being used and the rules concerning how voters will be registered or their votes disqualified. In some cases, the lawyers are compiling dossiers on the people involved and their track records on enforcing voting rights. The disputed 2000 presidential election remains a fresh wound for Democrats, and Mr. Kerry has been referring to it on the stump while assuring his audiences that he will not let this year's election be a repeat of the 2000 vote.

"A million African-Americans disenfranchised in the last election," he said at the N.A.A.C.P. convention in Philadelphia on Thursday. "Well, we're not just going to sit there and wait for it to happen. On Election Day in your cities, my campaign will provide teams of election observers and lawyers to monitor elections, and we will enforce the law."
The Kerry campaign's legal efforts are hardly occurring in a vacuum.
The Bush-Cheney campaign says it will have party lawyers in every state, covering 30,000 precincts. An affiliated group, the Republican National Lawyers Association, held a two-day training session in Milwaukee over the weekend on "how to promote ballot access to all qualified voters," according to the group's Web site.

condt.......

The real last minute War has begun.

Did you see Jay Leno's comment on Canceling the Elections?

2004-07-13T19:38:00.000-07:00

"I love that the Department of Homeland Security always tells Americans if you don't fly commercial airlines, 'the terrorists have won.' If you don't hold the Super Bowl or the World Series, 'the terrorists have won.' If you don't get out to the mall and do your Christmas shopping, 'the terrorists have won.' Comes time for the election, 'Oh, let the terrorists have that one.'"

Report: Touchscreen Voting Flawed in Fla.

2004-07-12T22:40:00.000-07:00

Sunday July 11, 2004

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) - Touchscreen voting machines didn't perform as well as devices that scanned paper ballots in this year's Florida Democratic presidential primary, raising questions about the state's voting process for the November election, a newspaper reported Sunday.

An analysis of just under half of the ballots from the March 9 election shows that votes were not recorded for about one out of every 100 people using the new machines, or a 1.09 percent rate of undervotes, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported. An undervote is when a selection cannot be detected on a ballot.

That's at least eight times the number of undervotes in the same election on paper ballots marked with pencils and tallied by an optical scanner, which had a 0.12 percent rate of undervotes, the newspaper reported.

condt.........................

A spokeswoman for Secretary of State Glenda Hood, Florida's top elections official, did not return calls seeking comment Sunday.

what a surprise

Electronic voting critics sue Diebold under whistle-blower law

2004-07-12T09:38:00.000-07:00

Monday, July 12, 2004 Posted: 11:46 AM EDT (1546 GMT)

SAN FRANCISCO, California (AP) -- Critics of electronic voting are suing Diebold Inc. under a whistle-blower law, alleging that the company's shoddy balloting equipment exposed California elections to hackers and software bugs.

California's attorney general unsealed the lawsuit Friday. It was filed in November but sealed under a provision that keeps such actions secret until the government decides whether to join the plaintiffs.

Lawmakers from Maryland to California are expressing doubts about the integrity of paperless voting terminals made by several large manufacturers, which up to 50 million Americans will use in November.

The California lawsuit was filed in state court by computer programmer Jim March and activist Bev Harris, who are seeking full reimbursement for Diebold equipment purchased in California.

Issues cited by the case include Diebold's use of uncertified hardware and software, and modems that may have allowed election results to be published online before polls closed.

They are asking California to join the lawsuit against Diebold. The state has not yet made a decision.

State election officials have spent at least $8 million on paperless touchscreen machines. Alameda County, for one, has spent at least $11 million.

condt................

U.S. Mulls How to Delay Nov. Vote in Case of Attack

2004-07-12T09:07:00.000-07:00

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A senior House Democratic lawmaker was skeptical on Sunday of a Bush administration idea to obtain the authority to delay the November presidential election in case of an attack by al Qaeda,

Reuters

U.S. counterterrorism officials are looking at an emergency proposal on the legal steps needed to postpone the presidential election in case of such an attack, Newsweek reported on Sunday.

"I think it's excessive based on what we know," said Rep. Jane Harman of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, in a interview on CNN's "Late Edition."

Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge warned last week that Osama bin Laden (news - web sites)'s al Qaeda network want to attack within the United States to try to disrupt the election.

Harman said Ridge's threat warning "was a bust" because it was based on old information.

Newsweek cited unnamed sources who told it that the Department of Homeland Security asked the Justice Department (news - web sites) last week to review what legal steps would be needed to delay the vote if an attack occurred on the day before or on election day.

The department was asked to review a letter from DeForest Soaries, chairman of the new U.S. Election Assistance Commission, in which he asked Ridge to ask Congress for the power to put off the election in the event of an attack, Newsweek reported in its issue out on Monday.

The commission was created in 2002 to provide funds to states to replace punch card voting systems and provide other assistance in conducting federal elections.

In his letter, Soaries wrote that while New York's Board of Elections suspended primary elections in New York on the day of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, "the federal government has no agency that has the statutory authority to cancel and reschedule a federal election."

Homeland Security Department spokesman Brian Rochrkasse told the magazine the agency is reviewing the matter "to determine what steps need to be taken to secure the election."

Republican Rep. Christopher Cox of California, who chairs the House Homeland Security Committee, told CNN that the idea of legislation allowing the election to be postponed was similar to what had already been looked at in terms of how to respond to an attack on Congress.

"These are doomsday scenarios. Nobody expects that they're going to happen," he said. "But we're preparing for all these contingencies now."

end...........................

I hate to say I told you so..but I told you so.

btw: I like reading Yahoo news stories because you can Rate it and also read the messages reader leave - very telling about the mood of the sheeple.

The article that started it all for me...

2004-07-09T17:14:00.000-07:00

Elections In America - Assume Crooks Are In Control
by Lynn Landes

Published on Monday, September 16, 2002 by CommonDreams.org
http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0916-04.htm

Don't blame the poll workers in Florida. The facts, supported by voting machine experts and numerous newspaper articles, have made it clear. Computerized voting machines that were certified by the state of Florida, caused most of the problems in Florida's primary election. In the absence of paper ballots, the damage is now irreversible.

This was no accident. It's not new. And Florida is not alone.

"The concept is clear, simple, and it works. Computerized voting gives the power of selection, without fear of discovery, to whomever controls the computer," wrote the authors of VoteScam (1992), James & Kenneth Collier (both now deceased). It's a 'must read' book about how elections have been electronically and mechanically rigged in the United States for decades, and with the knowing and sometimes unknowing support of media giants and government officials, including... ironically... Janet Reno.

Only a few companies dominate the market for computer voting machines. Alarmingly, under U.S. federal law, no background checks are required on these companies or their employees. Felons and foreigners can, and do, own computer voting machine companies. Voting machine companies demand that clients sign 'proprietary' contracts to protect their trade secrets, which prohibits a thorough inspection of voting machines by outsiders. And, unbelievably, it appears that most election officials don't require paper ballots to back up or audit electronic election results. So far, lawsuits to allow complete access to inspect voting machines, or to require paper ballots so that recounts are possible...have failed.

As far as we know, some guy from Russia could be controlling the outcome of computerized elections in the United States.

In fact, Vikant Corp., a Chicago-area company owned by Alex Kantarovick, formerly of Minsk, Belorussia (also known as White Russia, formerly U.S.S.R.), supplies the all-important 'control cards' to Election Systems & Software (ES&S), the world's largest election management company, writes reporter Christopher Bollyn. According to ES&S, they have "handled more than 40,000 of the world's most important events and elections. ES&S systems have counted approximately 60% of the U.S. national vote for the past four presidential elections. In the U.S. 2000 general election, ES&S systems counted over 100 million ballots."

Getting back to Kantarovich, he would not disclose where the control cards are made, except they aren't made in America, writes Bollyn. Nor would he discuss his previous employment. Bollyn says he got some not-too-thinly-veiled threats from Kantarovich.

Kantarovich sounds more like the Russian mafia, than a legitimate businessman.

But the really big deal is this....all of ES&S's touch screen machines contain modems, "allowing them to communicate—and be communicated with—while they are in operation," reports Bollyn. That communication capability includes satellites. "Even computers not connected to modems or an electronic network can still be manipulated offsite, not during the election, but certainly before or after," says voting systems expert Dr. Rebecca Mercuri.

ES&S supplied the touch screens for Miami-Dade and Broward counties where the worst machine failures occurred. But the debacle was nothing new for ES&S. Associated Press (AP) reporter Jessica Fargen wrote in June 2000, "Venezuela's president and the head of the nation's election board accused ES&S of trying to destabilize the country's electoral process. In the United States, four states have reported problems with equipment supplied by the company. Faulty ES&S machines used in Hawaii's 1998 elections forced that state's first-ever recount."

Sequoia is another voting systems company that sends a cold chill down my spine. "Mob ties, bribery, felony convictions, and threats of coercion are visible in the public record of the election services company," according to investigative journalist and filmmaker Daniel Hopsicker, and reported in Spotlight.com. Hopsicker says that Pasquale "Rocco" Ricci, a 65-year-old senior executive with Sequoia, and the firm's Louisiana representative, recently pled guilty to passing out as much as $10 million dollars in bribes over the course of almost an entire decade." According to American Law Education Rights & Taxation (ALERT), Ricci is the president of Sequoia International, which also manufactures casino slot machines.

That's just great. Now, we could possibly have both the Russian mafia and the U.S. mafia involved in our elections.

In May 2002 Sequoia was bought by De La Rue, based in England. By their own estimate, De La Rue is "the world's largest commercial security printer and papermaker, involved in the production of over 150 national currencies and a wide range of security documents such as travelers checks and vouchers. Employing almost 7,000 people across 31 countries, (De La Rue) is also a leading provider of cash handling equipment and software solutions to banks and retailers worldwide." And they develop technology for secure passports, identity cards, and driver's licenses.

Okay, add Dr. Evil to the mix and be on the look-out for international money launderers, drug kingpins, and Nazis.

The Shoup Voting Solutions of Quakertown, Pennsylvania, has a reputation for rigging elections, wrote the late co-author of VoteScam, Jim Collier. According to Collier, in 1979, Ransom Shoup II, the president of the firm, was convicted of conspiracy and obstruction of justice stemming from an FBI investigation of a vote-fixing scam involving the old-fashioned lever machines in Philadelphia."

These reports are just the tip of the iceberg. The numerous instances of U.S. voting systems error and fraud are documented in a 1988 report for the U.S. Commerce Department entitled, "Accuracy, Integrity, and Security in Computerized Vote-Tallying" by Roy G. Saltman, a computer consultant for the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Computer Systems Laboratory. Many other experts and observers have been warning and complaining about these problems for decades.

But complaints, warnings, reports, and books like "VoteScam," haven't deterred government officials like Pinellas County (Florida) Commissioners Calvin Harris and County Judge Patrick Caddell. They told the St. Petersburg Times in October 2001 that they were aware that all of the voting machine companies had "problems in their pasts." But, Harris said, "We have to look at this objectively and not get tied up into the emotions of, 'Some guy might be a crook."

Dear Commissioner Harris...when it comes to elections in America...assume crooks are in control...and then act accordingly.

Lynn Landes is a freelance journalist specializing in environmental issues. She writes a weekly column which is published on her website www.EcoTalk.org and reports environmental news for DUTV in Philadelphia, PA. Lynn's been a radio show host and a regular commentator for a BBC radio program.

Links:

http://www.votescam.com
http://www.securepoll.com
http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0805-07.htm

end........................

Activist (Bev Harris): E-Voting to Be a 'Train Wreck'

2004-07-09T16:37:00.000-07:00

By RACHEL KONRAD, Associated Press Writer

SAN JOSE, Calif. - Ambushing registrars and tracking down executives at their homes and offices, a literary publicist has uncovered conflicts of interests and security flaws inside the companies that make electronic ballot machines.

Searching the Web and poring over newspaper clippings, Bev Harris has unearthed obscure arrest records, ties to conservative political groups and other embarrassing secrets of senior executives at voting companies.

Her conclusion: there will be so many problems with the more than 100,000 paperless voting terminals to be used in the November presidential election that the fiasco will dwarf Florida's hanging chad debacle of 2000.

"We have a train wreck that's definitely going to happen," Harris said. "We have conflict of interest, we've taken the checks and balances away, and we know the votes are already being miscounted fairly frequently. This is going to be huge."

Harris, 52, didn't set out to become a muckraking voting technology expert.

Accustomed to working with manuscripts and authors in suburban Seattle, she preferred doting on her new grandchild to debating politics. She still doesn't vote regularly.

But when Harris was idly surfing the Web during a lunch break two years ago, she became obsessed with an issue essential to democracy, quickly becoming the unlikely center of a movement to ensure integrity in the nation's voting systems.

Critics say Harris, author of "Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century," is a fear-mongering grandstander and a presumptuous conspiracy theorist. The prime target of one investigation — voting equipment maker Diebold Inc. — says her antics undermine democracy.

"We must not frighten voters or inadvertently provide any type of disincentive to voting," Diebold spokesman David Bear wrote in an e-mail when asked to respond to Harris' claims that the company's software is riggable and insecure. "While security is an important issue ... improvements can and will be made."

Others question the motives behind her obsessive investigations of politicians and executives at big voting equipment companies such as Diebold, Sequoia Voting Systems Inc. and Election Systems & Services Inc.

condt...............

Bev Harris has been the true leader for all American on this issue. But she is only one woman.

Experts warn of potential problems with electronic voting machines

2004-07-08T19:41:00.000-07:00

Posted on Wed, Jul. 07, 2004 By Sumana Chatterjee
Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - Just four months before November's elections, vulnerabilities persist in electronic voting machines used nationwide, a group of computer experts told House lawmakers on Wednesday.

The experts are concerned that this fall's elections may be plagued by hackers, fraud and computer malfunctions. Some argue for the return of the paper ballot as a backup to verify voters' intentions.

But election commissioners who plan to rely on electronic balloting insisted that their machines work well. They said sufficient security measures and fallbacks are in place to assure that electronic voting is accurate.

Nearly 50 million Americans are expected to vote using touch-screen machines this fall. Many states and counties moved to electronic voting machines after the contested 2000 election results from Florida.

"No matter how you cut this, voters are concerned about their votes being counted," said Rep. Juanita Millender McDonald, D-Calif., a member of the House Administration Committee, which has oversees voting systems.

"Given the gravity of the security failings the computer security community has documented ... it is irresponsible to move forward without addressing them," said Avi Rubin, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University Information Security Institute in Baltimore. The institute's doctoral candidates found significant design and programming flaws in software for Diebold voting machines, a popular system.

The general problem, according to Rubin, is that there's no way for election officials to be sure that electronic machines are free of malicious code designed to manipulate election results.

condt...............................

The mainstream media has finally grabbed this issue but it's conveniently too late for the news to have a impact on the problem.

I will say it again...we're Chenneyed...sorry for the profanity.

Judge rules for media on Florida voter list

2004-07-01T12:25:00.000-07:00

Upholds both 'right to inspect' and 'right to copy'

Thursday, July 1, 2004 Posted: 2:13 PM EDT (1813 GMT)

(CNN) -- A state court judge in Florida ordered Thursday that the board of elections immediately release a list of nearly 50,000 suspected felons to CNN and other news organizations that last month sued the state for access to copies of the list.

The list is used to determine who will be eligible to vote in November's presidential election in the state.

Florida is one of a handful of states that bar people convicted of felonies in that state from voting.

In 2000, a similar list was the center of controversy when state officials acknowledged after the election that it contained thousands of names in error, thus barring eligible people from voting.

Many of the barred voters were African-Americans, who traditionally tend to vote Democratic.

Bush won the state by a 537-vote margin and, with it, the presidency.

The lawsuit, filed by CNN and joined by other news organizations, challenged a 2001 statute passed by the Republican-controlled legislature that limited the public's access to the list.

News organizations were allowed to inspect the list, but not make copies of it or take notes from it. (CNN asks Florida court for ineligible voters list)

"The right to inspect without the right to copy is an empty right indeed," said Leon County Circuit Judge Nikki Clark, in her six-page order.

condt .......................

This could prove to be a turing point.

One million black votes didn't count in the 2000 presidential election

2004-06-20T17:08:00.000-07:00

It's not too hard to get your vote lost -- if some politicians want it to be lost!

San Francisco Chronicle, Sunday, June 20, 2004
by Greg Palast

In the 2000 presidential election, 1.9 million Americans cast ballots that no one counted. "Spoiled votes" is the technical term. The pile of ballots left to rot has a distinctly dark hue: About 1 million of them -- half of the rejected ballots -- were cast by African Americans although black voters make up only 12 percent of the electorate.

This year, it could get worse.

These ugly racial statistics are hidden away in the mathematical thickets of the appendices to official reports coming out of the investigation of ballot-box monkey business in Florida from the last go-'round.

How do you spoil 2 million ballots? Not by leaving them out of the fridge too long. A stray mark, a jammed machine, a punch card punched twice will do it. It's easy to lose your vote, especially when some politicians want your vote lost.

While investigating the 2000 ballot count in Florida for BBC Television, I saw firsthand how the spoilage game was played -- with black voters the predetermined losers.

Florida's Gadsden County has the highest percentage of black voters in the state -- and the highest spoilage rate. One in 8 votes cast there in 2000 was never counted. Many voters wrote in "Al Gore." Optical reading machines rejected these because "Al" is a "stray mark."

By contrast, in neighboring Tallahassee, the capital, vote spoilage was nearly zip; every vote counted. The difference? In Tallahassee's white- majority county, voters placed their ballots directly into optical scanners. If they added a stray mark, they received another ballot with instructions to correct it.

In other words, in the white county, make a mistake and get another ballot; in the black county, make a mistake, your ballot is tossed.

The U.S. Civil Rights Commission looked into the smelly pile of spoiled ballots and concluded that, of the 179,855 ballots invalidated by Florida officials, 53 percent were cast by black voters. In Florida, a black citizen was 10 times as likely to have a vote rejected as a white voter.

But let's not get smug about Florida's Jim Crow spoilage rate. Civil Rights Commissioner Christopher Edley, recently appointed dean of Boalt Hall School of Law at UC Berkeley, took the Florida study nationwide. His team discovered the uncomfortable fact that Florida is typical of the nation.

Philip Klinkner, the statistician working on the Edley investigations, concluded, "It appears that about half of all ballots spoiled in the U.S.A. -- about 1 million votes -- were cast by nonwhite voters."

This "no count," as the Civil Rights Commission calls it, is no accident. In Florida, for example, I discovered that technicians had warned Gov. Jeb Bush's office well in advance of November 2000 of the racial bend in the vote- count procedures.

Herein lies the problem. An apartheid vote-counting system is far from politically neutral. Given that more than 90 percent of the black electorate votes Democratic, had all the "spoiled" votes been tallied, Gore would have taken Florida in a walk, not to mention fattening his popular vote total nationwide. It's not surprising that the First Brother's team, informed of impending rejection of black ballots, looked away and whistled.

The ballot-box blackout is not the monopoly of one party. Cook County, Ill., has one of the nation's worst spoilage rates. That's not surprising. Boss Daley's Democratic machine, now his son's, survives by systematic disenfranchisement of Chicago's black vote.

How can we fix it? First, let's shed the convenient excuses for vote spoilage, such as a lack of voter education. One television network stated as fact that Florida's black voters, newly registered and lacking education, had difficulty with their ballots. In other words, blacks are too dumb to vote.

This convenient racist excuse is dead wrong. After that disaster in Gadsden, Fla., public outcry forced the government to change that black county's procedures to match that of white counties. The result: near zero spoilage in the 2002 election. Ballot design, machines and procedure, says statistician Klinkner, control spoilage.

In other words, the vote counters, not the voters, are to blame. Politicians who choose the type of ballot and the method of counting have long fine-tuned the spoilage rate to their liking.

It is about to get worse. The ill-named "Help America Vote Act," signed by President Bush in 2002, is pushing computerization of the ballot box.

California decertified some of Diebold Corp.'s digital ballot boxes in response to fears that hackers could pick our next president. But the known danger of black-box voting is that computers, even with their software secure, are vulnerable to low-tech spoilage games: polls opening late, locked-in votes, votes lost in the ether.

And once again, the history of computer-voting glitches has a decidedly racial bias. Florida's Broward County grandly shifted to touch-screen voting in 2002. In white precincts, all seemed to go well. In black precincts, hundreds of African Americans showed up at polls with machines down and votes that simply disappeared.

Going digital won't fix the problem. Canada and Sweden vote on paper ballots with little spoilage and without suspicious counts.

In America, a simple fix based on paper balloting is resisted because, unfortunately, too many politicians who understand the racial bias in the vote- spoilage game are its beneficiaries, with little incentive to find those missing 1 million black voters' ballots.

--
Greg Palast is the author of "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy - The New Expanded Election Edition" from which this article is taken. For more information, visit www.GregPalast.com.

State (California) approves paper records for e-voting

2004-06-16T09:43:00.000-07:00

By Ian Hoffman, STAFF WRITER

California approved the nation's first standards Tuesday for a paper record to be produced by electronic voting machines and verified by voters.
Congress and at least 20 states are debating laws requiring that electronic voting machines produce a "voter-verified paper trail" so voters can be sure their electronic vote was properly recorded and so local officials would have something to recount.

But no one is certain what such a paper trail would look like, although about a half-dozen voting-system vendors have developed or are working on e-voting machines that generate a printout.

California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley ordered all e-voting machines in the state to offer the paper trail by July 2006 and had promised to define it by May.

"California is at the forefront of the movement toward a paper trail, and these standards help lead the way," said Kim Alexander, a paper-trail advocate and president of the Davis-based California Voter Foundation.

condt........

This is definitely a positive step. However this statement misses the real point entirely:
"Shelley and other California officials say instability and lax security of the current generation of e-voting machines have made a paper trail inescapable. "

It is necessary because the GOP fixed the legislation so the technology providers could fix the machines enabling them to fix the elections for the GOP.

It's not complicated.

Women Voters Drop Paperless Vote Support (BBV)

2004-06-14T17:48:00.000-07:00

NYTimes.com

"The League of Women Voters rescinded its support of paperless voting machines on Monday after hundreds of angry members voiced concern that paper ballots were the only way to safeguard elections from fraud, hackers or computer malfunctions.

"About 800 delegates who attended the nonpartisan league's biennial convention in Washington voted overwhelmingly in favor of a resolution that supports `voting systems and procedures that are secure, accurate, recountable and accessible.'"

That relatively neutral stance was a sharp change from last year, when league leaders endorsed paperless terminals as reliable alternatives to antiquated punch card and lever systems. About 30 percent of the electorate will use touchscreen voting machines in the November election, and hardly any of the machines provide paper records that could be used in case of a contested election.

Last year's endorsement infuriated members from chapters around the country -- particularly in Silicon Valley and other technology-savvy enclaves, where computer scientists say the systems jeopardize elections. Legitimate recounts are impossible without paper records of every vote cast, they say.

E-voting critics who attended the five-day convention, which ends Tuesday, said the league's revision was welcome -- if not overdue.

``My initial reaction is incredible joy and relief,'' said computer scientist Barbara Simons, 63, past president of the Association for Computing Machinery and a league member from a chapter in Palo Alto, Calif. ``This issue was threatening to split the league apart. ... The league now has a position that I feel very comfortable supporting.''

------

On the Net:

http://www.lwv.org

end......

No surprise here...the wave is becomming a tsunami. Although I fear it may crest too late for us in Nov.

Gambling on Voting- Making Votes Count - New York Times

2004-06-13T10:52:00.000-07:00

If election officials want to convince voters that electronic voting can be trusted, they should be willing to make it at least as secure as slot machines. To appreciate how poor the oversight on voting systems is, it's useful to look at the way Nevada systematically ensures that electronic gambling machines in Las Vegas operate honestly and accurately. Electronic voting, by comparison, is rife with lax procedures, security risks and conflicts of interest.

On a trip last week to the Nevada Gaming Control Board laboratory, in a state office building off the Las Vegas Strip, we found testing and enforcement mechanisms that go far beyond what is required for electronic voting. Among the ways gamblers are more protected than voters:

Condt.................

What a wonderful example of how technology CAN be used to manage voting and ensure that every vote counts.

Fla. Voting Machines Have Recount Flaw

2004-06-12T21:00:00.000-07:00

Sat Jun 12, 7:09 PM ET

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. - Touchscreen voting machines in 11 counties have a software flaw that could make manual recounts impossible in November's presidential election, state officials said.

A spokeswoman for the secretary of state called the problems "minor technical hiccups" that can be resolved, but critics allege voting officials wrongly certified a voting system they knew had a bug.

The electronic voting machines are a response to Florida's 2000 presidential election fiasco, where thousands of punchcard ballots were improperly marked. But the new machines have brought concerns that errors could go unchecked without paper records of the electronic voting.

The machines, made by Election Systems & Software of Omaha, Neb., fail to provide a consistent electronic "event log" of voting activity when asked to reproduce what happened during the election, state officials said.

Officials with the company and the state Division of Elections said they believe they can fix the problem by linking the voting equipment with laptop computers. Florida's two largest counties — Miami-Dade and Broward — are among those affected by the flaws.

Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Fla., has asked state Attorney General Charlie Crist to investigate whether the head of the state elections division lied under oath when he denied knowing of the computer problem before reading about it in the media. A spokeswoman for Crist said he was reviewing the request.

The elections chief, Ed Kast, abruptly resigned Monday, saying he wanted a change of pace.

During a May 17 deposition for a lawsuit Wexler filed seeking to require a paper trail for state voting machines, Kast said he had recently heard of the problem only days earlier. But in a letter to Crist, Wexler said the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition, a citizens' group, notified Kast and Secretary of State Glenda Hood of the glitch in March.

Hood blamed Miami-Dade Supervisor of Elections Constance Kaplan for the delay, telling Kaplan in a May 13 letter she should have notified state officials when she learned of the problem in June 2003.

Nonetheless, state and county election officials insist the problem can be resolved in the five months before the November election.

"These are minor technical hiccups that happen," said Hood spokeswoman Nicole DeLara. "No votes are lost, or could be lost."

Wexler and coalition members said they want to know how the state can be sure that glitches will not prevent elections officials from even detecting computer malfunctions.

"How do you know that any votes were lost if your audit is wrong?" asked Lida Rodriguez-Taseff, chairwoman of the Miami-Dade coalition.

State officials say there is no need for recounts, or an audit trail, with the touchscreen system because it was designed to prevent people from voting in the same race more than once — an overvote — and provide multiple alerts to voters to warn them when they are skipping a race — an undervote.

They emphasize that the "glitch" in the touchscreen machines occurs when the audit is done after the election, not when the tally sheet is printed in each precinct when polls close.

end ...............

All roads in this Touch Screen Voting Machines scandal seem to go though the same place.. Florida...hhmm

"If You Want To Win An Election, Just Control The Voting Machines"

2004-06-12T15:24:00.000-07:00

I am respositng this because it's becomming necessary.

Published on Friday, January 31, 2003 by CommonDreams.org
by Thom Hartmann

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.

You'd think in an open democracy that the government - answerable to all its citizens rather than a handful of corporate officers and stockholders - would program, repair, and control the voting machines. You'd think the computers that handle our cherished ballots would be open and their software and programming available for public scrutiny. You'd think there would be a paper trail of the vote, which could be followed and audited if a there was evidence of voting fraud or if exit polls disagreed with computerized vote counts.

You'd be wrong.

The respected Washington, DC publication The Hill (www.thehill.com/news/012903/hagel.aspx) has confirmed that former conservative radio talk-show host and now Republican U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel was the head of, and continues to own part interest in, the company that owns the company that installed, programmed, and largely ran the voting machines that were used by most of the citizens of Nebraska.

Back when Hagel first ran there for the U.S. Senate in 1996, his company's computer-controlled voting machines showed he'd won stunning upsets in both the primaries and the general election. The Washington Post (1/13/1997) said Hagel's "Senate victory against an incumbent Democratic governor was the major Republican upset in the November election." According to Bev Harris of www.blackboxvoting.com, Hagel won virtually every demographic group, including many largely Black communities that had never before voted Republican. Hagel was the first Republican in 24 years to win a Senate seat in Nebraska.

Six years later Hagel ran again, this time against Democrat Charlie Matulka in 2002, and won in a landslide. As his hagel.senate.gov website says, Hagel "was re-elected to his second term in the United States Senate on November 5, 2002 with 83% of the vote. That represents the biggest political victory in the history of Nebraska."

What Hagel's website fails to disclose is that about 80 percent of those votes were counted by computer-controlled voting machines put in place by the company affiliated with Hagel. Built by that company. Programmed by that company.

"This is a big story, bigger than Watergate ever was," said Hagel's Democratic opponent in the 2002 Senate race, Charlie Matulka (www.lancastercountydemocrats.org/matulka.htm). "They say Hagel shocked the world, but he didn't shock me."

Is Matulka the sore loser the Hagel campaign paints him as, or is he democracy's proverbial canary in the mineshaft?

condt.................................

Read this article and you will understand what we are up against.

BadGimp

Delays, Purge Hit Voter Rolls

2004-06-08T05:01:00.000-07:00

Photo by: JAY NOLAN
Willie Johnson, 69, can no longer vote because of criminal records from the 1950's. Johnson says he's been voting for the passed 30 years but has been unable to since 2000.

By WILLIAM MARCH wmarch@tampatrib.com - Published: Jun 7, 2004

TAMPA - For the second straight presidential election, Florida's law against former felons voting, a law grounded in Old South racism, may prevent thousands of people from voting.
Some of those people may be legally entitled to vote. Others won't be able to navigate the bureaucratic hurdles of the state's clemency process to get their rights restored in time for the election.

But the state government is concentrating on removing as many former felons from voting rolls as possible, even though critics charge that it risks disenfranchising some who are legally entitled to vote. Meanwhile, those critics charge, the state is dragging its feet on restoring those wrongly removed from voter rolls in 2000.

Florida is one of only seven states with laws that prevent former felons from voting unless they go through a long and sometimes difficult process of having their rights restored.

That law, which wasn't enforced by the state before the controversial 2000 presidential race, caused hundreds or possibly thousands of voters - no one knows for sure - to be turned away from the polls in 2000, some wrongly, because of errors in a state ``purge list'' of former felons.

Today, as the 2004 election nears:

* More than 43,000 Floridians are on the waiting list to have their rights restored, some of whom first learned in 2000, after voting for years, that they weren't legally entitled to vote. The restoration process can take years, and the list is growing, not shrinking.

* Hundreds of people wrongly removed from voter rolls in 2000, who never committed felonies or whose rights had been restored, may not yet have been put back on the rolls.

* A lawsuit charges that Florida's felon disenfranchisement is unconstitutional and affects up to 600,000 people.

Despite all this, state officials have just sent elections supervisors in Florida's 67 counties another list of 47,000 names of individuals who may have committed felonies in the past, telling the supervisors to purge their rolls again.

Some supervisors say they don't have the staff, expertise or money to do the purge without the same kind of errors as in 2000.

Legally purged voters, meanwhile, won't find out about it until they get a letter from an election supervisor this summer - too late to have their rights restored for this election - or are turned away on Election Day.

The vast majority of them are black and would be likely to vote Democratic.

In Miami-Dade County, for example, blacks are 20 percent of the population but make up 65 percent of those on the 2000 felon purge lists.

Asked why a new purge list is going out less than six months before the election, Secretary of State Glenda Hood said it's part of establishing a statewide voter list, as required by the state's 2001 election reform law. The law was passed in the wake of the disputed presidential vote.

``The legislation mandated that as soon as this process [of identifying improperly registered names] was complete, the information be sent out,'' said Hood, a Republican and an appointee of Gov. Jeb Bush.

But Hood acknowledged ``there is no particular time line'' in the law for sending purge lists to county elections supervisors.

Hood's staff didn't follow through on a promise to have a staff attorney call a reporter to discuss precisely what part of the new law requires that the list go out now.

When news of the new purge list broke about three weeks ago, it drew a chorus of anger from civil rights advocates who had sued the state over the 2000 election problems.

``Frankly, the state should first fix the problems with people who were erroneously thrown off in 2000 before they start on another purge,'' said Elliot Mincberg, legal director of People for the American Way Foundation, a liberal-oriented advocacy group.

State officials are seeking to keep the new purge list secret, but CNN is suing to get a copy. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Tallahassee, and several news organizations including The Tampa Tribune plan to join the lawsuit.

condt................

Amazing how blatant an attempt this is to throw the Reselection to Jeb's brother GW.

Florida's Elections Chief Steps Down

2004-06-08T04:54:00.000-07:00

By Associated Press

June 8, 2004, 3:25 AM EDT

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. -- A veteran elections official has quit his post overseeing the state's voting machinery.

Less than five months before the Nov. 2 election, Ed Kast stepped down as chief of the Division of Elections, saying he wished to pursue other interests.

Kast, 53, had worked at the Department of State since 1994 and took over as elections chief in 2002.

Secretary of State Glenda Hood named the agency's top lawyer, Dawn Roberts, to replace him.

Kast said he believed the Division of Elections had plenty of time to get ready for Election Day under new leadership.

end................

Not good people. Not good at all. Suggests a pending electorial disaster. I wonder if this person is ready to go public or go hide.

Kast Resignation Prompts New Concerns on Florida Voting Purge, Fall Election

2004-06-08T04:50:00.000-07:00

For Immediate Release: 6/7/2004

Tallahassee, Florida – In the wake of the resignation of the Florida state director of Elections, Ed Kast, People For the American Way Foundation (PFAWF) called for renewed efforts to restore voters wrongly purged from the voting rolls in 1999 and 2000, and called on Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood to delay implementation of a new purge list for the 2004 elections.

“When the key election official for the state resigns with just five months to go, it’s a sign of serious disarray and instability,” said Sharon Lettman, PFAWF’s state director for the Election Protection voter education and advocacy program. “Just when county supervisors are looking for clear leadership, here comes another curve ball. We call on the Secretary of State to withdraw her demand for immediate implementation of the new voter purge list, and to make the restoration of voters’ rights the state’s highest priority.”

condt........

This is a very bad sign. This person knows enough to make sure he is far away from this oncomming clamity (The 04 Reselection).

CNN Suing Florida to Obtain 2004 Voter Purge List

2004-05-29T23:45:00.000-07:00

search for Florida...

5/28/2004

WOODRUFF: In Florida, county election boards are reviewing a list of state felons to determine if they will be properly denied the right to vote in November. Well, today, CNN sued the state for a copy of the list claiming the information should be made public, four years after Florida was at the center of a disputed presidential election. CNN and the public were invited to view the documents and state election headquarters in Tallahassee, but were prevented from making copies or from even taking notes. Civil rights advocates charge that in 2000, thousands of eligible voters were prevented from casting ballots because they were improperly listed as felons.

Thanks to gulfcoastliberal a member over at DemocraticUnderground.com
post link

end..................

Interesting indeed - I will stay on this to see if CNN gets anywhere.

Florida continues to be the hot bed of this kinda crap. Jeb Bush has so massively corrupted Florida politics to support his brother. This man needs to be tried, convicted and sent to prison. Real Prison!

Absentee ballot law is a joke that isn't funny

2004-05-29T13:49:00.000-07:00

Jim DeFede/Miami Herald

``Every vote should count.''

-- Jeb Bush, upon signing into law a measure doing away with witness signatures for absentee ballots

Our governor -- what a kidder!

If we counted every vote in Florida, Jeb's brother would be spending all of his time -- and not just some of his time -- falling off his bicycle on his Texas ranch.

The only thing the bill Jeb signed Tuesday guarantees, is that Florida's elections will continue to be a joke. By taking away the witness requirement, the governor and the Legislature not only made it easier for corruption to take place -- which in itself is a fairly amazing feat -- but they have also made it more difficult to catch.

The folks in Tallahassee, at the urging of elections supervisors across the state, claim the witness requirement was too burdensome on some people and that 2,000 absentee ballots had to be discarded this year during the presidential primary because they didn't have the required signature.

You don't change the rules just because a few people can't follow them. You work on making the rules better understood. After all, how hard is it to get someone to witness a ballot? Anyone can do it. A family member. A friend. A neighbor. The mailman. Anyone.

CAUSE FOR SHAME

The election supervisors in this state should be ashamed of themselves. It is becoming increasingly clear they are not interested in operating fair elections as much as they are interested in running quick and easy elections.

''Doing it easy is not necessarily doing it well,'' says state Rep. Dan Gelber, a Miami Beach Democrat who spoke out against the no-signature requirement. ``A smooth election is important, but it is more important it be done right and honestly.''

Lida Rodriguez-Taseff, an attorney with the Election Reform Coalition, agrees.

''I don't think the people who run our elections think of themselves as being responsible for protecting the integrity of the system,'' she said. ``For them it is just about increasing turnout and counting votes with as little hassle as possible.''

The problem with doing away with the witness signature should be obvious to anyone who has lived in Miami. Absentee ballot fraud has long been a problem in South Florida, with candidates often buying ballots, or worse, stealing them from unsuspecting people in nursing homes and condominiums. A city of Miami election in 1997 was overturned after such fraud.

''If you have the same witness sign 100 or 200 ballots, it at least makes you suspicious that there might have been coercion or fraud and it gives you a place to start investigating,'' says Rodriguez-Taseff. ``Now without the witness signatures, there is no paper trail to follow.''

SUSPICIOUS INTENT

She believes that some of the politicians who voted to do away with the witness requirement, did so with the worst of intentions.

''The only logical reason to get rid of the one and only safeguard for absentee ballots is that there are politicians in this state who are interested in manipulating elections,'' she charges. ``Now some people are saying it is a Republican plot to try and steal the presidential election.

''I don't believe that. I don't believe it's a Republican plot,'' she continues. ``I think there are politicians in both parties who want to try and control the outcome of their own elections and this will help them do that. Rather than allow the will of the voters to be heard, this is a means they can disenfranchise voters and stay in office.''

Rodriguez-Taseff's assessment may be scary, but I'm afraid she's right. There are politicians who every election live and die by absentee ballots. Some work the system honestly, others don't. In the past, when absentee ballot fraud has been caught, it was the witnesses who often went to jail, who in turn could point a finger at the politician. Now that link is gone.

Crooked politicians and lazy election supervisors can breathe a little easier today.

As for the rest of us, well, at least our governor has a sense of humor.

end.........................

Fucking Jeb Bush - What a fucking criminal asshole.

Florida - Secretary of state tries to calm voters

2004-05-28T11:44:00.000-07:00

Secretary of state tries to calm voters

Secretary of State Glenda Hood hopes for a scandal-free election in November, even as she acknowledges a swirl of questions about the state's new voting machines.

- herald.com - BY LESLEY CLARK lclark@herald.com

Amid controversy over touch-screen voting machines and a purge of felons from the voting rolls, Secretary of State Glenda Hood sought on Thursday to reassure anxious voters that 2004 won't be a rehash of the 2000 presidential debacle.

Hood, addressing the League of Women Voters of Miami-Dade County, said she has ''great confidence'' that the state's 67 elections supervisors are ready for the November election -- and the scrutiny that will accompany it.

''I want the attention to be on Florida, but I always want it to be in a positive way,'' she said.

But Hood acknowledged her office is investigating a voting machine glitch in Miami-Dade County, which she said was not properly reported to the state.

A spokesman for Miami-Dade Elections Supervisor Constance Kaplan noted it was the county that detected the problem and said that Kaplan had sought to balance the need to report potential problems against unnecessarily alarming the public.

The glitch involves the auditing system of the iVotronic touch-screen machines Miami-Dade and Broward installed after the mishaps that plagued the 2000 presidential election.

condt.....................

Florida again ughhh..

New Questions Arise About Touch-Screen Voting Machines

2004-05-27T16:42:00.000-07:00

New York Lawyer
May 27, 2004

By Matthew Haggman
Miami Daily Business Review

For the second time in two weeks, an internal memo from a Miami-Dade County election official in Florida has exposed a new round of auditing flaws that have plagued the iVotronic touch-screen voting machines used in Miami-Dade and Broward counties.

The memo also indicates that the problem had been brought to the attention of Miami-Dade Supervisor of Elections Constance A. Kaplan two months earlier than she had said she first had learned of it. Its disclosure has prompted charges that Kaplan violated state open records laws by failing to disclose the memo sooner.

The latest memo, dated Oct. 10, 2003, and addressed to Kaplan, said a review of the Oct. 7, 2003, mayoral and City Council primary election in Homestead, Fla., found that the iVotronic system's audit log failed to account for 162 ballots cast.

All of the votes, however, were accurately tabulated, according to the machines' manufacturer, Elections Systems & Software of Omaha, Neb.

According to the latest memo, the system's audit log did not recognize five of the touch-screen machines used in the Homestead election.

condt........................

Solano County ends e-voting contract with Diebold

2004-05-27T16:38:00.000-07:00

USAToday.com - Posted 5/27/2004 12:41 AM

FAIRFIELD, Calif. (AP) — Nearly a month after touch-screen voting machines were banned in four counties, Solano County supervisors voted to terminate a contract with Diebold Election Systems.
Last month, Secretary of State Kevin Shelley banned Diebold e-voting machines in Solano, San Diego, San Joaquin and Kern counties in the November election because he said a lack of a paper trail made them unreliable.

Ten other counties that use older electronic voting equipment must meet nearly two dozen conditions in order to use their touch screen machines this year.

Diebold, based in North Canton, Ohio, had offered to pay for an optical-scan system for November's election as a temporary backup if Solano County would continue its $4.1 million contract to use the e-voting machines in the future.

"They wanted to mend the contract," said Supervisor John Silva. "But my feeling was enough is enough."

condt.............

Enough is Enough indeed!!

2004-05-12T09:02:00.000-07:00

San Bernardino County to defy state order on e-voting

(05-12) 05:29 PDT SAN BERNARDINO, Calif. (AP)

Election officials in San Bernardino County say they will defy a ban on electronic voting ordered by Secretary of State Kevin Shelley in November's presidential election.

County Supervisor Dennis Hansberger said Tuesday that Shelley had previously encouraged counties to move toward electronic voting and was rash to change paths after many counties had invested in the new technology.

"If you really disagree with us, you tell us to stop," Hansberger said. "But have the court tell us that, because we were acting on your prior authorization."

The move comes as other counties joined a federal lawsuit filed by Riverside County that challenges the ban on touch-screen voting machines.

Doug Stone, a spokesman for Shelley, said the secretary of state intended to work with San Bernardino County officials to help them meet his directives. Under state law, all election equipment must be approved by the secretary of state, he said.

Shelley issued the order late last month after problems at polling stations in the March 2 election.

In Orange County, about 2,000 voters cast ballots in the wrong races after being given the wrong computer access codes. In San Diego County, an equipment malfunction prevented more than half the polling places from opening on time. And in San Bernardino County, a vote tally was delayed for three hours because election staffers improperly entered data into their main computer.

condt ............................

2004-05-12T09:01:00.000-07:00

HOW TO BEAT A FIXED ELECTION
Ernest Partridge, Co-Editor
The Crisis Papers
May 11, 2004

It's an old story: Satan picks up the phone and calls St. Peter to challenge Heaven to a baseball game.

"Of course, we'll play," says Peter. "But have you forgotten? We have all the great baseball players."

"That may be so," replied Satan, "but we have all the umpires!"

John Kerry and his Democratic party face a similar problem: They may have the votes, but the other side has the machines that record and count the votes. How can the Democrats win?

A win over the Bushevik regime is not impossible, but it will be difficult and it will require considerable persistence and initiative.

Here are a few suggestions. No doubt, many who read this article will have still better ideas. Send them to us, (crisispapers@comcast.net) and we may follow this up with a compendium of the best of those proposals.

condt .................

Get over there and read the above article!

Here is an excellent post over at SmirkingChimp by upu8:

VNS' sudden, inexplicable cessation of exit polling on election day showed me that not only was "the fix in", but that the Repugs were no longer afraid to flaunt that fix. This obvious and appalling elimination of the last remaining check on voting accuracy should have been cause for massive outrage by the American electorate. Instead--nothing happened at all and most Americans still don't even know about this event. Our democracy was already on 'life support' after the machinations of Coup 2000, but those of 2002 sounded the horrifying drone of 'flatline'. If an election can be stolen and the evidence of that theft is itself stolen with no repercussions, it may well be over for America as a democratic republic.

The problem of exit polling is that the Repugs have the upper hand and they will not accept ANY exit polling as valid, no matter who does it or how extensive and expertly it is done. This is obviously a partisan issue with them since they have systematically blocked all efforts to institute verifiable paper trails, so they will ignore, dismiss and deride any exit polling as well.

I'm afraid that only a supermajority that is impossible to scam will suffice in the 2004 election. This is going to be like winning against the homecoming team with the Devil's refs mentioned in the article giving the home team all the calls.

end ---------------------------------------

2004-05-03T21:09:00.000-07:00

Salon.com Technology | E-voting oversight overwhelms U.S. agency

SALON - - - - - - - - - - - - - By Rachel Konrad

May 3, 2004 | SAN JOSE, Calif. -- As alarm mounts over the integrity of the ATM-like voting machines 50 million Americans will use in the November election, a new federal agency has begun scrutinizing how to safeguard electronic polling from fraud, hackers and faulty software.

But the tiny U.S. Election Assistance Commission says it is so woefully underfunded that it can't be expected to forestall widespread voting machine problems, which would cast doubt on the election's integrity.

The commission -- which on Wednesday conducts the first federal hearing on the security and reliability of electronic voting -- laments its predicament in a new report.

"We've found some deeply troubling concerns, and the country wants to know the solution," said DeForest B. Soaries, Jr., a Republican and former New Jersey secretary of state named by President Bush in December to lead the agency.

The Washington, D.C. hearing will focus on the security risks of touchscreen machines, which computer scientists say cannot be trusted because they do not produce paper records, making proper recounts impossible. Despite reassurances from the machines' makers, at least 20 states are considering legislation to require a paper trail.

After hearing from academics, elections officials and voting equipment company executives, the Soaries commission will issue recommendations -- for example, that poll workers should keep a stack of paper ballots handy in case machines fail to start. Machines in more than half the precincts in California's San Diego County malfunctioned during the March 2 presidential primary, and a lack of paper ballots may have disenfranchised hundreds of voters.

Created nearly a year after a congressional deadline, the Soaries-led agency took over the Federal Elections Commission's job of setting standards for ensuring the voting process is sound.

But the EAC lacks the authority to enforce any such standards and the agency's first annual report, released Friday, is apt to disappoint anyone who had high expectations.

Created under the 2002 Help America Vote Act that began funneling $3.9 billion to states to upgrade voting systems after Florida's hanging chad debacle, the agency's two Republican and two Democratic commissioners weren't appointed until December. Their first public meeting was in March. A bare-bones Web site only went live on Friday.

With only $1.2 million of its $10 million budget appropriated, the commission has so far been able to hire seven full-time staffers, borrowing some part-timers from other federal agencies.

The lack of funding has forced the EAC to abandon or delay much of its intended mission. For example, it won't be able to develop a national system for testing voting machines, according to the report.

Soaries intends to use his bully pulpit as chairman to highlight problems to state and local elections officials. But he said in a telephone interview that the EAC will need $2 million more this year and its full $10 million in 2005 to tackle its mission of restoring public faith in electronic voting.

"If you look at the evolution of voting in America, only in last four months has there been a federal agency whose exclusive focus is to deal with voting. It's the foundation of our democratic structure on one hand, but on the other we've really left it to the states to manage completely," Soaries said.

Most states have relied on guidance from the National Association of State Election Directors, a volunteer organization of retired and active election officials around the country. NASED, in turn, has certified three little-known testing companies to verify the integrity of every machine and every line of code in e-voting equipment nationwide, and it's up to elections officials in each state to get the equipment tested.

NASED plans to transfer its certification authority to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which is supposed to update the decade-old standards the labs use to make sure voting equipment is secure and reliable.

But that also is on hold because NIST "did not receive funding to support the work," the commission report says.

"I wish the EAC luck, but oversight of these systems is illusory," said Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation. "As long as federal voting system standards are voluntary, voters across the country will not have the peace of mind they need to feel confident in their voting systems."

Currently certified by NASED to test all voting hardware for U.S. elections is a Huntsville, Ala.-based division of Wyle Laboratories Inc. All software is tested by two other entities -- a Huntsville, Ala., lab operated by Greenwood Village, Colo.-based Ciber Inc., and Denver-based SysTest Labs LLC.

The labs may take a year or more to test voting equipment -- a bottleneck that may tempt manufacturers to install uncertified software in voting machines, Soaries said. "The minute I found out about this problem I started talking about it."

Shawn Southworth, who directs Ciber's voting software testing practice, said more labs would only add more confusion.

"You'd have a lot of different companies interpreting standards their own ways," he said. "It takes years to understand the election process and how the software is supposed to function."

The hearing Wednesday could turn contentious.

Executives from Diebold Inc., Hart Intercivic Inc., Election Systems & Software Inc., and Sequoia Voting Systems Inc. will speak, along with one of their loudest critics -- Avi Rubin, a Johns Hopkins computer expert who discovered numerous weaknesses in a version of Diebold's voting software.

Also invited is California's top elections official, Kevin Shelley. On Friday, Shelley banned a Diebold model touchscreen machine that was to be used in four counties and called for a criminal investigation. Shelley alleged that Diebold's use of uncertified software in the state's March 2 primary amounted to "reprehensible" fraud.

Diebold responded that it's confident in its systems and will work with elections officials nationwide to run a smooth election this fall.

end -----------------------------------

This is the entiore article...sue me

2004-04-30T15:47:00.000-07:00

Calif. secretary of state pulls plug on some electronic voting

SignOnSanDiego.com > News > Politics --

By Jim Wasserman
ASSOCIATED PRESS
2:21 p.m. April 30, 2004

SACRAMENTO – Secretary of State Kevin Shelley banned touch screen voting Friday in four California counties in the November election, saying the lack of a paper trail makes them unreliable and he threatened to block computerized voting in 10 other counties.

Shelley cited concerns about the security and reliability of new computerized voting machines manufactured by Texas-based Diebold Election systems, many of them used for the first time in the March election.

"We are acting boldly and responsibly to improve the system in time for November," Shelley said.

The decision means as many as 2 million voters in San Diego, Solano, San Joaquin and Kern counties will see paper ballots in November, marking their choices in ovals read by optical scanners.

It's also a setback for a national leader in electronic voting machine technology as counties gear up to spend billions of dollars to modernize the way Americans vote.

The action will idle 10,200 Diebold AccuVote-TSx machines in San Diego County, 1,626 machines in Kern County, 1,350 in San Joaquin County and about 1,100 in Solano County.

condt -------------------------------------------

CA takes the lead!

2004-04-30T13:42:00.000-07:00

Join truemajority.org's "The Computer Ate My Vote" campaign at www.truemajority.org.

Join and get involved at VerifiedVitong.org!

Head over to BlackBoxVoting.com and get involved, buy the book... do whatever you can!

end -------------------------------------

2004-04-30T13:38:00.000-07:00

The Republicans will probably manipulate the Vote in Florida as they did in 2000
============================================================

---QUOTED---

One million votes will disappear in a puff of very black smoke. And when the smoke clears, the Bush clan will be warming their political careers in the light of the ballot bonfire. HAVA nice day.

---END QUOTE---

Vanishing Votes by Gregory Palast

n October 29, 2002, George W. Bush signed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). Hidden behind its apple-pie-and-motherhood name lies a nasty civil rights time bomb.

First, the purges. In the months leading up to the November 2000 presidential election, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, in coordination with Governor Jeb Bush, ordered local election supervisors to purge 57,700 voters from the registries, supposedly ex-cons not allowed to vote in Florida. At least 90.2 percent of those on this "scrub" list, targeted to lose their civil rights, are innocent. Notably, more than half--about 54 percent--are black or Hispanic. You can argue all night about the number ultimately purged, but there's no argument that this electoral racial pogrom ordered by Jeb Bush's operatives gave the White House to his older brother. HAVA not only blesses such purges, it requires all fifty states to implement a similar search-and-destroy mission against vulnerable voters. Specifically, every state must, by the 2004 election, imitate Florida's system of computerizing voter files. The law then empowers fifty secretaries of state--fifty Katherine Harrises--to purge these lists of "suspect" voters.

The purge is back, big time. Following the disclosure in December 2000 of the black voter purge in Britain's Observer newspaper, NAACP lawyers sued the state. The civil rights group won a written promise from Governor Jeb and from Harris's successor to return wrongly scrubbed citizens to the voter rolls. According to records given to the courts by ChoicePoint, the company that generated the computerized lists, the number of Floridians who were questionably tagged totals 91,000. Willie Steen is one of them. Recently, I caught up with Steen outside his office at a Tampa hospital. Steen's case was easy. You can't work in a hospital if you have a criminal record. (My copy of Harris's hit list includes an ex-con named O'Steen, close enough to cost Willie Steen his vote.) The NAACP held up Steen's case to the court as a prime example of the voter purge evil.

The state admitted Steen's innocence. But a year after the NAACP won his case, Steen still couldn't register. Why was he still under suspicion? What do we know about this "potential felon," as Jeb called him? Steen, unlike our President, honorably served four years in the US military. There is, admittedly, a suspect mark on his record: Steen remains an African-American.

condt......................................

I feel like Casandra people..

We are screwed. Pardon my pessimissim. I don't have the time to do detailed research and since VerifiedVoting.org and BlackBoxVoting.com already have, I just watch for news and opinion peices and post them here.

The bottom line is it's too late for 04. The Fix is in and no matter what happens the GOP will hold the White House and both houses of COngress on November.

F&^*!#g brilliant move on their part from a purely tactical point of view.

p.s. there's always 06 right..

2004-04-29T19:28:00.000-07:00

Two Voting Companies & Two Brothers Will Count 80% of U.S. Election -
Using BOTH Scanners & Touchscreens

by Lynn Landes 4/27/04

Voters can run, but they can't hide from these guys. Meet the Urosevich brothers, Bob and Todd. Their respective companies, Diebold and ES&S, will count (using BOTH computerized ballot scanners and touchscreen machines) about 80% of all votes cast in the upcoming U.S. presidential election.

Both ES&S and Diebold have been caught installing uncertified software in their machines. Although there is no known certification process that will protect against vote rigging or technical failure, it is a requirement of most, if not all, states.

And, according to author Bev Harris in her book, Black Box Voting, "...one of the founders of the original ES&S (software) system, Bob Urosevich, also oversaw development of the original software now used by Diebold Election Systems."

Talk about putting all our eggs in one very bogus, but brotherly basket.

Even if states or counties hire their own technicians to re-program Diebold or ES&S software (or software from other companies), experts say that permanently installed software, called firmware, still resides inside of both electronic scanners and touchscreen machines and is capable of manipulating votes. For those who are unfamiliar with the term 'firmware', here's a definition by BandwidthMarket.com: "Software that is embedded in a hardware device that allows reading and executing the software, but does not allow modification, e.g., writing or deleting data by an end user."

The ability to rig an election is well within easy reach of voting machine companies. And it does not matter if the machines are scanners or touchscreens, or are networked or hooked up to modems.

So, for those states and counties who think they're dodging the bullet by not buying (or not using) the highly insecure and error-prone touchscreen voting machines (which will process 28.9% of all votes this year), a huge threat still remains - computerized ballot scanners. They will count 57.6% of all votes cast, including absentee ballots.

And don't count on recounts to save the day. In most states, recounts of paper ballots only occur if election results are close. The message to those who want to rig elections is, "rig them by a lot." In some states, like California, spot checks are conducted. But, that will not be an effective way to discover or deter vote fraud or technical failure, particularly in a national election where one vote per machine will probably be enough to swing a race.

Although touchscreens have been getting the bulk of negative publicity lately, electronic ballot scanners have a long and sordid past, as well. Electronic scanners were first introduced into U.S. elections in 1964, and ever since then a steady stream of reports of technical irregularities have caught the attention of scientists, journalists, and activists, most notably the 1988 report, Accuracy, Integrity, and Security in Computerized Vote-Tallying, by Roy G. Saltman, and the 1992 book, Votescam: The Stealing of America, by Jim and Ken Collier.

Even though there are several foreign and domestic corporations involved in the U.S. vote counting business, ES&S and Diebold clearly dominate the field. ES&S claims that they have tabulated "56% of the U.S. national vote for the past four presidential elections", while a Diebold spokesperson told this writer that the company processed about 35% of U.S. electronic vote count in 2002.

But, is there any real difference between Diebold and ES&S? Perhaps not.

Bob Urosevich is currently president of Diebold. Todd is vice president of ES&S. In 1999, American Information Systems (AIS), purchased Business Records Corporation (BRC) to become ES&S. AIS (1980) was formerly Data Mark (1979). Both AIS and Data Mark were founded by the brothers Urosevich. In 2002 Diebold acquired Global Election Systems. Global was founded 1991, which itself acquired the AccuVote system the same year. Bob Urosevich is a past president of Global.

Of course, most interested observers don't believe that the Urosevich brothers are the real brains behind their respective operations. For information on their financial backers, check out Chapter 8 of Bev's book - blackboxvoting.com, and my webpage - ecotalk.org/VotingMachineCompanies.htm.

Diebold and ES&S have been involved in countless election irregularities over the years, involving both ballot scanners and touchscreens. But, it seems that they've always managed to finesse a happy ending for themselves. Now, it appears that at least Diebold might be in real trouble.

On April 22, 2004, Jim Wasserman of the Associated Press (AP) reported, "By an 8-0 vote, the state's (California) Voting Systems and Procedures Panel recommended that (Secretary of State) Shelley cease the use of the machines, saying that Texas-based Diebold has performed poorly in California and its machines malfunctioned in the state's March 2 primary election, turning away many voters in San Diego County...In addition to the ban, panel members recommended that a secretary of state's office report released Wednesday, detailing alleged failings of Diebold in California, be forwarded to the state attorney general's office to consider civil and criminal charges against the company."

Interestingly, no one in the U.S. federal government seems to be paying attention...as usual. There is no federal agency that has regulatory authority or oversight of the voting machine industry - not the Federal Election Commission (FEC), not the Department of Justice (DOJ), and not the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The FEC doesn't even have a complete list of all the companies that count votes in U.S. elections.

Once again we are witness to an 'eyes closed, hands off' approach to protecting America. The 2004 election rests in the private hands of the Urosevich brothers, who are financed by the far-out right wing and top donors to the Republican Party. The Democrats are either sitting ducks or co-conspirators. I don't know which.

My mantra remains - Vote Paper Ballots, Ditch the Machines.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Lynn Landes is one of the nation's leading journalists on voting technology and democracy issues. Readers can find her articles at EcoTalk.org. Lynn is a former news reporter for DUTV and commentator for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). Contact info: lynnlandes@earthlink.net / (215) 629-3553

end----------

this is truly depressing..

2004-04-28T19:33:00.000-07:00

Calif. panel wants paper-ballot backups

Salon: By Jim Wasserman
April 28, 2004 | SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) --

Ten counties with touch-screen voting machines can use them in November -- but only if alternative paper ballots are offered in each precinct, a state advisory committee recommended Wednesday.

The committee considered banning touch-screen voting in the 10 counties, but voted 7-0 for a compromise that sets up numerous conditions.

The vote also bans other counties in California from introducing new ATM-like electronic voting equipment in November, unless the machines include a verified paper trail of votes cast.

Secretary of State Kevin Shelley has the final say on the panel's recommendation; he's expected to decide by Friday.

The committee's action follows its recommendation last week to ban the use of 15,000 Diebold Elections Systems voting machines in four counties, citing security concerns, malfunctions in the March election and Diebold's last-minute changes to its machines just before the election.

Shelley will also rule on that recommendation by Friday.

The 14 counties that use touch-screen machines represent 6.5 million voters, 43 percent of the state's total.

The panel acted after more than two days of testimony that largely challenged the security and accuracy of paperless voting.

But advocates for the disabled defended touch-screen voting for allowing them to vote privately, and many of the state's registrars of voters argued against a ban.

Registrars say the machines are popular with voters and produced accurate vote counts. They argue a ban forcing the counties back to paper ballots would cost up to $30 million.

If Shelley decides against a blanket statewide ban, the Legislature is also considering a pair of bills that would ban touch-screen voting this November.

...........................................

Go CA!

2004-04-28T19:32:00.000-07:00

Calif. panel wants paper-ballot backups

Salon: By Jim Wasserman

2004-04-28T08:48:00.000-07:00

From today's Talking Points Memo by - Joshua Micah Marshall 4/28/2004

"I've been giving this matter a lot of thought recently. And if John Kerry is going to win this election, he will have to make it, in large measure, an election about accountability.

The president seldom any more makes a positive argument for how things have been handled up till this point. He doesn't admit mistakes, certainly. But what he does and doesn't say is telling.

Most of the president's speeches amount to a) My heart was in the right place and, b) The past isn't what's important. Where we go from here is what's important.

(Look at his ads and you'll see he's making little attempt to make a positive case for himself.)

His partisans chime in with something similar, quickly dismissing any discussion of what's happened up until this point -- all the many mistakes made over expert advice counseling against -- and arguing, militantly, that all the matters now is who has a better plan on where to go from here, etc.

This is certainly true, to an extent. But there's that double matter of accountability. Accountability first, just as a matter of principle. But at some point you have to ask whether the crew that has gotten so much wrong -- making almost every mistake makable in Iraq -- is really the team to get things back on track, to walk the situation back from the precipice. As in so much else in life, we predict the future based on past performance. And if you look at what's happened over the last eighteen months, I think that's a very hard argument for the administration to confront. "

condt......................................

On March 25th I wrote my friend Dave Johnson who runs Seetheforest with exactly the same message. He was planning on attending a Kerry function that night in the Bay Area. I suggested he speak to Kerry about this (how naive of me).

I raise the notion that this is in fact the Administration of Zero Accountability.

You can go down a long list of issues and see a solid pattern that smacks of an administration that does not hold itself accountable to the American people.

2004-04-27T11:48:00.000-07:00

CNN.com - E-voting developers on the defensive - Apr 26, 2004

Computer scientists, lawmakers worried about glitches
Tuesday, April 27, 2004 Posted: 9:24 AM EDT (1324 GMT)

SAN JOSE, California (AP) -- A growing number of federal and state legislators are expressing doubts about the integrity of the ATM-like electronic voting machines that at least 50 million Americans will use to cast their ballots in November.

Computer scientists have long criticized the so-called touchscreen machines as not being much more reliable than home computers, which can crash, malfunction and fall prey to hackers and viruses.

Now, a series of failures in primaries across the nation has shaken confidence in the technology installed at thousands of precincts. Despite reassurances from the machines' makers, at least 20 states have introduced legislation requiring a paper record of every vote cast.

On Thursday, a key California panel unanimously recommended banning a popular Diebold Inc. paperless touchscreen model -- a move that could force North Canton, Ohio-based Diebold and other manufacturers to overhaul their business practices nationwide. Secretary of State Kevin Shelley, who said Diebold glitches "jeopardized the outcome" of the March 2 primary, has until April 30 to decide whether to decertify Diebold and possibly other touchscreen terminals in California.

The head of a newly created federal agency charged with overseeing electronic voting called Diebold's problems "deeply troubling." The bipartisan U.S. Election Assistance Commission, formed in January to develop technical standards for electronic voting, will conduct a May 5 public hearing in Washington, D.C.

"We wanted to jump into this issue in time to impact November's election," said agency director DeForest B. Soaries, Jr. "There are so many troubling issues that have emerged surrounding electronic voting and so much money has been spent since 2000 on converting to electronic voting systems that it requires our attention -- particularly because many states assume the computer is the solution."

Condt................................

This is good traction for the issue...CNN..nice.

2004-04-25T18:19:00.000-07:00

Diebold May Face Criminal Charges

WIRED

By Kim Zetter

08:55 AM Apr. 23, 2004 PT

SACRAMENTO, California –- After harshly chastising Diebold Election Systems for what it considered deceptive business practices, a California voting systems panel voted unanimously Thursday to recommend that the secretary of state decertify an electronic touch-screen voting machine manufactured by the company, making it likely that four California counties that recently purchased the machines will have to find other voting solutions for the November presidential election.

The panel also voted to send the findings of its recent Diebold investigation to the state's attorney general for possible criminal and civil charges against the firm for violating state election laws.

Following a contentious six-hour hearing during which the Voting Systems and Procedures Panel grilled Diebold president Bob Urosevich about his company's business practices, the panel voted to recommend decertifying the Diebold AccuVote-TSx machine, which was used for the first time in California during the March primary in Kern, San Joaquin, Solano and San Diego counties.

The decision was based partly on the fact that a peripheral device for the machine performed poorly in the March primary and partly on the fact that Diebold had marketed and sold the TSx to counties before it was certified by the state. The panel also said Diebold misled the state about issues pertaining to the federal certification of the system.

condt:
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Don't mess with California :)

2004-04-24T22:30:00.000-07:00

Black Box Voting Machines Banned

Post on South Knox Bubba

Electronic voting machines dealt blow

Sacramento -- A panel of top elections officials recommended Thursday that 15,000 electronic voting machines in four counties -- including Solano -- be banned in the November election because glitches in some devices turned voters away from the polls in the March primary election.

[..]
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Click on over and read...

2004-04-24T21:57:00.000-07:00

Kucinich Calls for Suspension of Electronic Voting
, 2004

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
APRIL 23, 2004
6:08 PM
CONTACT: Kucinich Campaign
Matt Harris, 216.403.3980, press@kucinich.us
Terre Lundy, 515.988.5534

Kucinich Calls for Suspension of Electronic Voting

CLEVELAND - April 23 - Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich, who has been sounding warning alarms regarding electronic voting systems since he began his campaign last year, today called on federal, state and local election officials “to suspend immediately the implementation of any voting systems that do not provide a 100 percent reliable paper-trail back-up to corroborate results.”

A decision yesterday by the eight-member California Voting Systems and Procedures Panel that 15,000 electronic voting machines in four counties be banned in the November election because of “glitches” in the March primary election “is more than enough evidence that these systems could undermine the integrity and affect the results of November’s general election,” Kucinich said.

Especially in terms of the Presidential election, Kucinich said, “we cannot entrust the future of our country to technologies that are flawed, suspect, and proven to have failed, especially when those technologies have been developed by companies that have their own political agendas.”

Diebold Election Systems, which came under the harshest criticism from the California elections panel, is headed by Chief Executive Officer Walden O'Dell, who last year became active in the re-election effort of President Bush, even attending a strategy meeting with wealthy Bush benefactors at the President's private ranch in Texas. Soon after, O’Dell wrote a fundraising letter where he said he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."

Although Diebold is the most embattled voting equipment company, Newsday reported that “paperless systems made by Sequoia Voting Systems Inc. and other competitors also expose elections to malicious attack, software glitches and mechanical errors that could delete or alter millions of ballots.” The story went on to report a variety of other problems in Indiana, Maryland, and other states. According to Newsday, “Because votes that only exist in electronic form can be altered or deleted, Oregon, New Hampshire and Illinois require paper ballots; and California, Missouri and Nevada will require paper backups on touchscreen terminals by 2006.” The newspaper also reported that “Secretaries of state in Washington and West Virginia are calling for paper trails, while Ohio is reconsidering the switch to new machines.”

Kucinich said he will take his challenges to the newly created federal agency charged with overseeing electronic voting, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, established in January, which will conduct a May 5 public hearing in Washington, D.C. on May 5.

“The technological problems are real,” Kucinich said, “and the potential for further problems, mischief, and outright fraud is equally real, and far more dangerous.”

(Extensive information on electronic voting systems is available at
http://www.kucinich.us/e-voting/intro.php
For information about the National campaign: http://www.kucinich.us
For Congressman Kucinich's Schedule: http://www.kucinich.us/schedule.htm
To schedule an interview with Kucinich or spokesperson: interviews@kucinich.us

http://www.commondreams.org/news2004/0423-11.htm

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This is still positive momentum.

2004-04-23T00:27:00.000-07:00

Yahoo! News - Maryland Group Sues to Upgrade E-Voting Machines: "Maryland Group Sues to Upgrade E-Voting Machines"

Wed Apr 21, 6:36 PM ET Add Politics - Reuters to My Yahoo!
By Andy Sullivan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A Maryland voters' group said on Wednesday it planned to force the state to add printers to electronic voting machines to ensure they can be double-checked after a disputed election, such as the 2000 presidential vote.

The group said it would file a lawsuit on Thursday to force state officials to stop using the machines until they fix software to keep out hackers and add printers to produce paper receipts.

"These machines are vulnerable to human error, computer malfunction and fraud," said Linda Schade, co-founder of the Campaign for Verifiable Voting in Maryland. "We are talking about the system, of course, by which we will elect the next president of the United States."

Maryland officials should stop using their machines until manufacturer Diebold Inc. . fixes programming to make the software more secure and adds a printer to each machine, said Ryan Phair, an attorney with Kirkland & Ellis who will handle the lawsuit.

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Receipts are fine but a audit trail which provides a way to do a recount is the main requirement AFTER taking the software out of the hands of the Diebold types.

2004-04-20T23:55:00.000-07:00

Stealing an Election

Bruce Schneier offers a back-of-the-envelope estimate of what we're up against.

In 2002, all the Congressional candidates together raised over $500M. As a result, one can conservatively conclude that affecting the balance of power in the House of Representatives is worth at least $100M to the party who would otherwise be losing. So when designing the security behind the software, one must assume an attacker with a $100M budget.

Conclusion: The risks to electronic voting machine software are even greater than first appears.

.....................................................................

I ripped this post from SeeTheForest. But hey I bought the guy a nice sushi dinner last night so he won't mind.

2004-03-30T21:11:00.000-08:00

Wired News: How E-Voting Threatens Democracy

By Kim Zetter

In January 2003, voting activist Bev Harris was holed up in the basement of her three-story house in Renton, Washington, searching the Internet for an electronic voting machine manual, when she made a startling discovery.

Clicking on a link for a file transfer protocol site belonging to voting machine maker Diebold Election Systems, Harris found about 40,000 unprotected computer files. They included source code for Diebold's AccuVote touch-screen voting machine, program files for its Global Election Management System tabulation software, a Texas voter-registration list with voters' names and addresses, and what appeared to be live vote data from 57 precincts in a 2002 California primary election.

"There was a lot of stuff that shouldn't have been there," Harris said.

The California file was time-stamped 3:31 p.m. on Election Day, indicating that Diebold might have obtained the data during voting. But polling precincts aren't supposed to release votes until after polls close at 8 p.m. So Harris began to wonder if it were possible for the company to extract votes during an election and change them without anyone knowing.

A look at the Diebold tabulation program provided a possible answer.

Harris discovered that she could enter the vote database using Microsoft Access -- a standard program often bundled with Microsoft Office -- and change votes without leaving a trace. Diebold hadn't password-protected the file or secured the audit log, so anyone with access to the tabulation program during an election -- Diebold employees, election staff or even hackers if the county server were connected to a phone line -- could change votes and alter the log to erase the evidence.

Watch a parody of Diebold's e-voting machine.

"It was getting scarier and scarier," Harris said. "I was thinking we have an immense problem here that's much bigger than me."

Over the past year, doubts about the accuracy and integrity of e-voting equipment have been growing, thanks to Harris' discovery. Some election officials have called Harris, a 53-year-old mother of five and a self-employed publicist, a wacko, a conspiracy nut and even a threat to democracy for her role in raising the controversy. But day by day, other election officials, secretaries of state, legislators and voters have come to agree with her that something is seriously wrong with electronic voting systems and the companies that make them.

In 2002, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act, or HAVA, which allocated $3.9 billion in matching federal funds to help states upgrade to new e-voting systems. Touted as the answer to the hanging chads in Florida that marred the 2000 presidential election, e-voting machines have been lauded by their makers as faster, more accurate and easier to use than punch-card and lever machines. But election glitches involving the systems paint a different picture, depicting machines that sometimes fail to boot up, fail to record votes or even record them for the wrong candidates. Computer scientists say the machines are also easy to hack.

In addition to glitches, there are concerns about the people behind the machines. A few voting company employees have been implicated in bribery or kickback schemes involving election officials. And there are concerns about the partisan loyalties of voting executives -- Diebold's chief executive, for example, is a top fund-raiser for President Bush.

Condt --- Wired News: How E-Voting Threatens Democracy

A very detailed piece.

BG

2004-03-30T07:14:00.000-08:00

Diebold, Electronic Voting and the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy

Published on Wednesday, February 25, 2004 by the Free Press, Columbus, Ohiio by Bob Fitrakis

The Governor of Ohio, Bob Taft, and other prominent state officials, commute to their downtown Columbus offices on Broad Street. This is the so-called “Golden Finger,” the safe route through the majority black inner-city near east side. The Broad Street BP station, just east of downtown, is the place where affluent suburbanites from Bexley can stop, gas up, get their coffee and New York Times. Those in need of cash visit BP’s Diebold manufactured CashSource+ ATM machine which provides a paper receipt of the transaction to all customers upon request.

Many of Taft’s and President George W. Bush’s major donors, like Diebold’s current CEO Walden “Wally” O’Dell, reside in Columbus’ northwest suburb Upper Arlington. O’Dell is on record stating that he is “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President” this year. On September 26, 2003, he hosted an Ohio Republican Party fundraiser for Bush’s re-election at his Cotswold Manor mansion. Tickets to the fundraiser cost $1000 per couple, but O’Dell’s fundraising letter urged those attending to “Donate or raise $10,000 for the Ohio Republican Party.”

According to the Columbus Dispatch: “Last year, O’Dell and his wife Patricia, campaigned for passage of two liquor options that made their portion of Tremont Road wet.

On November 5, Upper Arlington residents narrowly passed measures that allowed fundraising parties to offer more than beer, even though his 10,800-square-foot home is a residence, a permit is required because alcohol is included in the price of fundraising tickets. O’Dell is also allowed to serve “beer, wine and mixed drinks” at Sunday fundraisers.

O’Dell’s fund-raising letter followed on the heels of a visit to President Bush’s Crawford Texas ranch by “Pioneers and Rangers,” the designation for people who had raised $100,000 or more for Bush’s re-election.

If Ohio’s Republican Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell has his way, Diebold will receive a contract to supply touch screen electronic voting machines for much of the state. None of these Diebold machines will provide a paper receipt of the vote.

Diebold, located in North Canton, Ohio, does its primary business in ATM and ticket-vending machines. Critics of Diebold point out that virtually every other machine the company makes provides a paper trail to verify the machine’s calculations. Oddly, only the voting machines lack this essential function.

State Senator Teresa Fedor of Toledo introduced Senate Bill 167 late last year mandating that every voting machine in Ohio generate a “voter verified paper audit trail.” Secretary of State Blackwell has denounced any attempt to require a paper trail as an effort to “derail” election reform. Blackwell’s political career is an interesting one: he emerged as a black activist in Cincinnati supporting municipal charter reform, became an elected Democrat, then an Independent, and now is a prominent Republican with his eyes on the Governor’s mansion.

Voter fraud

A joint study by the California and Massachusetts Institutes of Technology following the 2000 election determined that between 1.5 and 2 million votes were not counted due to confusing paper ballots or faulty equipment. The federal government’s solution to the problem was to pass the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002.

One of the law’s stated goals was “Replacement of punch card and lever voting machines.” The new voting machines would be high-tech touch screen computers, but if there’s no paper trail, how do you know if there’s been a computer glitch? How can the results be trusted? And how do you recount to see if the actual votes match the computer’s tally?

Bev Harris, author of Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century, argues that without a paper trail, these machines are open to massive voter fraud. Diebold has already placed some 50,000 machines in 37 states and their track record is causing Harris, Johns Hopkins University professors and others great concern.

Johns Hopkins researchers at the Information Security Institute issued a report declaring that Diebold’s electronic voting software contained “stunning flaws.” The researchers concluded that vote totals could be altered at the voting machines and by remote access. Diebold vigorously refuted the Johns Hopkins report, claiming the researchers came to “a multitude of false conclusions.”

Perhaps to settle the issue, someone illegally hacked into the Diebold Election Systems website in March 2003 and stole internal documents from the company and posted them online. Diebold went to court to stop, according to court records, the “wholesale reproduction” of some 13,000 pages of company material.

The Associated Press reported in November 2003 that: “Computer programmers, ISPs and students at [at] least 20 universities, including the University of California, Berkeley, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology received cease and desist letters” from Diebold. A group of Swarthmore College students launched an “electronic civil disobedience” campaign to keep the hacked documents permanently posted on the Internet.

Harris writes that the hacked documents expose how the mainstream media reversed their call projecting Al Gore as winner of Florida after someone “subtracted 16,022 votes from Al Gore, and in still some undefined way, added 4000 erroneous votes to George W. Bush.” Hours later, the votes were returned. One memo from Lana Hires of Global Election Systems, now Diebold, reads: “I need some answers! Our department is being audited by the County. I have been waiting for someone to give me an explanation as to why Precinct 216 gave Al Gore a minus 16,022 [votes] when it was uploaded.” Another hacked internal memo, written by Talbot Iredale, Senior VP of Research and Development for Diebold Election Systems, documents “unauthorized” replacement votes in Volusia County.

Harris also uncovered a revealing 87-page CBS news report and noted, “According to CBS documents, the erroneous 20,000 votes in Volusia was directly responsible to calling the election for Bush.” The first person to call the election for Bush was Fox election analyst John Ellis, who had the advantage of conferring with his prominent cousins George W. Bush and Florida Governor Jeb Bush.

Incestuous relationships

Increasingly, investigative writers seeking an explanation have looked to Diebold’s history for clues. The electronic voting industry is dominated by only a few corporations – Diebold, Election Systems & Software (ES&S) and Sequoia. Diebold and ES&S combined count an estimated 80% of U.S. black box electronic votes.

In the early 1980s, brothers Bob and Todd Urosevich founded ES&S’s originator, Data Mark. The brothers Urosevich obtained financing from the far-Right Ahmanson family in 1984, which purchased a 68% ownership stake, according to the Omaha World Herald. After brothers William and Robert Ahmanson infused Data Mark with new capital, the name was changed to American Information Systems (AIS). California newspapers have long documented the Ahmanson family’s ties to right-wing evangelical Christian and Republican circles.

In 2001, the Los Angeles Times reported, “. . . primarily funded by evangelical Christians – particularly the wealthy Ahmanson family of Irvine – the [Discovery] institute’s $1-million annual program has produced 25 books, a stream of conferences and more than 100 fellowships for doctoral and postdoctoral research.” The chief philanthropists of the Discovery Institute, that pushes creationist science and education in California, are Howard and Roberta Ahmanson.

According to Group Watch, in the 1980s Howard F. Ahmanson, Jr. was a member of the highly secretive far-Right Council for National Policy, an organization that included Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, Major General John K. Singlaub and other Iran-Contra scandal notables, as well as former Klan members like Richard Shoff. Ahmanson, heir to a savings and loan fortune, is little reported on in the mainstream U.S. press. But, English papers like The Independent are a bit more forthcoming on Ahmanson’s politics.

“On the right, figures such as Richard Mellon Scaife and Howard Ahmanson have given hundreds of millions of dollars over several decades to political projects both high (setting up the Heritage Foundation think-tank, the driving engine of the Reagan presidency) and low (bankrolling investigations into President Clinton’s sexual indiscretions and the suicide of the White House insider Vincent Foster),” wrote The Independent last November.

The Sunday Mail described an individual as, “. . . a fundamentalist Christian more in the mould of U.S. multi-millionaire Howard Ahmanson, Jr., who uses his fortune to promote so-called traditional family values . . . by waving fortunes under their noses, Ahmanson has the ability to cajole candidates into backing his right-wing Christian agenda.

Ahmanson is also a chief contributor to the Chalcedon Institute that supports the Christian reconstruction movement. The movement’s philosophy advocates, among other things, “mandating the death penalty for homosexuals and drunkards.”

The Ahmanson family sold their shares in American Information Systems to the McCarthy Group and the World Herald Company, Inc. Republican Senator Chuck Hagel disclosed in public documents that he was the Chairman of American Information Systems and claimed between a $1 to 5 million investment in the McCarthy Group. In 1997, American Information Systems purchased Business Records Corp. (BRC), formerly Texas-based election company Cronus Industries, to become ES&S. One of the BRC owners was Carolyn Hunt of the right-wing Hunt oil family, which supplied much of the original money for the Council on National Policy.

In 1996, Hagel became the first elected Republican Nebraska senator in 24 years when he did surprisingly well in an election where the votes were verified by the company he served as chairman and maintained a financial investment. In both the 1996 and 2002 elections, Hagel’s ES&S counted an estimated 80% of his winning votes. Due to the contracting out of services, confidentiality agreements between the State of Nebraska and the company kept this matter out of the public eye. Hagel’s first election victory was described as a “stunning upset” by one Nebraska newspaper.

Hagel’s official biography states, “Prior to his election to the U.S. Senate, Hagel worked in the private sector as the President of McCarthy and Company, an investment banking firm based in Omaha, Nebraska and served as Chairman of the Board of American Information Systems.” During the first Bush presidency, Hagel served as Deputy Director and Chief Operating Officer of the 1990 Economic Summit of Industrialized Nations (G-7 Summit).

Bob Urosevich was the Programmer and CEO at AIS, before being replaced by Hagel. Bob now heads Diebold Election Systems and his brother Todd is a top executive at ES&S. Bob created Diebold’s original electronic voting machine software. Thus, the brothers Urosevich, originally funded by the far Right, figure in the counting of approximately 80% of electronic voting in the United States.

Like Ohio, the State of Maryland was disturbed by the potential for massive electronic voter fraud. The voters of that state were reassured when the state hired SAIC to monitor Diebold’s system. SAIC’s former CEO is Admiral Bill Owens. Owens served as a military aide to both Vice President Dick Cheney and former Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci, who now works with George H.W. Bush at the controversial Carlyle Group. Robert Gates, former CIA Director and close friend of the Bush family, also served on the SAIC Board.

Diebold’s track record

Wherever Diebold and ES&S go, irregularities and historic Republican upsets follow. Alastair Thompson, writing for scoop.co of New Zealand, explored whether or not the 2002 U.S. mid-term elections were “fixed by electronic voting machines supplied by Republican-affiliated companies.” The scoop investigation concluded that: “The state where the biggest upset occurred, Georgia, is also the state that ran its election with the most electronic voting machines.” Those machines were supplied by Diebold.

Wired News reported that “. . . a former worker in Diebold’s Georgia warehouse says the company installed patches on its machine before the state’s 2002 gubernatorial election that were never certified by independent testing authorities or cleared with Georgia election officials.” Questions were raised in Texas when three Republican candidates in Comal County each received exactly the same number of votes – 18,181.

Following the 2003 California election, an audit of the company revealed that Diebold Election Systems voting machines installed uncertified software in all 17 counties using its equipment.

Former CIA Station Chief John Stockwell writes that one of the favorite tactics of the CIA during the Reagan-Bush administration in the 1980s was to control countries by manipulating the election process. “CIA apologists leap up and say, ‘Well, most of these things are not so bloody.’ And that’s true. You’re giving politicians some money so he’ll throw his party in this direction or that one, or make false speeches on your behalf, or something like that. It may be non-violent, but it’s still illegal intervention in other country’s affairs, raising the question of whether or not we’re going to have a world in which laws, rules of behavior are respected,” Stockwell wrote. Documents illustrate that the Reagan and Bush administration supported computer manipulation in both Noriega’s rise to power in Panama and in Marcos’ attempt to retain power in the Philippines. Many of the Reagan administration’s staunchest supporters were members of the Council on National Policy.

The perfect solution

Ohio Senator Fedor continues to fight valiantly for Senate Bill 167 and the Holy Grail of the “voter verified paper audit trail.” Proponents of a paper trail were emboldened when Athan Gibbs, President and CEO of TruVote International, demonstrated a voting machine at a vendor’s fair in Columbus that provides two separate voting receipts.

The first paper receipt displays the voter’s touch screen selection under plexiglass that falls into a lockbox after the voter approves. Also, the TruVote system provides the voter with a receipt that includes a unique voter ID and pin number which can be used to call in to a voter audit internet connection to make sure the vote cast was actually counted.

Brooks Thomas, Coordinator of Elections in Tennessee, stated, “I’ve not seen anything that compares to the Gibbs’ TruVote validation system. . . .” The Assistant Secretary of State of Georgia, Terrel L. Slayton, Jr., claimed Gibbs had come up with the “perfect solution.”

Still, there remains opposition from Ohio Secretary of State Blackwell. His spokesperson Carlo LoParo recently pointed out that federal mandates under HAVA do not require a paper trail: “. . . if Congress changes the federal law to require it [a paper trail], we’ll certainly make that a requirement of our efforts.” LoParo went on to accuse advocates of a paper trail of attempting to “derail” voting reform.

U.S. Representative Rush Holt introduced HR 2239, The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2003, that would require electronic voting machines to produce a paper trail so that voters may verify that their screen touches match their actual vote. Election officials would also have a paper trail for recounts.

As Blackwell pressures the Ohio legislature to adopt electronic voting machines without a paper trail, Athan Gibbs wonders, “Why would you buy a voting machine from a company like Diebold which provides a paper trail for every single machine it makes except its voting machines? And then, when you ask it to verify its numbers, it hides behind ‘trade secrets.’”

Maybe the Diebold decision makes sense, if you believe, to paraphrase Henry Kissinger, that democracy is too important to leave up to the votes of the people.

Dr. Bob Fitrakis is Senior Editor of The Free Press , a political science professor, and author of numerous articles and books.

© 1970-2004 The Columbus Free Press

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If this article does not scare you, nothing will.

BG

2004-03-29T21:05:00.000-08:00

Vote Crime - The Mugging of America

Posted on Bartcop

Vote Crime - The Mugging of America
by Faun Otter

Did you know that the number of votes cast on touch screen machines in some precincts in the California primary last month exceeded the number of voters registered?

Move along, nothing to see here.

This ballot disaster was reported in the LA Times on March 9, 2004. As always, our do-nothing media have not bothered to investigate or report on it since that date.

"In 21 precincts where the problem was most acute, there were more ballots cast than registered voters."

The article includes a chart of the names of precincts, the number of registered voters, the number of votes cast and what percentage of turn out this represents. Here are just two typical precincts from amongst the many listed:

Kaiser Elementary 91 264 290%
Costa Mesa 681 60 9%

Shh, don’t tell anyone (although the Diebold and ES&S vote machine makers already know)
here is a recipe for using this type of "error" to commit an unprovable vote crime:

condt.................. (Link)

This is a must read piece...it's a letter from a reader of Bartcop but man is it a bute.

BG

2004-03-29T21:01:00.000-08:00

00-blank

2004-03-15T19:34:00.000-08:00

Suffrage Suffers in the Land of Rights

By Jamin Raskin - LAtimes.com - 3/15/2004

You have to admire President Bush's willingness to amend the Constitution over an issue of basic principles. But before we forever deny millions of Americans the chance to marry the persons they love, shouldn't we first pass an amendment guaranteeing all of us the right to vote and the right to have those votes counted?

You may think such a right already exists, but it doesn't. In fact, among 119 electoral democracies in the world, the United States is one of only 11 whose constitutions do not include the right to vote and to be represented. This embarrassing national secret reflects our origins as a slave republic in which votes were cast only by white male property owners over 21. Universal suffrage was never on the agenda in Philadelphia, and the founders left the tricky issue of voter qualifications to state legislatures. Only gradually was the electorate broadened in the years that followed, with anti-discrimination amendments that prevent disenfranchisement based on race (the 15th), gender (the 19th) and failure to pay a poll tax (the 24th).

But these incremental stabs at voting rights fall way short of international standards requiring universal suffrage. Florida 2000 was not a fluke but a vivid glimpse behind the scenes of a fragmented and politically compromised system that, according to a Caltech and MIT study, managed to lose the votes of more than 4 million Americans in that election.

Florida highlighted several things: We have no uniform ballot for national elections, but a free-for-all of local butterfly and caterpillar ballots spawning confusion. We have no independent, nonpartisan federal commission overseeing national elections, as Mexico has, but rather partisan state officials doing the job, like Florida Secretary of State Katharine Harris, who doubled as state chair of the Bush campaign. We have no national voter registration system, as more than 100 nations do, but rather state-based systems subject to manipulation. So under the guise of centralizing Florida's voter list, Harris contracted with a private company that proceeded, under her direction, to wrongly purge more than 18,000 voters, most of them minorities, on the false grounds that they were ex-felons. We don't even have a national ballot count or tally.

Florida laid bare the undemocratic structures that constrain our politics. When the Florida Supreme Court ordered the counting of 175,000 ballots that did not register on the punch-card machines, Republican legislative leaders threatened to disregard the popular vote and choose their own electors. This threat startled much of the nation. But, in Bush vs. Gore, the Supreme Court quickly recorded that they were acting within their powers under Article II ("Each state shall appoint, such manner as the legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors … ").

The court emphasized that the "individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the president of the United States."

Condt.....................................................

The BFL folks is we do NOT have the right to vote for our President. This the the real leave behind of the Bush 2000 Selection.

..just wonderful..

2004-03-13T13:19:00.000-08:00

In Response to Major Fax Campaign by TrueMajority.org,
Three More States Protect Voters from Pitfalls of Computer Voting
Americans in seven states - up from three states less than a month ago - can now be assured that their votes will not be lost by unreliable computer voting machines.

That's because the secretaries of state of Vermont, Missouri, and West Virginia - in response to TrueMajority.org's "Computer Ate My Vote" campaign - recently pledged to require all computer voting machines in their states to produce a voter-verified paper ballot trail. Those states join California, Nevada, New Hampshire, and Oregon, which already require a paper trail.

The Computer Ate My Vote campaign is urging secretaries of state nationwide to safeguard democracy as a growing number of their colleagues are doing.

In the past three weeks, our campaign has

- staged a national press event in Washington, D.C., that generated coverage on National Public Radio, on CNN, in Wired magazine, and by local outlets across the country;
- helped 35,577 TrueMajority members send faxes to their secretaries of state;
- held news conferences addressing secretaries of state in Colorado and Florida, with Pennsylvania scheduled this week and others soon thereafter;
- promoted a Super Tuesday protest at polling places in Maryland, and
- testified against paperless voting at a hearing held by Pennsylvania legislators.

Letters to the editor, op-eds, and paid advertising will follow in succession to generate sustained pressure.

Check out the Computer Ate My Vote campaign materials at http://www.truemajority.org/ComputerAteMyVote/index.cfm.

For more detailed information about computer voting, visit www.verifiedvoting.org or www.calvoter.org/votingtechnology.html#resources.

We'll keep you posted.

Yours in Stopping Computers from Eating Our Votes,

Ben Cohen
President, TrueMajority.org

2004-03-13T13:15:00.000-08:00

USATODAY.com - Calif. senators want decertification of e-vote systems

Calif. senators want decertification of e-vote systems
By Anna Oberthur, Associated Press

SACRAMENTO — Citing problems in last week's primary election, two leading senators Thursday asked the secretary of state to decertify the use of touch-screen voting systems for the upcoming November election.
"California has a lemon law which protects consumers if they buy an automobile that doesn't work. So far, electronic voting in California is a lemon. It needs to be fixed," said Sen. Ross Johnson, R-Irvine.

Electronic voting machines have been controversial almost since their invention. Some computer scientists say the systems leave elections vulnerable to hackers, while other critics say that because most electronic voting terminals do not produce paper records, there's no way to ensure accurate recounts.

There's also a concern that system problems in California could lead to voter confusion like that surrounding the 2000 presidential election in Florida.

In the March 2 statewide election, where 14 counties used touch-screen voting systems, the number of system failures was "alarming," said Sen. Don Perata, D-Oakland.

Perata cited San Diego County, where touch screens failed to start properly, causing delays up to two hours in some polling places.

condt....................

2004-03-10T23:38:00.000-08:00

Election panel OKs Illegal software

By Mary Beth Schneider
mary.beth.schneider@indystar.com
March 11, 2004

The Indiana Election Commission voted late Wednesday to let four counties use illegal voting software after hearing desperate appeals by county clerks who feared primary election disasters if they didn't get help.

The unanimous decision by the four commission members, though, belied the anger they felt at Election Systems & Software, the voting equipment vendor whose mistakes had created the potential mess for the state and Johnson, Vanderburgh, Wayne and Henry counties.

"I find this whole thing incredibly distasteful," said Brian Burdick, chairman of the commission. "We're all lined up to be sued all because you derelicts couldn't get your act together."

He was particularly concerned about Johnson County, where a potentially close primary election contest is brewing between two Republicans -- state Sen. Larry Borst and Johnson County Council President Brent Waltz.

"God forbid we have a problem" in the tallying of that race, Burdick said.

To make sure the Nebraska firm -- known as ES&S -- would be liable for any costs, the commission voted to require the company to post a $10 million bond. If it is unable to provide the counties with legally certified voting equipment by Oct. 1, it must install any other company's voting equipment that satisfies the four counties in time for the November election.

The problem came because ES&S had sold the counties new touch-screen voting software that has not been certified for use in Indiana. Three of the counties -- Johnson, Wayne and Henry -- used the illegal voting system in the November 2003 election.

To meet Indiana law, ES&S retrofitted the machines in those counties, and Vanderburgh, with older software certified for use in Indiana. They could not guarantee it would work smoothly.

ES&S senior vice president Ken Carbullido compared the old version to an Edsel automobile that hasn't been driven for a while. And, he and others in the company said, voters could be confused

condt...................................

Chuck Hagel's company btw...

2004-03-10T06:49:00.000-08:00

Black Box Backlash
Seattle Weekly: News: by George Howland Jr.

Bev Harris of Renton created a firestorm with her national Internet campaign against electronic voting. Now she's trying to persuade people in the real world that their democracy is on the line.

America's leading critic of electronic voting lives on a cul-de-sac in the blue-collar suburb of Renton. Bev Harris drives a gray Dodge Caravan with a bumper sticker that says, "Keep honking, I'm reloading." Last year, several things broke in her home— the furnace, a sink, and a toilet—and she didn't have the money to get them fixed right away. In fact, the sink and toilet are still broken.
At 53, Harris worries about being overweight, and she can't find a hairdresser she's happy with. In recent years she's made her living as a literary publicist, hawking such books as Odyssey of the Soul by Hugh Harmon and Pamela Chilton, which is about channeling spirits, and Two Codes for Murder, a true-crime story by Dorothea Fuller Smith. A year and half ago, she admits, "I thought voting was boring."

Clearly, Harris' feelings about voting have changed a lot in the past 18 months. Voting has become Harris' passion and vocation. Voting issues consume her life, even pushing her to work around the clock at times.

Since September 2002, Harris has battled a U.S. senator, large corporations, and election officials across the country in her effort to ensure our votes are counted fairly and accurately. At first, she focused on the problems with computer voting. Since then, the name of her Web site (www.blackboxvoting.com) and her book devoted to the subject—Black Box Voting—have become shorthand for concerns about computers and elections. Moreover, her astounding discoveries on the subject have resulted in damning research by distinguished computer-science professors and numerous articles in major newspapers across the country. Secretaries of state, including Republican Sam Reed of Washington and Democrat Kevin Shelley of California, have responded by proposing key changes in how we will cast our ballots in the future.

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All Hail Bev Harris..... a modern day American hero, a true patriot, and a tireless fighter for our rights and democracy. If only we fought along side here with anything resembling the same level of dedication and vigor.