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YOUTUBE VIDEO BRINGS TO FORE AN ALLEGED
HUGE POLITICAL SCANDAL
[If you do nothing else today
watch this video of sworn testimony by a computer programmer
on his design of software to rig the 2000 Florida election. The
programmer, Clint Curtis, was a staunch Republican at the time
but has since switched and is now running against the man he
accuses on the video: Rep. Tom Feeney of Florida.]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEzY2tnwExs
MORE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3Uz9PHB6-M
BRAD BLOG - On December 6th, 2004, The Brad Blog 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.,
a computer consulting firm in Oviedo, Florida.
[The testimony was actually before
an informal group of House Democrats, and was not an official
Judiciary Committee hearing - TPR]
Curtis, a life-long Republican
up until then, had been a programmer at YEI, which had several
top-secret clearance contracts with the state, NASA and other
government agencies. Curtis' understanding at the time was that
the prototype he was being asked to create (built to the very
precise specifications of Feeney) was to address Feeney's concerns
that the Democrats might attempt to electronically rig the election
and Feeney wanted to know what to look out for in that event.
After informing YEI CEO Mrs. Li-Woan Yang that he would not be
able to hide the vote-flipping routines in the software source-code
as Feeney had requested, Curtis testified that Mrs. Yang informed
him that the program was needed to "rig the vote in South
Florida."
At the time of the alleged meeting,
Feeney was the incoming Speaker of the Florida House, and also
a registered lobbyist and the general corporate counsel for YEI.
Previously, he had been the running mate of Jeb Bush during his
1994 unsuccessful first bid for Florida Governor. . . He eventually
ascended to the U.S. Congress and today sits on the House Judiciary
Committee. . .
Curtis also reported in his affidavit
and to the Florida State Inspector General that YEI was employing
an illegal Chinese alien by the name of Hai Lin "Henry"
Nee who was inserting "wire-tapping modules" into sensitive
database programs which YEI had built for NASA and other companies.
. .
Tom Feeney has categorically
denied all charges made by Curtis and has refused to comment
on the record about any of the allegations beyond telling MSNBC
that "Curtis has defamed a lot of people. . .
After many months and many requests
and many challenges from both critics and Mainstream Media types,
The St. Petersburg Times reports that Clint Curtis took a polygraph
test on March 3rd, 2005...and passed.
The lie-detector test, administered
by Tim Robinson, the retired chief polygraph operator for the
Florida Department of Law Enforcement, found that Curtis was
indeed found to be truthful in all of his responses.
On February 13th, 2006, it was announced that Clint Curtis is
planning a run for the U.S. House of Representatives in Florida's
24th District.
FROM CURTIS' TESTIMONY:
Are there computer programs that
can be used to secretly fix elections?
Yes.
How do you know that to be the
case?
Because in October of 2000, I
wrote a prototype for Congressman Tom Feeney [R-FL]...
It would rig an election?
It would flip the vote, 51-49.
Whoever you wanted it to go to and whichever race you wanted
to win.
And would that program that you
designed, be something that elections officials... could detect?
They'd never see it.
WIKIPEDIA - Clint Curtis (born
1958) is a programmer who worked for Yang Enterprises in Oviedo,
Florida until February 2001. Curtis is notable chiefly for making
a series of "whistleblower" allegations about his employer
YEI and Republican Congressman, Tom Feeney. After leaving YEI,
Curtis worked for the Florida Department of Transportation and
currently resides in Titusville, FL. YEI is a provider of engineering
and computer services to the government and the private sector,
and is run by Ms. Yang. At the time of the alleged incidents,
Feeney was simultaneously YEI's corporate attorney, a registered
lobbyist for YEI, and a member of Florida's House of Representatives.
He also maintained his election office in the YEI building.
At the behest of Rep. Tom Feeney,
in September 2000, he was asked to write a program for a touch
screen voting machine that would make it possible to change the
results of an election undetectably. This technology, explained
Curtis, could also be used in any electronic tabulation machine
or scanner. . . West Palm Beach was named as an intended target,
but used punched card ballots in the 2000 elections; Curtis explained
that the software could be used in any electronic tabulation
machine or scanner. . . YEI employed Hai Lin "Henry"
Nee, a Chinese national, to work on a NASA contract. This included
large NASA databases that were downloaded by the owner of the
company and passed to Nee. Nee has since pled guilty to violating
export regulations and received a $100 fine and a 3 year probation
after admitting that he sent missile guidance chips to Beijing
over 20 times without the proper export licenses, a common error.
According to WFTV News, The Tom
Feeney Campaign responded by characterizing Curtis as "crazy,"
by sending tens of thousands of mailers throughout his district.
WFTV reports, "the mailing features congressional candidate
Clint Curtis's head superimposed on what's supposed to be the
body of Playboy magazine publisher Hugh Heffner. It went out
to 110,000 voters across Central Florida,"
Tom Feeney was quoted as saying
the charges are "some of the most ridiculous, fictional
charges you could ever imagine." Mr. Feeney also states,
according to the St. Petersburg Times, "Clint Curtis is
the craziest man in America. Serious times demand serious leaders,
and Curtis is not even in the same solar system as the rest of
us. With tinfoil hats in hand, black helicopters swarming, and
purple Martians landing, this election promises to be more entertaining
than Saturday morning cartoons,"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clint_Curtis
SOME VOTING MACHINES CAN BE EASILY USED
FOR MULTIPLE VOTING
BRAD BLOG - It seems there's
a little yellow button on the back of every touch-screen computer
made by Sequoia Voting Systems, that allows any voter, or poll
worker, or precinct inspector to set the system into "Manual
Mode" allowing them to cast as many votes as they want.
Concerns about the flaw were
first reported some thirty days ago to California Secretary of
State Bruce McPherson's office by Ron Watt, a Tehama County,
CA precinct inspector who has been a poll worker in the county
for the last fifteen years. And yet, as recently as a radio interview
last Tuesday, McPherson ­ who has been crowing about having
the country's most stringent security process for voting systems
­ denied he was aware of any security issues with Sequoia
systems. . .
The complete sequence to override
the system and enter manual voting mode, along with the Sequoia
booklet received via Watt's public records request, is now posted
at BlackBoxVoting.org. . .
Sequoia's voting machines are
perhaps the most widely used in California, in some 19 different
counties, including both Tehama and Riverside, which is known
as the "Home of E-Voting" as it was the first county
in the nation to deploy such systems. But identical Sequoia machines
are also used in dozens of other states around the country including
Florida, Illinois and elsewhere.
It is now confirmed that all
such systems are completely vulnerable to virtually anyone who
wishes to cast as many votes as they please. "I can do it
in 18 seconds," says Watt. "I can train you to do it
in 3 minutes. Just push the yellow button, wait 3 seconds and
it chimes. Push the yellow button again, wait 3 seconds and it
chimes again. Then it's all on the screen prompts. You're asked
'Do you want to enter manual mode?' and you push 'Yes'. . . And
then you're on your way."
"You can then vote as many
times as you want. You won't ever have to stop until someone
physically restrains you from voting," he explained.
"But wouldn't someone hear
the chime?" we asked…
"No, it's barely audible.
Quieter than the beep on your computer when it boots up. The
systems are usually kept up against the wall to be near a power
outlet and away from the poll workers for privacy. Plus, if you
really wanted to pull it off, just come in with a friend and
have them talk to the poll workers to distract them. Nobody would
ever know."
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=3714
BLACK BOX VOTING - [The California
Secretary of State] had Sequoia demonstrate the process which,
in effect, allows any citizen to cast multiple votes
Sequoia agreed it could be done,
but claimed it would be difficult to do unnoticed (they focused
more on voters doing it than the idea of an insider doing it).
The Secretary of State contacted
every California county that uses Sequoia and confirmed with
them that they were indeed aware of this feature.
California counties are to inform
all their poll workers of this and instruct them to be very vigilant
during the Election Day to anyone spending too much time in the
booth, or reaching around to the back of the machine where the
button is located. Poll workers are supposed to be instructed
to listen for a beeping sound made when the yellow button is
pressed.
The Secretary of State is reportedly
going to require increased signage regarding criminal penalties
for tampering with voting equipment are to be prominently displayed
on every machine.
http://www.bbvforums.org/cgi-bin/forums/board-auth.cgi?file=/1954/44823.html
BRAD BLOG has obtained an exclusive
partial transcript from a recent, unaired interview by a major
broadcast network with former U.S. Elections Assistance Commission
chair Rev. DeForest Soaries. Soaries was appointed by George
W. Bush as the first chair of the commission created by the federal
Help America Vote Act in the wake of the 2000 Presidential election
Debacle. In the interview, available here for the first time,
Soaries excoriates both Congress and the White House, referring
to their dedication to reforming American election issues as
"a charade" and "a travesty," and says the
system now in place is "ripe for stealing elections and
for fraud."
Having resigned from the commission
in April of 2005, Soaries goes on to explain that he believes
he was "deceived" by both the White House and Congress,
and that neither were ever "really serious about election
reform."
. . . In the unaired interview,
conducted last August, Soaries says there are "no standards"
for voting systems and that Congress and the White House "made
things worse through the passage of the Help America Vote Act."
. . . Due to underfunding and
lack of attention to the EAC and the Election Reform it was supposed
to oversee, Soaries says we now have an "inability to trust
the technology that we use" to count votes in our American
democracy, even as "we're spending a billion dollars a week
in Iraq."
. . . "Someone has got to
be able to say, no one in America should use machine 'A' ever
again," he says, in reference to the EAC's failure to decertify
electronic voting systems even after they have been proven to
be easily vulnerable to hackers and tampering. "And if it's
not EAC," he continued, "it's got to be someone. Someone
in America has got to hold America accountable for protecting
the most fundamental right in a democracy and that is the right
to vote."
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=3491
ALTERED AND CENSORED REPORT
REVEALS EXTENT OF POSSIBLE ELECTION FRAUD
REBECCA ABRAHAMS, BRAD BLOG - In September,
2003 Linda Lamone, the Administrator of Maryland's State Board
of Elections and President of the National Association of State
Election Directors hands over a critical study on the security
of the Diebold Election Systems machines that count all of Maryland's
votes. . . The original SAIC report, coming in at nearly 200
pages, was reduced, redacted and altered such that the only version
the public - or even state officials including the Governor and
the full State Board of Elections - would ever be allowed to
see was a wholly sanitized 38-page version of the report.
Until now.
For the first time, we've been able to
review the complete, much sought-after, unredacted version of
the SAIC report which has been kept at bay from Maryland state
officials. . . as well as the computer science and security community.
. . as well as the election integrity community and public at
large since it was originally completed in 2003.
It has been called "The Pentagon Papers
of Electronic Voting Systems" by some members of the computer
science and security community. . .
Enter the world of electronic voting machines,
the 2002 "cure" to 2000's hanging and dimpled chads.
. . Diebold and the other manufacturers insist that their machines
are safe and secure yet every single cyber security expert and
computer scientist has, for years, been screaming into an empty
wilderness of media attention, that. . .
- The machines can be hacked, by the implanting
of malicious code, at the factory
- The machines can be hacked during transport
from the factory
- The machines can be hacked while on "sleepovers"
before the election
- The machines can be hacked (in 1 minute
with a .50 cent mini bar key) during the election
- These machines can be hacked, at the
tabulator, after the election.
What makes this SAIC report, "The
Pentagon Papers of Electronic Voting" as some computer experts
have described it, so important is that:
It shows, in black and white, that what
Diebold says to election officials and voters across the country
is not the truth. It shows that there are virtually no security
protocols in place for certain Diebold machines and that the
recommended security protocols were purposely removed from the
publicly released version of the report. It shows that the analyzed
Diebold machines were not functional nor secure for use in elections
and raises serious doubts that they are ready for the November
7, 2006 midterm elections. . .
Diebold, in return for allowing their super
secret, proprietary machines to be examined by the independent
laboratory, insisted on two huge concessions from the state of
Maryland.
First, SAIC would not be allowed to even
look at the source code, the heart and guts of electronic voting
machines.
Second, they would be allowed to go through
the SAIC Report, line by line, and redact anything and everything
that they felt was proprietary, had a potential for security
breaches or could provide a roadmap for anyone who wanted to
compromise the system.
In other words, whatever they wanted to
do with the publicly released version of the report they were
allowed to do so.
468 federal seats and countless state and
local contests are being decided by Diebold and other similar
electronic voting machines. The outcome of these elections will
set the direction of our country for at least the next two years.
The issue is whether or not Diebold has
implemented the critical changes in its software and hardware
called for by the full, genuine un-redacted SAIC Report
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=3719
OCTOBER 2006
DUTCH BAN VOTING MACHINES AFTER MAJOR
FLAWS ARE REVEALED
INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE - Voters in Amsterdam and 34 other
Dutch cities may be using paper and pencil instead of computerized
voting machines in national elections next month. The government
on Monday banned the use of one common type of computer voting
machine, fearing that secret ballots may not be kept secret.
It ordered a review of all electronic machines after the Nov.
22 election.
Government Renewal Minister Atzo Nicolai said the move was necessary
after an investigation found the machines made by Sdu NV emitted
radio signals that a technology-savvy spy could use to peek at
a voters' choices from a distance of up to several dozen yards.
"What can be detected is the image on the screen that's
visible to the voter, by which his voting could be monitored,"
Nicolai said in a letter to parliament.
"In short, the machines made by the company Sdu can now
be tapped, and there are no technical measures that can be taken
before the upcoming elections that would prevent this tapping
and guarantee the secrecy of the ballot."
He said he had revoked the permits for all the machines, about
10 percent of all voting machines used in the country. . .
The turnabout came after a group called "We Don't Trust
Voting Computers" protested the vulnerability of electronic
voting to fraud or manipulation.
"I think this will have repercussions far beyond Holland"
said Rop Gonggrijp, one of the group's founders, after Monday's
announcement.
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2006/10/30/europe/EU_GEN_Netherlands_Voting_Machines.php
WE DON'T TRUST VOTING COMPUTERS - 90% of the of the votes in
The Netherlands are cast on the Nedap/Groenendaal ES3B voting
computer. With very minor modifications, the same computer is
also being used in parts of Germany and France. Use of this machine
in Ireland is currently on hold after significant doubts were
raised concerning its suitability for elections.
We were able to buy two Nedap voting computers from a Dutch municipality.
. . . When given brief access to the devices at any time before
the election, we can gain complete and virtually undetectable
control over election results. . . . We discovered that radio
emanations from an unmodified ES3B can be received at several
meters distance and be used to tell who votes what.
FULL REPORT
http://www.wijvertrouwenstemcomputersniet.nl/English
MACHINES IN FLORIDA RECORD WRONG
VOTE IN EARLY BALLOTING
CHARLES
RABIN AND DARRAN SIMON, MIAMI HERALD - After a week of early
voting, a handful of glitches with electronic voting machines
have drawn the ire of voters, reassurances from elections supervisors
-- and a caution against the careless casting of ballots.
Several South Florida voters say the choices they touched on
the electronic screens were not the ones that appeared on the
review screen -- the final voting step.
Election officials say they aren't aware of any serious voting
issues. But in Broward County, for example, they don't know how
widespread the machine problems are because there's no process
for poll workers to quickly report minor issues and no central
database of machine problems.. . .
Debra A. Reed voted with her boss on Wednesday at African-American
Research Library and Cultural Center near Fort Lauderdale. Her
vote went smoothly, but boss Gary Rudolf called her over to look
at what was happening on his machine. He touched the screen for
gubernatorial candidate Jim Davis, a Democrat, but the review
screen repeatedly registered the Republican, Charlie Crist. .
. A poll worker then helped Rudolf, but it took three tries to
get it right, Reed said.
Broward Supervisor of Elections spokeswoman Mary Cooney said
it's not uncommon for screens on heavily used machines to slip
out of sync, making votes register incorrectly. Poll workers
are trained to recalibrate them on the spot -- essentially, to
realign the video screen with the electronics inside. The 15-step
process is outlined in the poll-workers manual.
ANOTHER OHIO VOTE SCAM MAY ALREADY BE
UNDERWAY
K STREET PROJECTOR, DAILY KOS
- A friend, in a position to be present at lunches of GOP insiders
here in DC called me on Thursday. . . My friend was present as
a group of moderate GOP members with Ohio ties lamented how far
the party had strayed. There was consensus at the table there
was no way they should retain control. . . Then, one insider,
probably an extremist but certainly very close to Mr. Ken Mehlman,
abruptly stopped the conversation. He told table that it was
impossible they would lose either house. He also predicts an
Ohio GOP sweep.
He informed the group that over
the last year, in four critical states the GOP needs to hold
huge purges of the voter rolls have just been finished. The insider
did not say which four states, but did say Ohio was among them.
His claim was a new Diebold voter
registry system had been installed over the last year. The last
week of July and the first week of August a "test run"
was made of the systems ability to purge ineligible voters. The
purge generated names and test letters sent out to 1.2 million
Ohio addresses with a focus on university's, apartment addresses
with high turnover. He claims they made the letters seem just
functionary, but they have an action component to avoid being
purged from the rolls. . .
Further the insider stated that
Blackwell had only purged the lists after a full 60 days was
given for people to respond. Which means even if a voter was
on the "termination" list, they would still have been
eligible to vote in the primary.
He told the table they believe
the purge has probably caught up "hundreds of thousands
of students, activists and wanderers with no real job" would
show up at the polls and have to vote provisionally. . .
Friday I called friends in Lorain
County and Wayne County Ohio. I told them this DC tale. Neither
of them had voted yet and I asked them if they could go on Monday
to either early vote, or apply for an absentee ballot. And if
possible sit for in the Elections Office for an hour and determine
if anyone was expressing surprise they were no longer registered.
If the sample in Lorain County
Ohio and Wayne County Ohio are true, then Ohio Democratic Voters
had better go and Vote Early if they plan to vote at all. At
Lorain County, my friend arrived to find a line of over 15 people,
many of whom had come back for a second time, all of them Democrats
who had arrived to vote and been told that drivers licence information,
or in one case home ownership information had not matched the
address provided for voter registration. In one case a college
student had been purged because he had changed dorms on campus.
In another case a local blue-collar
worker had been purged because his voter registration had only
his building address, but his drivers license included an apartment
number. This tiny difference in information had led to his purging.
While everyone present seemed
to have enough information to allow the records to be updated,
my friend told me it was being done by one and only one clerk
and was taking a very long time, about 5 minutes per person to
resolve. Everyone in line confirmed that several voters had given
up in frustration and left. . .
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/10/18/85915/109
YOU TUBE EXPLANATION OF INSTANT RUNOFF VOTING
WHY RUNOFFS DON'T WORK
SEPTEMBER 2006
A GUIDE TO STEALING VOTES FROM
A DIEBOLD MACHINE
AUGUST 2006
PUBLIC INTEREST GROUP CLAIMS DIEBOLD
MACHINES EASILY HACKED
OPEN VOTING FOUNDATION - Upon
examining the inner workings of one of the most popular paperless
touch screen voting machines used in public elections in the
United States, it has been determined that with the flip of a
single switch inside, the machine can behave in a completely
different manner compared to the tested and certified version.
"Diebold has made the testing
and certification process practically irrelevant," according
to Alan Dechert. "If you have access to these machines and
you want to rig an election, anything is possible with the Diebold
TS -- and it could be done without leaving a trace. All you need
is a screwdriver." This model does not produce a voter verified
paper trail so there is no way to check if the voter's choices
are accurately reflected in the tabulation
DETAILS
http://openvotingfoundation.org/
JUNE 2006
ROBERT KENNEDY JR'S CASE FOR A STOLEN
2004 ELECTION
ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR, ROLLING
STONE - Republicans derided anyone who expressed doubts about
Bush's victory as nut cases in "tinfoil hats," while
the national media, with few exceptions, did little to question
the validity of the election. The Washington Post immediately
dismissed allegations of fraud as "conspiracy theories,"
and The New York Times declared that "there is no evidence
of vote theft or errors on a large scale." But despite the
media blackout, indications continued to emerge that something
deeply troubling had taken place in 2004.
Nearly half of the 6 million
American voters living abroad never received their ballots -
or received them too late to vote - after the Pentagon unaccountably
shut down a state-of-the-art Web site used to file overseas registrations.
A consulting firm called Sproul & Associates, which was hired
by the Republican National Committee to register voters in six
battleground states, was discovered shredding Democratic registrations.
In New Mexico, which was decided by 5,988 votes, malfunctioning
machines mysteriously failed to properly register a presidential
vote on more than 20,000 ballots. Nationwide, according to the
federal commission charged with implementing election reforms,
as many as 1 million ballots were spoiled by faulty voting equipment
- roughly one for every 100 cast.
The reports were especially disturbing
in Ohio, the critical battleground state that clinched Bush's
victory in the Electoral College. Officials there purged tens
of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls, neglected to
process registration cards generated by Democratic voter drives,
shortchanged Democratic precincts when they allocated voting
machines and illegally derailed a recount that could have given
Kerry the presidency. A precinct in an evangelical church in
Miami County recorded an impossibly high turnout of ninety-eight
percent, while a polling place in inner-city Cleveland recorded
an equally impossible turnout of only seven percent. In Warren
County, GOP election officials even invented a nonexistent terrorist
threat to bar the media from monitoring the official vote count.
. . But what is most anomalous about the irregularities in 2004
was their decidedly partisan bent: Almost without exception they
hurt John Kerry and benefited George Bush.
After carefully examining the
evidence, I've become convinced that the president's party mounted
a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people
in 2004. Across the country, Republican election officials and
party stalwarts employed a wide range of illegal and unethical
tactics to fix the election. . . In what may be the single most
astounding fact from the election, one in every four Ohio citizens
who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only to
discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP
efforts to stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to
cast ballots. And that doesn't even take into account the troubling
evidence of outright fraud, which indicates that upwards of 80,000
votes for Kerry were counted instead for Bush. That alone is
a swing of more than 160,000 votes - enough to have put John
Kerry in the White House. ... Indeed, the extent of the GOP's
effort to rig the vote shocked even the most experienced observers
of American elections. "Ohio was as dirty an election as
America has ever seen," Lou Harris, the father of modern
political polling, told me. "You look at the turnout and
votes in individual precincts, compared to the historic patterns
in those counties, and you can tell where the discrepancies are.
They stand out like a sore thumb."
http://www.bradblog.com/archives/00002896.htm
STUDY: ONE PERSON COULD HACK AN ELECTRONIC
ELECTION COUNT
ZACHARY A. GOLDFARB, WASHINGTON
POST - To determine what it would take to hack a U.S. election,
a team of cyber security experts turned to a fictional battleground
state called Pennasota and a fictional gubernatorial race between
Tom Jefferson and Johnny Adams. It's the year 2007, and the state
uses electronic voting machines. Jefferson was forecast to win
the race by about 80,000 votes, or 2.3 percent of the vote. Adams's
conspirators thought, "How easily can we manipulate the
election results?"
The experts thought about all
the ways to do it. And they concluded in a report that it would
take only one person, with a sophisticated technical knowledge
and timely access to the software that runs the voting machines,
to change the outcome.. . . The report concluded that the three
major electronic voting systems in use have significant security
and reliability vulnerabilities. But it added that most of these
vulnerabilities can be overcome by auditing printed voting records
to spot irregularities. And while 26 states require paper records
of votes, fewer than half of those require regular audits.
http://tinyurl.com/oudom
DID GEORGE BUSH STEAL THE MEXICAN ELECTION,
TOO?
MATT PASCARELLA & GREG PALEST
- Reuters News agency reports that, as of 8pm Eastern time, as
voting concluded in Mexico, exit polls show Andres Manuel Lopez
Obrador of the "left-wing" Party of the Democratic
Revolution (PRD) leading in exit polls over Felipe Calderon of
the ruling conservative National Action Party (PAN).
Exit polls tell us how voters
say they voted, but the voters can't tell pollsters if their
vote will be counted. In Mexico, counting the vote is an art,
not a science -- and Calderon's ruling crew is very artful indeed.
The PAN-controlled official electoral commission, not surprisingly,
has announced that the presidential tally is too close to call.
Calderon's election is openly supported by the Bush Administration.
This past Friday, we reported
that the US Federal Bureau of Investigation had obtained Mexico's
voter files under a secret "counterterrorism" contract
with database company ChoicePoint of Alpharetta, Georgia. The
FBI's contractor states that, following the arrest of Choice
Point agents by the Mexican government, the company returned
or destroyed its files. The firm claims not to have known collecting
this information violated Mexican law. Such files can be useful
in challenging a voter's right to cast a ballot or in preventing
that vote from counting.
It is, of course, impossible
to know if the FBI destroyed its own copy of the files of Mexico's
voter rolls obtained by Choicepoint or if these were then used
to illegally assist the Calderon candidacy. But we can see the
results: as in the US, first in Florida then in Ohio, the exit
polls are at odds with "official" polls.
GREG PALEST, TRUTHOUT, JUN 30
- George Bush's operatives have plans to jigger with the upcoming
elections. . . It begins with an FBI document marked, "Counterterrorism"
and "Foreign Intelligence Collection" and "Secret."
Date: "9/17/2001," six days after the attack on the
World Trade towers. It's nice to know the feds got right on the
ball, if a little late.
What does this have to do with
jiggering Mexico's election? Hold that thought. This document
is what's called a "guidance" memo for using a private
contractor to provide databases on dangerous foreigners. Good
idea. We know the 19 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan
and the Persian Gulf Emirates. So you'd think the "Intelligence
Collection" would be aimed at getting info on the guys in
the Gulf.
No so. When we received the document,
we obtained as well its classified appendix. The target nations
for "foreign counterterrorism investigation" were nowhere
near the Persian Gulf. Every one was in Latin America - Argentina,
Venezuela, Mexico and a handful of others. . .
All the target nations had one
thing in common besides a lack of terrorists: each had a left-leaning
presidential candidate or a left-leaning president in office.
In Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez, bete noir of the Bush Administration,
was facing a recall vote. In Mexico, the anti-Bush Mayor of Mexico
City, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador was (and is) leading the race
for the Presidency.
Most provocative is the contractor
to whom this no-bid contract was handed: Choice Point Inc. of
Alpharetta, Georgia. Choice Point is the database company that
created a list for Governor Jeb Bush of Florida of voters to
scrub from voter rolls before the 2000 election. . .
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/greg_palast/2006/07/stealing_mexico_an_election_di.html
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/063006R.shtml
LIST OF RECENT E-VOTE PROBLEMS
ROCKY MOUNTAIN NEWS - The company
Denver is relying on for voting machines for this year's elections
has a history of computer glitches, delayed counting, supply
problems and a brush with a bribery scandal. Malfunctions in
Sequoia Voting Systems' machines contributed to a four-week delay
in getting full results in Chicago's March primary election -
prompting a Cook County official to threaten to withhold payment
of some of the $50 million the county owes Sequoia.
Although Denver will be using
some of the same machines implicated in Chicago, city election
officials say they have worked with Sequoia for decades and they
will be ready for the Aug. 8 primary. Essex County, N.J., election
officials, however, are waiting for Sequoia to deliver 616 machines
for its June primary. If they don't arrive in time, the county
could lose $5 million in federal funds.
Meanwhile, officials in Pennsylvania
are sketching out contingency plans for a May 16 vote in the
event Sequoia software problems cannot be fixed in time. A test
showed that part of the system being used there is vulnerable
to hackers. These problems follow a series of Sequoia snafus
in California, Washington, Florida and New Mexico, according
to summaries of news reports given to members of the Denver City
Council by a voters' rights organization.
Also on the list is a bribery
scandal in Louisiana where that state's election chief, Jerry
Fowler, pleaded guilty in 2001 to taking bribes for the purchase
of outdated voting equipment at inflated prices. All of these
issues are either minor glitches or problems blown up by the
media, said Sequoia spokeswoman Michelle Shafer.
http://tinyurl.com/rc3wg
DIEBOLD MACHINES CAN BE HACKED IN MINUTES
BOING BOING - Diebold's notoriously
insecure voting machines -- in use across the USA -- have been
found to have an even deeper vulnerability than previously known.
A new report by Harri Hursti, released on Black Box Voting, documents
how an attacker with a few moments' of private physical access
to a machine could compromise it and load it with his own software,
compromising every function of the machine, including the ability
to count votes. Ed Felten and Avi Rubin have written an excellent
summary and analysis of the Hursti paper:
"Hursti's findings suggest
the possibililty of other attacks, not described in his report,
that are even more worrisome. In addition, compromised machines
would be very difficult to detect or to repair. The normal procedure
for installing software updates on the machines could not be
trusted, because malicious code could cause that procedure to
report success, without actually installing any updates. A technician
who tried to update the machine's software would be misled into
thinking the update had been installed, when it actually had
not. On election day, malicious software could refuse to function,
or it could silently miscount votes."
http://www.boingboing.net/2006/05/11/diebold_voting_machi.html
MARCH 2006
TEXAS MACHINE COUNT ADDS 100,000 VOTES
TO TOTAL
JIM DRINKARD, USA TODAY WASHINGTON
- Problems using voting machines in the Texas and Illinois primaries
this month have reinforced fears that the 2006 elections may
be beset with glitches. "There's a lot of evidence that
some of those fears are coming to pass," says Doug Chapin,
president of Electionline, a non-partisan group that studies
elections. . .
In Texas, a candidate for the
state Supreme Court will contest the March 7 primary because
of what he calls widespread problems using new machines. In Fort
Worth, an initial ballot count showed about 150,000 votes even
though there were only one-third that many voters, says David
Rogers, campaign manager for the candidate, Steve Smith. And
in San Angelo, balky new equipment and a close local race led
to a recount that was halted after it appeared some votes were
missing.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-03-27-voting-machines_x.htm
EASIER TO RIG VOTING MACHINE THAN LAS
VEGAS SLOT MACHINE
RICHARD MORIN, WASHINGTON POST - It's easier to rig an electronic voting
machine than a Las Vegas slot machine, says University of Pennsylvania
visiting professor Steve Freeman. That's because Vegas slots
are better monitored and regulated than America's voting machines,
Freeman writes in a book out in July that argues, among other
things, that President Bush may owe his last win to an unfair
vote count.
FEBRUARY 2006
LEADING LIBERALS FILE FAKE PUBLIC CAMPAIGN
FINANCING BILL THAT BARS THIRD PARTIES
ST LOUIS ORACLE - Eight Democratic
congressmen have filed a bill that combines a laudable goal ­
public funding of congressional campaigns ­ with a vicious
attack on freedom of speech. The bill would effectively eliminate
virtually all congressional campaigns by independent and third-party
candidates.
Ballot Access News reports that
candidates not qualifying for funding would not only receive
no government funds, but would also be barred from spending any
privately raised money. No government money and no private money
means that a non-qualifying candidate would be prohibited from
spending any money at all, not one red cent. Not even a business
card with the candidate's name and office sought would be legal
under the bill!
Requirements for qualifying for
funding would be relatively easy for the major parties but almost
impossible for independent and third-party candidates. The bill
would provide public funding for nominees of parties that had
averaged 25% of the vote for U.S. House in that district over
the last two elections. Independent candidates who had averaged
25% would also get full public funding, but unlike party candidates,
only the specific individual who previously got those votes would
qualify. All others would be required to submit petitions signed
by 20% of the last vote cast for full funding, and 10% for partial
funding. For example, in Missouri's 2nd congressional district,
a candidate with a party that won less than 25% of the vote in
the last two elections would need nearly 70,000 signatures to
qualify for the public funding that her/his Democratic and Republican
opponents would get automatically, and only signatures from the
2nd District would count. Nearly 35,000 signatures would be required
in order to allow the candidate to spend anything at all on the
campaign.
In certain districts where a
single party is dominant, the bill would eliminate campaigns
by the district's second party as well. Not surprisingly, Democrats
(who propose this bill) hold Republican opponents to below 25%
in more districts than Republicans do the same to Democrats.
If the bill were law today, a Republican campaign in Lacy Clay's
1st District would be illegal without a massive petition drive.
In Roy Blunt's 7th District, Democrats would be less than a percentage
point away from the same fate.
The offensive bill is sponsored
by Rep. David Obey (D-WI) and co-sponsored by fellow Democrats
Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, Barney Frank and James McGovern
of Massachusetts, Henry Waxman and Bob Filner of California,
Steve Israel of New York, and Tim Ryan of Ohio. So much for standing
up the for the little guy.
http://stloracle.blogspot.com/2006/02/bill-would-ban-3rd-party-campaigns-for.html
AMAZING POLITICAL FACT
If the House Republicans had
elected their leadership the way the country runs its elections,
Rep. Blunt would be majority leader. In fact, however, the GOP
used a system somewhat similar to what has been proposed by backers
of instant run-off voting. Although not accomplished in one ballot
- as in the case of IRV - when the House GOP was unable to decide
by majority vote, they dropped the two bottom choices and took
another count. It was on this second vote that Rep. Boehner was
chosen. Here's how it looked in the first round:
Blunt: 110 votes
Boehner: 79 votes
Shadegg: 40 votes
Ryun: 2 votes
Now according the election law
just about everywhere in the U.S. save godless, gay San Francisco
and the House GOP caucus, Rep Blunt won the election based on
the sacred first-past-the-post principle. But the GOP wanted
something more than just a first round winner and so eliminated
Shadegg and Ryun and counted again. Second time out:
Boehner: 122
Blount: 109
In other words, the Republicans
were smart for a change. Meanwhile in San Francisco a report
by Fair Vote California finds that instant runoff voting (or
"ranked choice voting" in San Francisco terminology)
increased voter participation in the decisive round of last November's
citywide election for assessor-recorder by an estimated 2.7 times.
Moreover, six out of 25 neighborhoods in the city had triple
the turnout they would have likely had with a traditional runoff;
these neighborhoods represent the poorest and most racially diverse
in the city, showing how IRV truly is a voting rights issue as
well as a good government reform.
Says Fair Vote, nearly every
single federal primary runoff has had lower turnout than the
first round over the past dozen year, with an average decrease
of more than 35%.
http://sfrcv.com/reports/turnout.pdf
JANUARY` 2006
CLEAN ELECTIONS PROVE TOO POPULAR FOR
BUDGET
PAUL CARRIER, PORTLAND PRESS
HERALD, ME - Using tax dollars to run political campaigns is
so popular in the governor's race this year that the Clean Election
Fund, which provides the money, will run dry if most of the candidates
who want to use it qualify to do so. Seven of the 12 announced
candidates for governor hope to get optional public financing.
The other five, including Democratic Gov. John Baldacci, plan
to run the old-fashioned way - by raising money privately from
contributors.
The Clean Election Fund should
have almost $10 million on hand through June 30, 2007. That may
be enough to cover all of the program's costs, including hundreds
of publicly funded legislative races this year, if there are
only three tax-funded gubernatorial candidates. Officials estimate
three candidates would cost the state $4.9 million, but add a
fourth at a projected cost of $1.4 million and that would break
the bank.
The fact that so many people
are vying for the Blaine House this year is not unusual. Thirteen
candidates had registered with the state Commission on Governmental
Ethics and Election Practices, which administers the Clean Election
Fund, by this point in the election cycle four years ago. By
the election that November, the field had shrunk to four - Baldacci,
one Republican, one Green Independent and one independent.
What is unusual this time around
is the number of candidates who want public financing. In 2002,
only two of the 13 declared candidates received tax dollars.
This year, more than half of the candidates hope to go that route.
As a result, the ethics commission
will have to decide soon whether to gamble that the field of
publicly funded candidates will shrink enough for the state to
cover the budgeted costs, or err on the side of caution by seeking
extra cash now. Experts say there is more interest in public
financing now than when it was first made available in 2002 because
the novel idea didn't catch on right away. . .
"It's very beneficial,"
in part because it allows candidates to run without being beholden
to private contributors, said Alex Hammer, an independent candidate.
As independent David Jones put it: "It gives me more time
to focus on the issues" rather than fundraising. . .
To get money from the Clean Election
Fund, each candidate also must collect 2,500 $5 "qualifying
contributions," or $12,500, from registered voters. The
contributions, which go to the Clean Election Fund, must be by
check or money order, no cash.
Candidates in the process of
collecting that money say it is a time-consuming and labor-intensive
process that requires a small army of volunteers. Independents
have a June 2 deadline to submit their contributions, but party
candidates must do so by April 18 if they want funding before
the primary.
http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/news/state/060130governor.shtml
THE POLITICS OF BRIBERY
[Depending on which definition
one uses, bribery - the giving of private money to influence
public action - may or not be illegal. In Washington, it is clearly
quite legal, but that doesn't make it any less of a bribe]
TODD S. PURDUM, NY TIMES The
rise of government regulation - first in the New Deal and then
in the 1960's and 70's - spawned a parallel rise in the private
sector's efforts to master the new system. Between the early
1970's and the mid-1980's, the number of trade associations doubled;
in the first half of the 1980's alone, the number of registered
lobbyists quadrupled, according to The Washington Monthly. A
study by the Center for Public Integrity found that in the early
1990's, political donations from 19 major industries - including
pharmaceuticals, defense, commercial banking and accounting -
were split about evenly between the two parties.
By 2003, the Republicans held
a 2-to-1 advantage. Since 1998, the center found, more than 2,200
former federal employees had registered as federal lobbyists,
as had nearly 275 former White House aides and nearly 250 former
members of Congress. Many rules governing their conduct remain
deliberately vague, and the House Ethics Committee has been paralyzed
because of dysfunction and partisan disputes.
INDICATORS: Lobbyists in 2004
spent an average of $177 million per month in 2004, or $2 billion
annually. This figure has increased 46% since 1999.
The total number of lobbyist
has doublted from 15,000 to 32,000 in the past six years.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/08/weekinreview/08purdum.html
THE CLUB
SAM SMITH, SHADOWS OF HOPE, 1994
- Although Americans are apt to inveigh against lobbies and "special
interests" as much as they do against Congress, the former
are just as much a part of the American system. Alan Taylor,
writing in The Journal of American History about 1790s politics
in upstate New York, notes that "interests" developed
even before political parties:
||||| An interest collected together
individuals of compatible desires out to advance their self-interests,
but an interest was unequal and hierarchical. It coalesced around
a leading man who could influence others and reward his supporters.
The lesser partners reaped small favors from the more powerful
in recognition of their support - a support that preserved the
authority of the man at the top. In New York during the 1790s,
commentators occasionally referred to "the agricultural
interest," "the manufacturing interest," and "
the mercantile interest," but these were abstractions that
rarely seemed to have any concrete power; it was more common
for "interest" to refer to the personal following that
a leading man or a prominent family could influence, as in "the
Livingston interest" or "the Van Rensselaer interest."
|||||
John Talbot wrote John Porteous
in November 1792: "If you can find a freedom to give me
your vote and influence, it will lay me under an obligation which
I shall always be happy to make returns."
A few years later Ebenezer Foote
advised congressional candidate Peter Van Gaasbeck, "Every
Person wants a letter particularly addressed to himself or he
supposes his importance is not duly noted."
The custom of "making interest"
preceded significant party-building in most of the rural US prior
to 1800. Parties spread, says Taylor, from the seaport cities
to the mid-Atlantic states, New England and "last (if at
all) to the South." Taylor quotes historian Harry Watson
as saying of North Carolina that "a complex mixture of voluntary
deference and coercion marked relations between political leaders
and followers. . .The use of party structures . . .was almost
nonexistent.". . .
Although the public often thinks
of interest politics as something primarily occurring in the
halls of Congress, the explosion of federal regulatory law and
the huge purchasing decisions of the executive branch make this
no longer true. William Greider in Who Will Tell the People?
quotes an Environmental Protection Agency administrator as saying
that in his arguments with the Carter White House, three out
of every four of the White House comments on EPA proposed rule-making
"were cribbed right from industry briefs."
No one knows how many lobbyists
there are in town. In 1981, Robert Reich, then a Harvard professor,
estimated the Washington regulatory "community" to
consist of 92,500 people including lawyers, lobbyists and their
employees, trade journalists, corporate representatives, public
affairs specialists and consultants. The count is complicated
by the fact that many lobbyists escape registration requirements.
Says Charles Lewis of the Center for Public Integrity, "No
one in Washington ever admits they lobby."i
Whether the number of actual
lobbyists is 10,000 or 30,000 seems to make little difference
when you consider that, even at the lower figure, every lobbyist
meeting just once with each member of Congress would result in
over five million lobbying contacts.
There was a time when lobbying
was more of an art than a profession. A Washington regular recalls
an early job with one of the most powerful lobbyists in town.
Together they set out to visit a southern senator. Once in the
Hill office, the lobbyist and the senator discussed nothing but
hunting and fishing for 45 minutes. When it was time to leave,
the pair walked out of the suite, the senator's arm draped over
the lobbyist's shoulder. As they crossed the threshold, the lobbyist
casually pulled out an envelope and handed it to the senator,
remarking, "Here's something you might like to look at."
It was a request for assistance on a certain legislative matter.
The lobbyist and his aide returned
to their office and the former immediately sat down to write
a thank you note which he attached to backup material on his
legislative request. The aide was then dispatched back to the
Hill with the envelope to complete the courtly negotiation.
A radical change in lobbying
occurred in the 1970s. Business executives who had previously
regarded lobbying as something not quite respectable became worried
by the success of Ralph Nader. They formed the Business Roundtable,
a group limited to the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies and devoted
to using the immense assets of these corporations -- including
their customers and employees -- to affect political decisions
in Washington. Greider reports that in 1970 only a handful of
Fortune 500 companies had public affairs offices in Washington;
by 1980, 80% did.
Still, as late as 1979, according
to Tip O'Neill, a businessman as savvy as Lee Iacocca would need
basic lobbying advice. George Streinbrenner had set up a meeting
between the Speaker and the boss of the then failing car company.
The session did not go well and the next day Steinbrenner told
O'Neill that "Lee called me and said you were the coldest
bastard he ever met."
Replied O'Neill:
"What did he expect? He
came in with a whole damn army. Do you think I'm going to tell
him how to get the job done in front of all those lawyers and
lobbyists. They'll just take credit for my ideas. Tell Iacocca
to come back and see me, just the two of us, head on head, and
I'll tell him what to do."
Iacocca returned and O'Neil asked
him, "Tell me, how many people in my district work for Chrysler
or one of its suppliers?"
Iacocca had no idea so O'Neill
told him to find out and to do the same for every congressional
district in the country: "Make up a list, and have your
employees and dealers in each district call and write letters
to their own member of Congress." ii
What O'Neill suggested is now
practiced by many lobbies -- corporate and public interest --
on a daily basis. . .
None of [the] sophisticated manipulation
means that lobbying is immune from normal Washington inefficiencies.
As one lobbyist put it, "There is lots of locomotion masquerading
as cerebration." There are, for example, the long lunches
at restaurants such as the Palm, Prime Rib and Mr. K, during
which lobbyists and government officials balance drinks in one
hand and the legal niceties of pressure politics in the other.
And there are the briefings provided by trade associations that
allow corporate field representatives to report to the home office
that they had "breakfast with Senator Jones and he let it
drop that. . ." -- never mentioning that the meal was in
the company of 95 other lobbyists.
ORDER 'SHADOWS OF HOPE'
http://prorev.com/order3.htm#shadows
WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT
SAM SMITH, U.S. CAPITOL RALLY,
1999 - [One of my objections] to our system of campaign financing
is economic. It's just too damn expensive for the taxpayer. The
real cost is not the campaign contributions themselves. The real
cost is what is paid in return out of public funds.
A case in point: Public Campaign
recently reported that in 1996, when Congress voted to lift the
minimum wage 90 cents an hour, business interests extracted $21
billion in custom-designed tax benefits. These business interests
gave only about $36 million in campaign contributions so they
got out of the public treasury nearly 600 times what they put
in. And you helped pay for it.
Looked at another way, that was
enough money to give 11 million workers a 90 cent an hour wage
increase for a whole year -- or, to be more 1990s about it, to
give 21,000 CEOs a million dollar bonus.
This is repeated over and over.
For example, the oil industry in one recent year gave $23 million
in campaign contributions and got nearly $9 billion in tax breaks.
The bottom line is this: if you
want to save public money, support public campaign financing.
My final objection is biologic.
Elections are for and between human beings. How do you tell when
you're dealing with a person? Well, they bleed, burp, wiggle
their toes and have sex. They register for the draft. They register
to vote. They watch MTV. They go to prison and they have babies
and cancer. Eventually they die and are buried or cremated.
Now this may seem obvious to
you, but there are tens of thousands of lawyers and judges and
politicians who simply don't believe it. They will tell you that
a corporation is a person, based on a corrupt Supreme Court interpretation
of the 14th Amendment from back in the robber baron era of the
late 19th century -- a time in many ways not unlike our own.
Before this ruling, everyone
knew what a person was just as everyone knew what a bribe was.
States regulated corporations because they were legal fictions
lacking not only blood and bones, but conscience, morality, and
free will. . . .
Corporations say they just want
to be treated like people, but that's not true. Test it out.
Try to exercise your free speech on the property of a corporation
just like they exercise theirs in your election. You'll find
out quickly who is more of a person. We can take care of this
biologic problem by applying a simple literary solution: tell
the truth. A corporation is not a person and should not be allowed
to be called one under the law.
I close with this thought. The
people who work in the building behind us have learned to count
money ahead of votes. It is time to chase the money changers
out of the temple. But how? After all, getting Congress to adopt
publicly funded campaigns is like trying to get the Mafia to
adopt the Ten Commandments as its mission statement. I would
suggest that while fighting this difficult battle there is something
we can do starting tomorrow. We can pull together every decent
organization and individual in communities all over America --
the churches, activist organizations, social service groups,
moral business people, concerned citizens -- and begin drafting
a code of conduct for politicians. We do not have to wait for
any legislature.
If we do this right, if we form
true broad-based coalitions of decency, then the politicians
will ignore us only at their peril.
At root, dear friends, our problem
is that politicians have come to have more fear of their campaign
contributors than they have of the voters. We have to teach politicians
to be afraid of us again. And nothing will do it better than
a coming together of a righteously outraged and unified constituency
demanding an end to bribery of politicians, whether it occurs
before, during, or after a campaign.
http://prorev.com/camaigncash.htm
DECEMBER 2005
AP - Another voting machine company
is in trouble with the state of California, this time over problems
with vote counting and verification during the November special
election. In a letter obtained by The Associated Press, Assistant
Secretary of State for Elections Bradley J. Clark threatened
to start the process of decertifying Election Systems & Software
machines if the company didn't address the state's concerns immediately.
Those concerns included incorrect counting of turnout figures,
a malfunction that prevented voters from verifying their choices
and a touch-screen machine recording the wrong vote during a
test. It is imperative that company representatives "take
corrective action as soon as possible," Clark wrote.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-12-24-votingmachines_x.htm?csp=34
HOW PRISONERS RIG THE VOTE
NY TIMES EDITORIAL - A startling
analysis by Peter Wagner of the Prison Policy Initiative found
seven upstate New York Senate districts meeting the population
requirements only because inmates were included in the count.
The Republican Party in New York relies on its large upstate
delegation for its majority in the State Senate - and for its
political power statewide. New York is not alone. The Prison
Policy Initiative's researchers found 21 counties nationally
where at least 21 percent of so-called residents lived behind
bars.
By counting these nonvoting inmates
as residents, the prison counties offend the principle of one
person one vote, while siphoning off political power from the
home districts to which the inmates will return as soon as they
are released. Since inmates are jobless, their presence also
allows prison districts to lower their per capita incomes, unfairly
increasing their share of federal funds earmarked for the poor.
Congress, which has just caught on to this, recently gave the
Census Bureau 90 days to file a report on the feasibility of
counting inmates at their homes of record rather than in prison.
At the same time, a committee overseen by the National Academy
of Sciences has been studying the residency issue and is expected
to make its final report this spring. But why does the bureau
need another study to decide whether it wants to uphold the one-person-one-vote
principle? The bureau should get to work immediately on procedures
that would allow it to count inmates where they actually live
- and get those procedures locked in place by the 2010 census.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/27/opinion/27tues2.html?th&emc=th
HOW BUSH PAID OFF HIS CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTORS
PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE - America's
business leaders supplied more than $75 million to return Mr.
Bush to the White House last year -- and he has paid dividends.
Bush administration policies, grand and obscure, have financially
benefited companies or lobbying clients tied to at least 200
of the president's largest campaign fund-raisers, a Toledo Blade
investigation has found. Dozens more stand to gain from Bush-backed
initiatives that recently passed or await congressional approval.
The investigation included targeted
tax breaks, regulatory changes, pro-business legislation, high-profile
salaried appointments, and federal contracts.
Mr. Bush's policies often followed
specific requests from his 548 "Pioneers" and "Rangers,"
who each raised at least $100,000 or $200,000 for his 2004 re-election.
The help to business fund-raisers sometimes came at the expense
of consumers or public health concerns. The beneficiaries span
industries and the nation. Examples include:
- Timber barons who pay lower
tax rates on logging sales and face fewer barriers to harvesting
trees in national forests because of administrative changes and
laws Mr. Bush signed.
- Energy producers who dodged
potential legal fees and cleanup costs after federal officials
revised clean-air standards.
- Heads of stock brokerages and
other multinational firms, which, under a special tax incentive
in the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004, are bringing hundreds
of millions of dollars they earned or stored abroad back into
the United States this year at reduced rates.
- Executives of defense contractors
United Technologies and The Washington Group, which won contracts
potentially totaling more than $6 billion to supply American
troops in Afghanistan and Iraq and rebuild both countries' infrastructure.
The same contractors won far less government work under President
Bill Clinton.
- Mining executives who tapped
new veins of coal, thanks to administrative rule changes that
opened swaths of hills and forests to their backhoes and left
once-protected streams vulnerable to pollution. . .
A Blade report in October showed
Ohio's 30 Pioneers and Rangers have secured more than $1.2 billion
from taxpayers since 2001 for their companies and lobbying clients.
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05352/624259.stm
FLORIDA VOTING OFFICIAL BELIEVES 2000
COUNT WERE RIGGED
[We ran part of this story but
there are important new details below]
WESH, WINTER HARBOR, FL - There's
new evidence that computer hackers could change election results
without anyone knowing about it, WESH 2 News reported.
The supervisor of elections in
Tallahassee tested voting machines several times over the last
several months, and on Monday, his workers were able to hack
into a voting machine and change the outcome. He said that same
thing might have happened in Volusia County in 2000.
The big controversy revolves
around a little black computer card that is smaller than a floppy
disk and bigger than a flash drive. The card is inserted into
voting machines that scan paper ballots. The card serves as the
machine's electronic brain.
But when Ion Sancho, Leon County's
Supervisor of Elections, tested the Diebold system and allowed
experts to manipulate the card electronically, he could change
the outcome of a mock election without leaving any kind of trail.
In other words, someone could fix an election and no one would
know.
"The expert that we used
simply programmed it on his laptop in his hotel room," Sancho
said. . . .
After watching his computer expert
change vote totals this week, Sancho said that he now believes
someone on the inside did the same thing in Volusia County in
2000. "Someone with access to the vote center in Volusia
County put it on a memory card and uploaded it into the main
system," Sancho said. . .
http://www.wesh.com/news/5542983/detail.html
FLORIDA TEST FINDS DIEBOLD VOTE MACHINE
EASY TO HACK
BLACK BOX VOTING - Due to contractual
non-performance and security design issues, Leon County (Florida)
supervisor of elections Ion Sancho told Black Box Voting that
he will never again use Diebold in an election. He has requested
funds to replace the Diebold system from the county. He will
issue a formal announcement to this effect shortly.
A test election was run in Leon
County today with a total of eight ballots - six ballots voted
"no" on a ballot question as to whether Diebold voting
machines can be hacked or not. Two ballots, cast by Dr. Herbert
Thompson and by Harri Hursti voted "yes" indicating
a belief that the Diebold machines could be hacked.
At the beginning of the test
election the memory card programmed by Harri Hursti was inserted
into an Optical Scan Diebold voting machine. A "zero report"
was run indicating zero votes on the memory card. In fact, however,
Hursti had pre-loaded the memory card with plus and minus votes.
The eight ballots were run through
the optical scan machine. The standard Diebold-supplied "ender
card" was run through as is normal procedure ending the
election. A results tape was run from the voting machine.
Correct results should have been:
Yes:2 No:6
However, just as Hursti had planned,
the results tape read:
Yes:7 No:1
The results were then uploaded
from the optical scan voting machine into the GEMS central tabulator.
The central tabulator is the "mother ship" that pulls
in all votes from voting machines. The results in the central
tabulator read:
Yes:7 No:1
This exploit, accomplished without
being given any password and with the same level of access given
thousands of poll workers across the USA, showed that the votes
themselves were changed in a one-step process. This hack would
not be detected in any normal canvassing procedure, and it required
only a single a credit-card sized memory card.
http://blackboxvoting.org
JUDGES REFUSE RECOUNT IN RACE DIVIDED
BY 323 VOTES OUT NEARLY 2 MILLION CAST
CAROL MORELLO WASHINGTON POST
- A three-judge panel in Richmond decided yesterday that more
than 500,000 ballots cast in the attorney general's race will
not be recounted and run again through tabulating machines. The
ruling was a setback to Democratic Sen. R. Creigh Deeds, who
trails Republican Del. Robert F. McDonnell by 323 votes out of
1.94 million cast in the Nov. 8 election. After McDonnell was
certified the winner, Deeds requested the recount, scheduled
to take place over two days beginning Dec. 20. Joseph Kearfott,
Deeds's attorney, had argued that all paper ballots counted on
optical scan machines should be rerun through tabulators to ensure
an accurate recount. The Deeds campaign had hoped to pick up
some "undervotes" that had not been counted by the
machines. . .
"Undervotes" is the
term used when a machine records no vote. That can be the result
of a voter's decision not to vote for either candidate. But in
some cases, Kearfott said, they occur when a voter mistakenly
marks the ballot outside the lines or in some other fashion that
the tabulator cannot recognize. . .
In a petition filed with the
court, Deeds's attorneys said there were 929 undervotes in the
race in Chesterfield County and 1,393 undervotes in Virginia
Beach. In addition, the petition included an affidavit from a
member of the Gloucester County Electoral Board in which he said
printouts from the optical scan machines recorded 78 uncounted
ballots.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/09/AR2005120901883_pf.html
OHIO HEADS TOWARDS LAW MAKING IT MORE
DIFFICULT TO CHALLENGE FIXED ELECTIONS
BLACK BOX VOTING FORUMS -A law
that will make democracy all but moot in Ohio is about to pass
the state legislature and to be signed by its Republican governor.
Despite massive corruption scandals besieging the Ohio GOP, any
hope that the Democratic party could win this most crucial swing
state in future presidential elections, or carry its pivotal
US Senate seat in 2006, are about to end. House Bill 3's most
publicized provision will require positive identification before
casting a vote. But it also opens voter registration activists
to partisan prosecution, exempts electronic voting machines from
public scrutiny, quintuples the cost of citizen-requested statewide
recounts and makes it illegal to challenge a presidential vote
count or, indeed, any federal election result in Ohio. When added
to the recently passed HB1, which allows campaign financing to
be dominated by the wealthy and by corporations, and along with
a Rovian wish list of GOP attacks on the ballot box, democracy
in Ohio could be all but over. We should rename the Buckeye State
the Diebold State and have done with it.
http://www.bbvforums.org/cgi-bin/forums/board-auth.cgi?file=/1954/15567.html
CEO IN VOTING MACHINE SCANDAL RESIGNS
AS FIRM'S STOCK, PROFITS PLUMMET
DAVE SCOTT, AKRON BEACON JOURNAL
- Controversial Diebold Inc. Chairman and Chief Executive Wally
O'Dell resigned Monday, only a few days after meeting with the
company's board. A company statement cited personal reasons for
the resignation, which took effect immediately.
Thomas W. Swidarski, a rising
star in the company recently put in charge of an important restructuring,
was named O'Dell's successor. . . Diebold's stock has fallen
out of favor as it has dealt with poor results from its voting
machine business and disappointing cost-cutting efforts in the
automated teller machine division.
Monday's announcement came after
the market closed with Diebold shares up 11 cents to $37.73,
but down 32.3 percent for the year. The shares reached a high
of $57.81 earlier this year.
The board of directors and Wally
mutually agreed that his decision to resign at this time for
personal reasons was in the best interest of all parties,'' Lauer
said in a news release issued after markets closed Monday. .
.
The company had disappointing
third-quarter results, seeing profits drop 45 percent. . .
O'Dell gained national attention
when he invited people to a fund-raiser for George Bush with
a 2003 letter stating he planned to help "Ohio deliver its
electoral votes to the president.'' Critics howled that the maker
of voting machines should not be involved in partisan politics.
The company has since forbidden its top executives from making
political contributions.
http://www.ohio.com/mld/beaconjournal/business/13395525.htm
OAKLAND TRIBUNE, JULY 2005 -
After possibly the most extensive testing ever on a voting system,
California has rejected Diebold's flagship electronic voting
machine because of printer jams and screen freezes, sending local
elections officials scrambling for other means of voting.
"There was a failure rate
of about 10 percent, and that's not good enough for the voters
of California and not good enough for me," Secretary of
State Bruce McPherson said.
If the machines had been used
in an election, the result could have been frustration for poll
workers and long lines for thousands of voters, elections officials
and voter advocates said Thursday. "We certainly can't take
any kind of risk like that with this kind of device on California
voters," McPherson said.
http://www.insidebayarea.com/oaklandtribune/localnews/ci_2898234
ACCORDING TO JOURNALIST Lynn
Landes, 80% of all votes in the last presidential election were
counted by Diebold and ES&S
CARRIE SWITZER, DESERET MORNING
NEWS - Grand County administrators have forwarded a "litany"
of complaints about electronic voting machines to state elections
officials. Despite glowing reviews from other parts of the country
and a public relations campaign by Diebold Corp. lauding its
equipment, the Grand County Council has passed along what it
calls six extreme examples of inaccuracy in the equipment. The
examples "are only a fraction of the errors that have surfaced
regarding use of this new voting equipment," states a letter
from the council to the state Election Voting Equipment Selection
Committee. . .
http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,595108751,00.html
PETER PHILLIPS, PROJECT CENSORED
- Election Systems & Software, Diebold, and Sequoia are the
companies primarily involved in implementing the new voting stations
throughout the country. All three have strong ties to the Bush
Administration. The largest investors in ES&S, Sequoia, and
Diebold are government defense contractors Northrup-Grumman,
Lockheed-Martin, Electronic Data Systems and Accenture. Diebold
hired Scientific Applications International Corporation 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: - Army Gen. Wayne Downing,
formerly on the National Security Council - 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. So we have a CIA/military private
firm that programmed the security in the voting machines for
companies owned by some of the largest military contracts in
the country.
JULIE CARR SMYTH, CLEVELAND PLAIN
DEALER, AUG 28 2003 - The head of a company vying to sell voting
machines in Ohio told Republicans in a recent fund-raising letter
that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral
votes to the president next year." The Aug. 14 letter from
Walden O'Dell, chief executive of Diebold Inc. - who has become
active in the re-election effort of President Bush - prompted
Democrats this week to question the propriety of allowing O'Dell's
company to calculate votes in the 2004 presidential election.
O'Dell attended a strategy pow-wow
with wealthy Bush benefactors - known as Rangers and Pioneers
- at the president's Crawford, Texas, ranch earlier this month.
The next week, he penned invitations to a $1,000-a-plate fund-raiser
to benefit the Ohio Republican Party's federal campaign fund
- partially benefiting Bush - at his mansion in the Columbus
suburb of Upper Arlington.
The letter went out the day before
Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, also a Republican, was
set to qualify Diebold as one of three firms eligible to sell
upgraded electronic voting machines to Ohio counties in time
for the 2004 election. . .
In his invitation letter, O'Dell
asked guests to consider donating or raising up to $10,000 each
for the federal account that the state GOP will use to help Bush
and other federal candidates - money that legislative Democratic
leaders charged could come back to benefit Blackwell. They urged
Blackwell to remove Diebold from the field of voting-machine
companies eligible to sell to Ohio counties. . .
NY TIMES EDITORIAL - What election
officials do not mention are the close ties they have to the
voting machine industry. A disturbing number end up working for
voting machine companies. . . Former secretaries of state from
Florida and Georgia have signed on as lobbyists for Election
Systems and Software and Diebold Election Systems. The list goes
on. ven while in office, many election officials are happy to
accept voting machine companies' largess. The Election Center
takes money from Diebold and other machine companies, though
it will not say how much. At the center's national conference
last month, the companies underwrote meals and a dinner cruise.
BEV HARRIS, a leading e-vote
watchdog, argues flaws in the central tabulators of the Deibold
electronic vote counting system could allow major vote count
changes whether or not a paper trail was in place. The Review
has long noted this danger but it has been ignored by most reformers
who have concentrated on the vote count at individual precincts.
The argument is not new: Ronnie Dugger pointed it out in his
New Yorker expose of computer voting back in the 1980s but it
has yet to be taken seriously.
Reports Harris: "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."
ASSOCIATED PRESS, 2004 - California's
top election official called for a criminal investigation of
Diebold Election Systems Inc. as he banned use of the company's
newest touch-screen voting machine, citing concerns about its
security and reliability. The ban will force as many as 2 million
voters in four counties, including San Diego, to use paper ballots
in November, marking their choices in ovals read by optical scanners.
Secretary of State Kevin Shelley asked the attorney general's
office to investigate allegations of fraud, saying Diebold had
lied to state officials. A spokesman for Attorney General Bill
Lockyer said prosecutors would review Shelley's claims.
PAUL FESTA, CNET - California's
Voting Systems and Procedures Panel grilled Diebold Election
Systems President Bob Urosevich and an attorney for the company
after releasing a blistering report that alleged the company
violated state law by installing uncertified software on voting
machines in four California counties. . . "Diebold marketed,
sold and installed its TSX (voting machine) in these four California
counties prior to full testing, prior to federal qualification,
and without complying with the state certification program,"
read a staff report on the investigation of Diebold Election
Systems released Tuesday. An audit of all 17 California counties
using the company's equipment, the report went on to say, "discovered
that Diebold had, in fact, installed uncertified software in
all its client counties without notifying the Secretary of State
as required by law, and that the software was not federally qualified
in three client counties."
OAKLAND TRIBUNE, 2004 - Attorneys
for Diebold Election Systems Inc. warned in late November that
its use of uncertified vote-counting software in Alameda County
violated California election law and broke its $12.7 million
contract with Alameda County. Soon after, a review of internal
legal memos obtained by the Oakland Tribune shows Diebold's attorneys
at the Los Angeles office of Jones Day realized the McKinney,
Texas-based firm also faced a threat of criminal charges and
exile from California elections.
Yet despite warnings from the
state's chief elections officer, Diebold continued fielding poorly
tested, faulty software and hardware in at least two of California's
largest urban counties during the Super Tuesday primary, when
e-voting temporarily broke down and voters were turned away at
the polls. . .
"Diebold may suffer from
gross incompetence, gross negligence. I don't know whether there's
any malevolence involved," said a senior California elections
official who spoke on condition of anonymity. "I don't know
why they've acted the way they've acted and the way they're continuing
to act. Notwithstanding their rhetoric, they have not learned
any lessons in terms of dealing with this secretary (of state)."
The memos show that for months,
Diebold attorneys at Jones Day have been exploring ways to keep
the nation's second-largest electronic voting provider from losing
an eighth of the national market. Jones Day partner Daniel D.
McMillan declined to comment on the content of the documents
except to confirm they were internal papers from his office.
He warned against drawing conclusions from the firm's memos.
NOVEMBER 2005
SUPREME COURT APPROVES LIFETIME PENALTY
FOR MINOR CRIMES
[This ruling is not only blatantly
anti-black but disenfranchises those imprisoned for minor crimes
such as marijuana possession]
JAMES VICINI, REUTERS - The U.S. Supreme Court let stand a Florida
law that generally bars convicted felons from voting, even after
they have completed their term of prison, probation and parole.
The high court rejected an appeal which argued that the law could
be challenged under a section of the Voting Rights Act of 1965,
which prohibits voter disqualification based on race.
Every state in the nation, except
for Maine and Vermont, prohibit, to one degree or another, felons
from voting. Fourteen states, including Florida, generally bar
felons from voting even after they have served their sentences
and have completed their terms of probation and parole. Approximately
5 million felons who have been released from prison are legally
disenfranchised, civil rights experts have estimated. About 1.4
million black men remain permanently disenfranchised.
WERE OHIO'S RESULTS RIGGED AGAIN?
BRAD FRIEDMAN, HUFFINGTON POST
- 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 will have no
choice but to look into it.
As usual, the Free Press' heroic
Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman are on the case. 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 by Reform Ohio Now -- a bi-partisan coalition pushing
these four initiatives for electoral reform . . . 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
. . . 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 employing 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.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brad-friedman/the-staggeringly-impossib_b_10589.html
BOB FITRAKIS AND HARVEY WASSERMAN,
FREE PRESS, OH - The Dispatch was somehow dead accurate on Issue
One, and then staggeringly wrong on Issues Two through Five.
Sadly, this impossible inconsistency between Ohio's most prestigious
polling operation and these final official referendum vote counts
have drawn virtually no public scrutiny. Though there were glitches,
this year's voting lacked the massive irregularities and open
manipulations that poisoned Ohio 2004. The only major difference
would appear to be the new installation of touch screen machines
in those additional 41 counties.
And thus the possible explanations
for the staggering defeats of Issues Two through Five boil down
to two: either the Dispatch polling---dead accurate for Issue
One---was wildly wrong beyond all possible statistical margin
of error for Issues 2-5, or the electronic machines on which
Ohio and much of the nation conduct their elections were hacked
by someone wanting to change the 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.
http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2005/1559
PROFESSOR CLAIMS KERRY THINKS ELECTION
WAS STOLEN
[Mark Crispin Miller, is author
of "Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election
& Why They'll Steal the Next One Too." He is a professor
at New York University. The following is from the radio program,
Democracy Now]
MARK CRISPIN MILLER - On Friday,
this last Friday night, I arranged to meet Senator Kerry at a
fundraiser to give him a copy of my book. He told me he now thinks
the election was stolen. He said he doesn't believe that he is
the person who can go out front on the issue, because of the
sour grapes, you know, question. But he said he believes it was
stolen. He says he argues about this with his Democratic colleagues
on the Hill. He had just had a big fight with Christopher Dodd
about it, because he said, you know, 'There's this stuff about
the voting machines; they're really questionable.' And Dodd was
angry. 'I don't want to hear about it,' you know, 'I looked into
it. There's nothing there.' . . .
AMY GOODMAN: Did Senator Kerry
say, when he said on Friday night, according to you, that he
does think the election was stolen, did he say why he raced out
the next day after, for months, the Democratic candidates had
assured the voters that they would make sure every vote was counted?
I mean, Mark Hertsgaard says in his own piece in Mother Jones,
"It didn't help that Kerry conceded immediately, despite
questions about Ohio. The American press is less an independent
truth seeker than a transmission belt for opinions of movers
and shakers in Washington. If the Democratic candidate wasn't
going to cry foul, the press certainly wasn't going to do it
for him."
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Well, that's
true. That was a real body blow to the democratic system, and
it demoralized a lot of people when Kerry pulled out. It's hard
to forgive him for that. Why did he do it? Well, according to
my evidence and I've got this in Fooled Again, Kerry was swayed
by the brain trust around him. These are people like, you know,
Bob Shrum, Mary Beth Cahill – they're, you
know, Democratic Party war horses. I don't think they have a
stellar record of winning campaigns, and I don't really understand
how it is that they were hired to do this, but they persuaded
him up in Martha's Vineyard that he should pull out, otherwise,
he told John Edwards in his call, Kerry said, "They say
that if I don't pull out, they are going to call us sore losers,"
as if there's. . .
AMY GOODMAN: Are you saying,
Mark Crispin Miller, that John Edwards didn't want to concede?
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Absolutely
not. I spoke to someone, a relative of his who was with him when
the phone call came from Kerry. This is this in the book, Fooled
Again. Kerry called him on the cell phone, and don't forget that
Edwards himself, four hours before, had just been on national
TV promising righteously to count every vote, got a big hand.
Now he felt he was being made to look like a fool, and he argued
with Kerry vehemently. He said, "It's too soon, you know.
Wait." Kerry, you know, said this thing about how they will
call us sore losers, as if that's worse than the country, you
know, going fascist, whatever. And Edwards said quite understandably,
"So what?" You know, "So what if they call us
sore losers?" I mean, they are going to call them names
in any case. But it's true, Mark is right, Kerry's caving in
like that gave an enormous gift to the right wing. They could
now claim, "Well, even their candidate doesn't think it
was stolen." And they left, you know, the American people
hanging out to dry there.
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/04/1532222&mode=thread&tid=25
OCTOBER 2005
GAO SAYS E-VOTING STILL ISN'T READY
ANNE BROACHE, CNET - Electronic
voting systems aren't likely to be sufficiently secure even by
the 2006 elections, government auditors warned. Existing systems
are rife with problems, the Government Accountability Office
said in a 107-page document. The list of vulnerabilities included
everything from easily-guessed administrator passwords and voter-verified
paper-trail design flaws, to incorrect software installation
and system failures on Election Day.
The Election Assistance Commission,
created in 2002 to help states and localities implement e-voting
systems, has neglected to lay out a clear timeline for addressing
those problems, the report said. It also says that it's unrealistic
to expect anything to change by next fall.
Even as a dozen or more non-governmental
groups have begun drafting their own standards, federal agencies
are still in the process of writing their own voluntary guidelines
for voting systems and procedures for certifying them, the GAO
determined. . .
"It is totally unacceptable
that in 21st century America, we would allow faulty machines
and systems to rob citizens of their voting rights," said
Rep. John Conyers, a Michigan Democrat. "While GAO offers
some modest recommendations for improvement, it is incumbent
upon Congress to respond to this problem and to enact much-needed
reforms such as a voter-verified paper audit trail that protects
all Americans' right to vote."
http://news.com.com/E-voting+wont+be+verified+until+2006/2100-1028_3-5907036.html
THE LEFT DOWPLAYS 2004 ELECTION FRAUD
BOB FITRAKIS AND HARVEY WASSERMAN,
COLUMBUS FREE PREE, OH - If some of its key publications are
any indicator, much of the American left seems unable to face
the reality that the election of 2004 was stolen. So in all likelihood,
unless something radical is done, 2008 will be too.
Misguided and misinformed articles
in both Tom Paine and Mother Jones Magazine indicate a dangerous
inability to face the reality that these stolen elections mean
nothing less than the death of what's left of American democracy,
and the permanent enthronement of the Rovian GOP.
As investigative reporters based
in Columbus, Ohio, we witnessed first-hand, up close and personal,
exactly how the 2004 election was stolen, and how it will most
likely be done in 2008. In the precinct in which Harvey Wasserman
grew up, and in the one where Bob Fitrakis now lives, we saw
the well-funded, profoundly cynical and deadly effective mechanisms
by which the Bush-Cheney-Rove-Blackwell GOP machine switched
a victory for John Kerry to an easily-repeatable defeat for democracy.
That Kerry and the spineless
Ohio and national Democratic Parties have been complicit is a
crucial part of the problem much of the left also seems unwilling
to face. But if you live in Franklin County, Ohio, and watch
the Republican and Democratic Parties run joint pickets against
progressive candidate, and cut backroom deals allowing incumbents
of either party run unopposed, you may miss the full scope of
the disaster. . .
Let's do the bookends: before
the voting, Ohio's infamous Republican Secretary of State J.
Kenneth Blackwell clearly and vehemently denied poll access to
teams of international observers from the United Nations and
other international election observers.
Since the election, he has effectively
stonewalled and sabotaged all recount attempts, to the point
that no credible accounting of the Ohio election has ever been
done. To this day, at least 100,000 votes remain uncounted, electronic
voting machines remain unaudited, key hardware and data files
have been trashed, paper ballots have sat unguarded for anyone
to pilfer and tallies in dozens of key counties remain filled
with statistical impossibilities. . .
In Florida 2000, the means of
the crime were limited to a few instances of intimidation, butterfly
ballots, computer manipulation and a corrupt Supreme Court. But
four years after, in Ohio, dozens of sometimes subtle, sometimes
blatant tricks were designed to steal a few thousand votes here,
a few thousand more there, until victory was in GOP hands. Unless
they are exposed and blocked, every one of these scams can and
will be duplicated throughout the United States in 2006 and 2008.
The question is: will the left follow mainstream Democrats with
sheep-like acceptance as every election goes the same way from
here on? And if so, why bother even staging more votes in this
country at all?
http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2005/1502
JULY 2005 . . .
CALIFORNIA REJECTS DIEBOLD MACHINES
AS TOO ERROR-PRONE
OAKLAND TRIBUNE - After possibly
the most extensive testing ever on a voting system, California
has rejected Diebold's flagship electronic voting machine because
of printer jams and screen freezes, sending local elections officials
scrambling for other means of voting.
"There was a failure rate
of about 10 percent, and that's not good enough for the voters
of California and not good enough for me," Secretary of
State Bruce McPherson said.
If the machines had been used
in an election, the result could have been frustration for poll
workers and long lines for thousands of voters, elections officials
and voter advocates said Thursday. "We certainly can't take
any kind of risk like that with this kind of device on California
voters," McPherson said.
http://www.insidebayarea.com/oaklandtribune/localnews/ci_2898234 |