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The following article summaries are listed chronologically
with the most recent posted articles on the top of this page.
Each article heading is a link to the article itself.
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NIST RECOMMENDS SCRAPPING DRE'SSays Machines Should be Decertified! Also Says So-Called'Voter Verified Paper Audit Trails (VVPAT) Should Not BeUsed' in Voting Systems!_______________________________________________
Posted by CrisisPapers in Editorials & Other Articles
Tue Dec 05th 2006, 11:05 AM| Ernest Partridge |
Who could have guessed it?
Sure enough, the pre-election polls indicated a likely Democratic victory in the House.But the Senate? That victory was especially sweet, for being unexpected.
Those of us who are convinced that the previous three elections were stolen by meansof paperless, "direct record electronic" (DRE) voting machines and compilers, feared
that the secret DRE codes would once again frustrate the public will and keep both houses
in control of the GOP.
DRE critics such as Brad Friedman (of BradBlog) and Mark Crispin Miller, warned usto expect still more e-vote rigging, but further suggested that "the fix" could be over-ridden
by a "tsunami" of protest votes against the GOP and Bushism. Turns out, they were right.
The Republican software geniuses at Diebold, ES&S, etc. underestimated the size of the
wave of public indignation. Just three or four percent vote shifting in Virginia, Montana
and Missouri seemed sufficient to keep those seats, and thus the Senate, in GOP control.
They were proven to be wrong. The House was a much more difficult assignment:
too many individual seats to "fix."
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The 2004 US Elections:The Mother of all Vote Frauds
"Those who cast the votes decide nothing, those who count the votes decideeverything." - Joseph Stalin
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Hacking Democracy (HBO Special)
Electronic voting machines count about 87% of the votes cast in America today.
But are they reliable? Are ... all » they safe from tampering? From a current
congressional hearing to persistent media reports that suggest misuse of data and
even outright fraud, concerns over the integrity of electronic voting are growing by
the day. And if the voting process is not secure, neither is America's democracy.
The timely, cautionary documentary HACKING DEMOCRACY exposes gaping
holes in the security of America's electronic voting system.
_____________________________________________________
Twelve People Could Hack National Election
Part 1: GoTV's Hack the Vote
Part 2: Hack the Vote
Part 3: GoTV's Hack the Vote
Part 4: GoTV's Hack the Vote
Millions of voters will be casting their ballots electronically this election. But they’ll be using a technology that is far from proven and is vulnerable to compromise. Hack The Vote is an in-depth look at the still-unsolved problems with electronic voting, and GoTV’s investigative team has spoken to the experts with in-depth knowledge of those issues. We have the first on-camera interview with a former employee of Diebold, one of the companies that make these machines. This whistleblower talks about company practices that compromised the security of these machines and the votes for which they were used; the mechanical issues that make these machines unreliable, and how easy it is to steal an election. We have video of a Princeton University project during which a Diebold machine is hacked and a vote-swapping virus is installed. And we interview an expert, who shows us one of these e-voting machines and demonstrates how easy it is to compromise. Don’t cast a ballot this year until you watch GoTV’s special investigative report Hack The Vote. It’s on your cell phone now.
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EXCLUSIVE: FIRST BUSH-APPOINTED CHAIR OF U.S.ELECTION ASSISTANCECOMMISSION SAYS 'NO STANDARDS'FOR E-VOTING DEVICES, SYSTEM 'RIPE FOR STEALINGELECTIONS'!Former Chair Says He 'Was Deceived', EAC and Federal Efforts forElection Reform 'A Charade', 'Travesty'Soaries was appointed by George W. Bush as the first chair of thecommission created by the federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA) in thewake of the 2000 Presidential Election Debacle. In the interview,available here for the first time, Soaries excoriates both Congress andthe White House, referring to their dedication to reforming Americanelection issues as "a charade" and "a travesty," and says the systemnow in place is "ripe for stealing elections and for fraud."____________________________________________________
ZOGBY POLL:VOTERS QUESTION OUTCOME OF
2004 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION
Only 45% of Voters “Very Confident” Bush Won Election “fair and square”
By Michael Collins
Part II of a II Part Series (Part I)
“Scoop” Independent News
Washington , DC
At their lowest points of popularity, do you recall anyone who claimed that Presidents’
Carter and Nixon stole their elections or that they didn’t win fair and square? Did any
analysts or activist groups clam massive election fraud in the elections that brought these
ultimately very unpopular presidents to office?
How confident are you that George Bush really won the 2004 presidential election? If
you are a typical American voter and you have doubts, how did those doubts arise? A
mid August Zogby Poll of 1018 likely voters answered the first of these two very important
questions (The author was a contributing sponsor for the survey.)
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Will the Next Election Be Hacked?
By Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Rolling Stone
Thursday 05 October 2006 Issue
Fresh disasters at the polls - and new evidence from an industry insider - prove that
electronic voting machines can't be trusted.
Read Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s "Was the 2004 Election Stolen?" in the June 15th, 2006, issue
of "Rolling Stone," his investigation into how Republicans prevented more than 350,000
voters in Ohio from casting ballots or having their votes counted - enough to have put
John Kerry in the White House.
The debacle of the 2000 presidential election made it all too apparent to most
Americans that our electoral system is broken. And private-sector entrepreneurs werequick to offer a fix: Touch-screen voting machines, promised the industry and its lobbyists,
would make voting as easy and reliable as withdrawing cash from an ATM. Congress,
always ready with funds for needy industries, swiftly authorized $3.9 billion to upgrade
the nation's election systems - with much of the money devoted to installing electronic
voting machines in each of America's 180,000 precincts. But as midterm elections approach
this November, electronic voting machines are making things worse instead of better.
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HACKED: VIRUS IMPLANTED, SPREAD ON DIEBOLD
New, First-of-Its Kind, University Study Reveals Malicious Code Can Be Easily
Inserted into Voting Machine, Spread from One System to the Next, Resulting in
Flipped Votes, and Stolen Elections…All Without a Trace Being Left Behind
Study Also Confirms that Voter Access Cards Can Be Created At Home to Defeat
Security Protocols, Allowing Voters to Vote Multiple Times in a Single Election!
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Video-Diebold Machine Easily Hacked by an Implanted Virus
Here's a very alarming video made by some computer scientists at Princeton. They have successfully written hacking software to steal votes on Diebold voting machines that will be used in 10% of November's elections. It can be installed in less than a minute and erases itself when the election is over leaving absolutely no trace that there has been any tampering at all. Their findings have so far been largely ignored by the mainstream press. This is more scary than anything I've seen. If we thought we had even a shred of democracy left this confirms that we don't.
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Video-Fox News Exposes the Princeton Report
that confirms that Diebold machines cannot be trusted in elections.
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Date: Friday, July 21 @ 10:20:54 EDT
Topic: Elections
A response to Michael Scherer's "Taking the paper trail to Washington: The dangers of electronicvoting machines got tallied Wednesday on Capitol Hill"
I hate to rain on anyone's parade, but this is not a good idea.
Why is our democracy at risk? Is it just because those DRE machines don't leave a paper trail? Or isit that the Bush Republicans detest democracy, since they cannot wield power without subverting the
electoral system?
The fact is that they're pushing an agenda that could never win majority support in the United States--from liberals or conservatives. They've therefore had no choice but to commit election fraud, repeatedly and on a mammoth scale, deploying every trick and tactic in the book, and then some.
As I point out in Fooled Again, the Bush Republicans used paperless machines to cut the Democratic vote, not only in Ohio but from coast to coast--but they also cut the vote in states and counties that did not use paperless machines; and in those places that did use them, the Busheviks also relied on many other means of disenfranchising the majority.
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How to Pre-empt a 'November Surprise
Date: Thursday, July 20 @ 09:55:08 EDT
Topic: Elections
If the GOP should lose the House and/or the Senate on Election Day, they will pick out ahandful of the "closest" races--as many as they need to hang on to majority control--and
start to scream like hell about ELECTION FRAUD.
That's right: the major perpetrators of such fraud will cast themselves as victims of the verycrime that put them where they are, and charge the Democrats with having used the very
tactics that the Bush Republicans have now perfected: legal/bureaucratic disenfranchisement,
e-voting manipulation, hostile challenges to would-be voters, covert efforts at disinformation,
countless ballots thrown away, and so on.
This is what we'll hear non-stop from Rush, O'Reilly, Hannity and Coulter; Hastert, Boehner,Sensenbrenner, Graham and Coburn; even Bush and Cheney and Karl Rove himself.
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'The Stolen Election of 2004'
Date: Wednesday, July 12 @ 09:42:46 EDT
Topic: Elections
The 2004 presidential contest between Democratic challenger Senator John Kerry and theRepublican incumbent, President Bush Jr., amounted to another stolen election. This has been
well documented by such investigators as Rep. John Conyers, Mark Crispin Miller, Bob Fitrakis,
Harvey Wasserman, Bev Harris, and others. Here is an overview of what they have reported,
along with observations of my own.
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A Call to Investigate the 2004 Election
WE'VE ALL heard the story. Nov. 2, 2004, was shaping up as a day of celebration for Democrats.
The exit polls were predicting a victory for Senator John Kerry. Many Americans, including most political observers, sat down to watch the evening television coverage convinced that Kerry would be the next president.
But the counts that were being reported on TV bore little resemblance to the exit poll projections. In key state after state, tallies differed significantly from the projections. In every case, that shift favored President George W. Bush. Nationwide, exit polls projected a 51 to 48 percent Kerry victory, the mirror image of Bush's 51 to 48 percent win. But the exit poll discrepancy is not the only cause for concern.
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Petition for Recount in California Congressional Election
June 26, 2006
I don't know how else to put it, but every voting machine used in the June 6th special
election run-off for the U.S. House seat vacated by the disgraced Randy "Duke" Cunningham
in California's 50th congressional district has now been shown to have been effectively illegal
-- by federal standards, rules and provisions and by California state rules, laws and provisions.
And now, by the San Diego County Registrar of Voters own admission.
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Diebold Machines -Threat To National Security
This week has demonstrated that Diebold e-vote machines are not simply bad for
democracy but also constitute a real threat to national security.
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VOTING RIGHTS ACT NAILED TO BURNING CROSS
Behind the “Delay” in Renewing Law is Scheme for Theft of ‘08
White Sheets Changed for Spreadsheets
by Greg Palast
For The Guardian
June 23, 2006
[New York] Don’t kid yourself. The Republican Party’s decision yesterday to “delay” the renewal of the Voting Rights Act has not a darn thing to do with objections of the Republican’s White Sheets Caucus.
Complaints by a couple of Good Ol' Boys to legislation has never stopped the GOP leadership from rolling over dissenters.
This is a strategic stall — meant to de-criminalize the Republican Party's new game of challenging voters of color by the hundreds of thousands.
In the 2004 Presidential race, the GOP ran a massive multi-state, multi-million-dollar operation to challenge the legitimacy of Black, Hispanic and Native-American voters. The methods used broke the law -- the Voting Rights Act. And while the Bush Administration's Civil Rights Division grinned and looked the other way, civil rights lawyers are circling, preparing to sue to stop the violations of the Act before the 2008 race.
Therefore, Republicans have promised to no longer break the law -- not by going legit … but by eliminating the law.______________________________________________________________
Interview: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Journalist Q&A
PR Week USA Jun 19 2006 11:00
This month, Rolling Stone ran an investigative feature claiming that Republicans used a
systematic combination of voter disenfranchisement and fraud, centered in Ohio, to rob
John Kerry of a win in the 2004 presidential election.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an environmental lawyer and son of liberal icon Bobby Kennedy,
wrote the article, available, along with supporting research, at rollingstone.com. Kennedy
spoke to PRWeek about the story.
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PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION 2004
WHAT REALLY HAPPENED ON NOVEMBER 2, 2004?This is a collection of video footage and news articles surrounding the investigations
into the 2004 Presidential Election. By midnight John Kerry was winning the exit polls
by a decent margin. A phone call was made by Karl Rove that night to ABC news and
other stations reporting that the numbers he "showed" didn't match the exit polls, that
according to his information, Bush was winning. Why did Karl Rove have access to this
information, and why was his information different than all the exit polls and news channels?
Since when does a "Senior Adviser" have access to the vote count in a Presidential election?
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The Help Republicans Vote Act
Date: Monday, June 05 @ 10:14:11 EDT
Topic: Elections
I don't mind saying I'm one of those left-wing wackos who gives a rip about the veracityof our electoral process. Yep. I'm just that insane. I'm clearly a moonbat! I'm simultaneously
from the moon and bat-shaped.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s latest investigative report in Rolling Stone, along with Mark CrispinMiller's Fooled Again have jointly renewed a process of legitimizing skepticism over the presidential
election results in 2000, 2002, and 2004.
Thankfully.
What's so horribly wrong with examining the results of an election and finding evidence of fraud --electronic manipulation or other forms of chicanery? And how does that qualify anyone as loony, be
they Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Senator Boxer, Congressman Conyers, Randi Rhodes, Thom Hartmann, or Mark Crispin Miller? Hell, it's not like they're expecting you to believe that Hillary Clinton had Vince Foster whacked, or that American G.I.s executed Nazi SS soldiers at Malmedy in 1944 (the exact opposite happened, O'Reilly).
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Posted by CrisisPapers in Editorials & Other Articles
Tue Jun 06th 2006, 09:28 AM| Ernest Partridge |
"Simplify! Simplify! Simplify!" -- H. D. Thoreau, Walden
Complication of the election integrity issue works to the advantage of the status quo; which is to say,the increasing use of paperless, unauditable Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machines.
More complications abound as critics of the status quo attempt to prove that past, and presumably
future, elections were and will be fraudulent.
In fact, the controversy can be reduced to two simple questions:
1. Can defenders of the status quo prove that the 2004 (and also the 2000 and 2002) elections werefair and accurate?
2. Can defenders of the status quo refute the critics?
The answer to the first question is simple and straightforward: they cannot, because the DREs(and also the central compiling computers) were designed to exclude proof. The software is secret,
and thus closed to inspection and validation, and there is no independent record of the votes against
which the totals can be verified. (Running the same computations again is not a "recount"). Moreover,
computing experts have found, and demonstrated, numerous "holes" in the machines through which
voting totals can be finagled, and reports of still more flaws continue to come in.
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Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman: 'RFK and Rolling Stone Nail Ohio's
Stolen 2004 Election, but Much More Must Be Done'
Posted on Sunday, June 04 @ 07:39:02 EDT
At last!!!!
The story of the stolen election of 2004 has FINALLY busted into the mainstream media, thanksto Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Rolling Stone Magazine.
We all owe them great thanks.
Now we'll see if there's any further media follow-up. And if the Democratic Party actually DOESSOMETHING about the fact that America is about to be hijacked again in 2006, and then for the
third straight presidential race in 2008.
The massive article in this week's RS focuses on the impossible contrast between exit polls showinga clear and overwhelming Kerry victory versus bogus "official" vote counts giving George W. Bush
four more catastrophic years in the White House. It also details some of the horrific intimidation,
manipulation and outright theft used by Ohio's GOP Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell to deny
hundreds of thousands of mostly Democratic voters their right to a ballot. And it discusses in some depth
the fact that Diebold and other electronic voting machine and software producers make it possible for any
inside operator to use a laptop and a few keystrokes to flip an entire election in a matter of seconds.
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'Bush Stole Both Elections'
Posted on Sunday, June 04 @ 07:40:08 EDT
The latest polls say Americans now dislike Bush more than any other president includingeven Tricky Dick. It only took the public five and half year to see through him.
That said, I wonder how long it will take people to accept the news that Bush never woneither election and the country is in such a mess that it will take 50 years to get back to how
it was when Bush took office.
According to Robert Kennedy Jr's article in the June issue of Rolling Stone, "Republicansderided anyone who expressed doubts about Bush's victory as nut cases in 'tinfoil hats.'"
Well Republicans can call me whatever they like because this nut-case is finally going to weighin on this subject.
Bush needed Ohio. He could not win the election without Ohio and he knew it.
So just as you might expect with the Bush gang, voter fraud was rampant in Ohio, described as"the critical battleground state that clinched Bush's victory in the Electoral College," by Mr Kennedy.
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Kennedy-Was the 2004 Election Stolen?
Republicans prevented more than 350,000 voters in Ohio from casting ballots or having their votes counted -- enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.
BY ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.
The complete article, with Web-only citations, follows. For more, see exclusive documents,
sources, charts and commentary.
Like many Americans, I spent the evening of the 2004 election watching the returns on television
and wondering how the exit polls, which predicted an overwhelming victory for John Kerry, had
gotten it so wrong. By midnight, the official tallies showed a decisive lead for George Bush -- and
the next day, lacking enough legal evidence to contest the results, Kerry conceded. 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,''(1) and
The New York Times declared that ''there is no evidence of vote theft or errors on a large scale.''(2)
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Palast-How They Stole Ohio
And the GOP 4-step Recipe to 'Blackwell' the USA in 2008
Abracadabra: Three million votes vanish
A Buzzflash Exclusive
June 1, 2006
By Greg Palast
[Heads up! Catch Robert Kennedy Jr., Mike Papantonio and Greg Palast this Saturday onAir America's 'Ring of Fire' on the shoplifting of the last election … and the next one.]
This is a fact: On November 2, 2004, in the State of Ohio, 239,127 votes for President ofthe United States were dumped, rejected, blocked, lost and left to rot uncounted.
And not just anyone's vote. Dive into the electoral dumpster and these "spoiled"votes have a very dark color indeed.
________________________________________________________________________On Electronic Voting: We Were Always Right, They Were
Always Wrong...
Date: Saturday, May 13 @ 09:03:17 EDT
Topic: Elections
The Corporate Media Finally Begins to Notice
On November 20, 2004, in an article about those of us concerned about what happened in thePresidential Election, the New York Times wrote that such concerns were little more than "the
conspiracy theories of leftwing bloggers."
What a difference a year and a half makes.
In this morning's NY Times we find this (actually, understated) headline, "New Fears of SecurityRisks in Electronic Voting Systems".
The "fears," of course, aren't "new" at all. But if that's what the NYTimes needs to do to save face,we're happy to look the other direction and applaud them for finally jumping in to cover what they
should have been covering for the last two years. Every damned day.
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NIGHT OF THE UNCOUNTED:How to Disappear Three Million VotesBut the e-mails and their technical attachments won't mean a thingunless you understand some arcane facts about elections American-style.First, consider CNN's Ohio exit polls broadcast just after midnightafter the voting ended on Election Day. They show John Kerry defeated GeorgeBush among women voters by 53% to 47%. And among men voters, Kerry defeatedBush 51% to 49%.So here's your question, class: What third sex put George Bush over thetop in Ohio and gave him the White House?Answer: The Uncounted.In Ohio, there were 153,237 ballots simply thrown away, more than theBush "victory" margin. In New Mexico the uncounted vote was fives times theBush alleged victory margin of 5,988. In Iowa, Bush's triumph of 13,498 wasoverwhelmed by 36,811 votes rejected. In all, over three million voteswere cast but never counted in the 2004 presidential election. The officialnumber is bad enough-1,855,827 ballots cast not counted, reported tothe federal government's Election's Assistance Commission. But the feds aremissing data from several cities and entire states too embarrassed toreport the votes they failed to count. Correcting for the under-reporting ofthe undercount, the number of ballots cast but never counted goes to3,600,380. And there are certainly more we couldn't locate to tote up.Why doesn't your government tell you this? Hey, they do. It's rightthere in black-and-white on a U.S. Census Bureau announcement released sevenmonths after the election -- in a footnote to the report on voter turn -- out.The Census tabulation of voters voting "differs," from ballots tallied bythe Clerk of the House of Representatives for the 2004 presidential race by 3.4million votes.This is the hidden presidential count which, excepting the Census'whispered footnote, has not been reported._________________________________________________________
Hand Counted Paper Ballots in 2008
Sheila Parks
The right to vote, as well as the principle of “one person, one vote,” are cornerstones of
our democracy. The anti-slavery, women’s suffrage, and civil rights movements as well as
the expansion of voting to young people are all part of the history of electoral reform in this
country. Equally fundamental is the assurance that each voter knows that her or his vote counts
and is counted as intended. At this time in our history, many have lost confidence in our voting system.
The presidential elections of 2000 and 2004, and at least six contests in the mid-term elections
of 2002, raised many questions about fraud and electronic voting machines. The Help America
Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) established by HAVA,
and the Carter-Baker National Commission on Federal Election Reform were all created after the
2000 election to improve the electoral process. All of these efforts, however, have been detrimental
to the prevention and detection of election fraud and error due to their advocacy of the use of
electronic voting machines. One election reform advocate, Bev Harris of Black Box Voting, provides
a particularly vivid glimpse into the scope of the problems associated with electronic voting machines.
She notes that, at a special Texas meeting of the Carter-Baker Commission, “I asked a member of the
Panel why they [the Commission] had not asked a single question about how hacks can be done. He
said it is not necessary to understand how the system can be compromised in order to protect it.”
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Bev Harris of Blackbox Voting -End Secrecy
If we want a trustworthy system, we need to be unafraid to entertain the idea
that if you make any facet of elections secret (other than who a person votes
for), it will attract criminals. Such a temptation may take place inside a
voter registration database or voting machine vendor's operation. In the case
of a rogue programmer, management need not even know (if the programmer is
positioned correctly). It may exist inside an elections office, or with a
pollworker, or through a political operative.
You won't stop it by passing a rule against it. We need to be lobbying to end
secrecy and re-enable citizen oversight. Lobbying for anything else may give us
"fine" elections but we'll never really know whether our vote was counted as we
cast it.
Save your lobbying for something that eliminates secrecy. And if only a computer
scientist can understand it or only an elections official can monitor it, it's
still secrets. H.B. 550 doesn't do much of anything to get at the core problem.
http://www.blackboxvoting.org._____________________________________________________
'Is the Mainstream Media Finally Getting Half the Rigged
Voting Machine Story?'
Posted on Thursday, March 30 @ 10:15:22 EST
The fact that electronic voting machines don't work may finally be sinking into a segmentof the mainstream media. The fact that e-voting machines can, have been, and will be used
to steal elections, continues to go unreported.
At least the corporate media has moved from framing the allegations of e-voting fraud as"conspiracy theory" into reporting epic errors in election results.
Both USA Today and the New York Times have run recent articles on the mechanicalproblems surrounding electronic voting that mirror much of what happened during the theft
the presidential election in Ohio 2004.
On March 28, USA Today's front page reported, that "Primary voting-machine troubles raiseconcerns for general election." The story focused on primaries in Illinois and Texas, where
all-too-familiar problems include more votes being counted than there were registered voters,
and thousands of votes missing from a recount.
Even Texas voters couldn't ignore the fact that an initial ballot tally in Ft. Worth showed 150,000votes ". . . even though there were only one-third that many voters," according to USA Today.
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Jonathan Simon-“No” to Holt Election Reform Bill
Very well informed voting integrity activist, Jonathan Simon, is strongly opposed to supporting
the Holt bill in its current form. Please take a minute to review Jonathan's remarks and the
associated links and consider what action steps you may wish to take in light of this additional
information, including contacting True Majority and your Congressional members to express your
concerns.
The Holt bill is not a step forward but a step in a very dangerous direction: the illusion of
honest elections coupled with a federalization of counting and auditing process that only the White
House and the vendors could love. Just as HAVA, on its surface, appeared to be an improvement,
but really set in motion the disaster we are now witnessing, Holt, as written, will set us back even
further, while providing the political cover that the problem has been addressed and we can all stop
our shouting. Here is a two-part analysis of the Holt bill that I hope you are willing to review and send
out to your list
________________________________________________________________________________
What Part Of The "Still Allowing" - Do You Just Not Understand?
by The Old Hippie, Because It Is So Beyond The Pale, And So In Our Collective FaceThe spin, propaganda, bullshit lying just continues on, and you keep "allowing" them to continue
to get away with it, without real protest or revolt. Just as they are continuing to be "allowed" to
change the very structure of what used to be "our" America, its laws, its ideals, even its definition,
into an openly criminal, and proven corrupt, arrogantly opportunistic theocratic corporatist profiteering
single-party-ruled imperialist oligarchy, of, by, and for, the few. All of the born-again imbeciles that
actually wanted this, do truly deserve what's coming much more than the "we" that have fought this
from its beginnings, even though it is now obvious we just didn't fight hard enough.
________________________________________________________
CALIFORNIA VOTERS FILE LAWSUIT AGAINST STATE'S USE,
PURCHASE OF DIEBOLD VOTING SYSTEMS!
Sec. of State Bruce McPherson, 18 County Registrars Named as Defendants
Violations of State, Federal Laws Alleged, State Senator Releases Comment Condemning McPherson,
Outlining Violations
As The BRAD BLOG broke yesterday, a lawsuit has today been filed in San Francisco Superior
Court demanding that California Sec. of State Bruce McPherson follow state and federal law in
regards to his recent re-certification of Diebold voting machines in the state.
_______________________________________________________________________
NATIONAL BALLOT INTEGRITY PROJECT
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Q: What’s wrong with computer voting machines? Why can’t we safely entrust
our elections to automation?
· Five former CIA Directors are identified as directly involved in election engineering,
overtly or covertly: John Deutch, R. James Woolsey, Bobby Ray Inman, Robert Gates, and
George H.W. Bush.
· Investigative journalist, Lynn Landes, reports that SAIC (Science Applications
International Corp., sometimes also referred to as Scientific Applications International Corp.),
of San Diego, California, is described as, “the shadow ruling class within the Pentagon,”
and as a “behemoth military defense contractor with a shadowy, if not tarnished reputation,”
which maintains strong business ties to the military and intelligence communities, such as the
NSA and CIA. Many of SAIC’s board members are formerly with the Pentagon and CIA.
· Behemoth military contractor SAIC and ChoicePoint, Inc., of Atlanta, Georgia, have
developed a strategic alliance, teaming up as partners in “data mining”.
· SAIC is aligned with a number of major voting machine vendors, including Diebold
Election Systems, Hart Intercivic, VoteHere and ES&S (Election Systems & Software).
· SAIC has bid for state voter registration database contracts, such as that of the State of
Nevada, under the name of “Votec/SAIC/ES&S”.
_____________________________________________________________
Let's Get Real about Our Rigged Voting System
By Bev Conover
Online Journal Editor & Publisher
Mar 10, 2006, 00:40Writer after writer keeps talking about how we are just going to march into the polls
come November and vote the monsters out. If only that were true.
The system is rigged, folks. Just like oil and water, computers and voting don't mix. And
that includes touch screens, optically-scanned ballots, even punch cards that are tabulated
by computers. Worse, the voting equipment is in the hands of partisan private firms and
they deny you the right to see the code, claiming it is proprietary information.
Adding so-called "verifiable" paper receipts to touch screens would be meaningless, because
a handful of scumbags still can change the results just enough to give their candidates a win
without triggering a hand recount.
Is this so hard to understand? It must be, because we, Bev Harris, Lynn Landes Bob Fitrakis
and others have been screaming about this elephant in the room for nearly six years.
______________________________________________________________
'Why Did J. Kenneth Blackwell Seek, Then Hide, His Association with
Super-rich Extremists and E-voting Magnates?'
Posted on Friday, March 10 @ 10:11:59 EST
The man who stole the 2004 election for George W. Bush -- Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell-- has posted a picture of himself addressing the white supremacist ultra-right Council for National Policy (CNP).
He then pulled the picture and tried to hide his participation in the meeting by removing mention of it from
his website, kenblackwell.com.
First discovered by a netroots investigator, Blackwell's photo at the CNP meeting was found onBlackwell's website on Monday, March 6. Then it mysteriously disappeared.
That J. Kenneth Blackwell would now address an organization so thoroughly entwined with
the extreme right wing and the electronic voting machine industry can hardly be seen as an
accident. Blackwell's active presence in both Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004 make him a critical
player in the rise of the Bush regime. As governor of Ohio, he could solidify Republican
control of presidential elections for decades to come.
______________________________________________________________________________
LEGAL PROCEEDINGS LAUNCHED AGAINST
DIEBOLD IN FLORIDA!
Leon County Election Supervisor Alleges 'Breach of Contract' After Security Test Revealed
Hackable Elections Possible on Diebold Optical-Scan Systems!
E-Voting Monolith and 'Competitors' All Refuse to do Business with County Unless the Elected
Ion Sancho is 'Removed from Office'
Ion Sancho is fighting back.
Sancho, the Election Supervisor of Leon County, Florida who exposed a number of securityflaws in Electronic Voting Machines made by the Diebold corporation of North Canton, Ohio,
today launched legal "breach of contract" proceedings against the company. The action has been
filed on behalf of the Leon County Supervisor of Elections office.
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March 7, 2005
By Ernest Partridge, The Crisis PapersThe accumulated weight of evidence of election fraud – statistical, circumstantial, and
anecdotal – has failed to move the mainstream media to report or investigate this evidence,
or the Democratic party to acknowledge and protest the apparent Republican control of our
elections.
This essay is not yet another account of that evidence, which I have spelled out extensively
and which I firmly believe to be compelling.
Instead, I wish to deal with another indicator that our national elections no longer represent
the will of the voters, but rather are manipulated to produce the outcome desired by the
"winning" candidates and party. This indicator is the behavior of those who manufacture,
program, and operate the paperless, unauditable machines (direct recording electronic: "DRE"),
and those who benefit from this technology.
Perhaps this new electronic voting technology is as honest and reliable as the private election
industry and the winning candidates tell us it is. However, they simply do not behave as if this
were the case.
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'Party Hacks: California Sinks into the Bushist Sea'
Two weeks ago, an obscure, unelected, Republican-appointed official in Californiadecided the future of the world. That future - at least for the next several years - will be
an accelerating nightmare of war, corruption, repression, breakdown, atrocity and terror.
That's because the loyal apparatchik has, with the stroke of a pen, guaranteed the perpetuation
of the militarist Bush Faction in power in 2008 and beyond.
One of the few certainties in modern American politics is that no Democrat can hope towin the presidency without carrying California.
Thus the sudden, hugger-mugger decision by California Secretary of State BruceMcPherson to override the objections of his own experts and certify the eminently hackable
voting machines of the politically partisan private firm, Diebold, for use throughout the
state means, quite simply, that the fix is in for the 2008 race.
After Diebold's machines failed miserably in a battery of tests last year, McPherson vowedto put their certification on hold until his own hand-picked panel of experts had fine-combed
the system to a fare-thee-well, investigator Brad Friedman reports. The panel delivered their
conclusions last month - and the results were staggering, far beyond the worst fears of the most
hard-core "conspiracy theorist." The panel found that Diebold's machines were riddled with
curious built-in glitches that effectively "ceded complete control of the system" to hackers
who could "change vote totals, modify reports, change the names of candidates, and change
the races being voted on."
What's more, "hackers wouldn't need to know passwords or cryptographic keys, or haveaccess to any other part of the system to do their dirty work," the Los Angeles Times notes.
"Voters, candidates and election monitors wouldn't necessarily know they'd been rooked." A more
perfect vehicle for fixing an election can hardly be imagined. And it would require nothing more
than a handful of high-tech zealots, not a vast, easily-rumbled conspiracy.
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Did 308,000 Cancelled Ohio Voter Registrations Put Bush
Back in the White House?
by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman
February 28, 2006
While life goes on during the Bush2 nightmare, so does the research on what reallyhappened here in 2004 to give George W. Bush a second term.
Pundits throughout the state and nation---many of them alleged Democrats---continue to tell those of us who question Bush's second coming that we should
"get over it," that the election is old news.
But things get curiouser and curiouser.
In our 2005 compendium HOW THE GOP STOLE OHIO'S 2004 ELECTION & ISRIGGING 2008 (www.freepress.org), we list more than a hundred different ways the
Republican Party denied the democratic process in the Buckeye State. For a book of
documents to be published September 11 by the New Press entitled WHAT HAPPENED
IN OHIO?, we are continuing to dig.
It turns out, we missed more than a few of the dirty tricks Karl Rove, Ken Blackwelland their GOP used to get themselves four more years. In an election won with death
by a thousand cuts, some that are still hidden go very deep. Over the next few weeks
we will list them as they are verified.
One of them has just surfaced to the staggering tune of 175,000 purged voters in CuyahogaCounty (Cleveland), the traditional stronghold of the Ohio Democratic Party. An additional
10,000 that registered to vote there for the 2004 election were lost due to "clerical error."
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100,000 Errors Found in Palm Beach Fl Voting Machines
The internal logs of at least 40 Sequoia touch-screen voting machines reveal that votes
were time and date-stamped as cast two weeks before the election, sometimes in the middle
of the night.
Black Box Voting successfully sued former Palm Beach County (FL) Supervisor of ElectionsTheresa LePore to get the audit records for the 2004 presidential election.
After investing over $7,000 and waiting nine months for the records, Black Box Votingdiscovered that the voting machine logs contained approximately 100,000 errors. According
to voting machine assignment logs, Palm Beach County used 4,313 machines in the Nov.
2004 election. During election day, 1,475 voting system calibrations were performed while
the polls were open, providing documentation to substantiate reports from citizens indicating
the wrong candidate was selected when they tried to vote.
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Whistleblower Charged With Three Felonies for Exposing Diebold's Crimes
READ MORE: New York Times, George W. Bush
A whistleblower in Los Angeles is in legal trouble and needs our help. Stephen Heller
is alleged to have exposed documents in Jan. & Feb. 2004 which provided smoking
gun evidence that Diebold was using illegal, uncertified software in California voting
machines. The docs also showed that Diebold's California attorneys (the powerful
international law firm Jones Day) had told them they were in breach of the law for
using uncertified software, but Diebold continued to use the uncertified software anyway.
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