Georgia and Indiana soon to follow suit -- Then if this works, every other Republican controlled state in the union.
http://www.alternet.org/rights/29292/
The End of Democracy in Ohio?
By Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, Free Press. Posted December 12, 2005.
New legislation passed by Ohio Republicans may just institutionalize those famous "voting irregularities." Tools
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 U.S. Senate seat in 2006, are about to end.
House Bill 3 has already passed the Ohio House of Representatives and is about to be approved by the Republican-dominated Senate, probably before the holiday recess. Republicans dominate the Ohio legislature thanks to a heavily gerrymandered crazy quilt of rigged districts, and to a moribund Ohio Democratic party. The GOP-drafted HB3 is designed to all but obliterate any possible future Democratic revival. Opposition from the Ohio Democratic Party, where it exists at all, is diffuse and ineffectual.
HB3'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.
The GOP is ramming similar bills through state legislatures around the U.S., starting with Georgia and Indiana. The ID requirements in particular have provoked widespread opposition from newspapers such as the New York Times. The Times, among others, argues that the ID requirements and the costs associated with them, constitute an unconstitutional discriminatory poll tax.
But despite significant court challenges, the Republicans are forcing changes in long-standing election laws that have allowed citizens to vote based on their signature alone. Across the U.S., GOP Jim Crow laws will eliminate millions of Democratic voters from the registration rolls. In swing states like Ohio, such ballots are almost certain to be crucial.
The proposed Ohio law will demand a valid photo ID or a utility bill, a bank statement, a paycheck or a government document with a current address. Thousands of Ohio citizens who are elderly, homeless, unemployed or who do not drive will be effectively disenfranchised. Many citizens, for example, rent apartments where the utilities are paid by landlords. In such cases, the number of people living in utilities-included apartment rentals could actually determine an election.
During the 2004 presidential election, Ohio's Republican Secretary of State, J. Kenneth Blackwell, also issued statewide threats against ex-felons and people whose names resembled those of ex-felons. Thousands of such threats were delivered to registered voters who were never convicted of anything, or who were eligible to vote after being released from prison. In 2004 a "Mighty Texas Strike Force" came to Columbus with a specific mandate to threaten ex-felons with arrest if they dared to vote.
It is legal for ex-felons in Ohio to vote, even if they are in half-way houses or on parole. But HB3's identification requirement, combined with the confusion Blackwell has introduced into the process, will intimidate such Ohioans from voting in 2006 and beyond.
HB3 will also reduce voter rolls by ordering county boards of elections to send cards to registered voters every two years. If a card comes back as undelivered, the voter must rely on a provisional ballot. But tens of thousands of provisional ballots were arbitrarily discarded in 2004, and some 16,000 are known to remain uncounted to this day.
HB3 also imposes severe restrictions on voter registration drives. It allows the state attorney-general and local prosecutors wide powers to prosecute vaguely defined charges of fraud against those working to sign up voters. The restrictions are clearly meant to chill the kind of Democratic registration drives that brought hundreds of thousands of new voters to the polls in 2004 (even though many were turned away in Democratic wards due to a lack of voting machines).
Those electronic machines will also be exempted from recounts by random sampling, even in close, disputed elections like those of 2000 and 2004.
In 2004, scores of Ohio voters reported, under oath, that they had pressed John Kerry's name on touchscreen machines, only to see George W. Bush's name light up. A board of elections technician in Mahoning County (Youngstown) has admitted that at least 18 machines there suffered such problems. Sworn testimony in Columbus indicates that votes for Kerry faded off the screen on touchscreen machines there. Other charges of mis-programming, re-programming, recalibrating, mishandling and manipulation of electronic voting software, hardware and memory cards have since arisen throughout Ohio 2004.
For the 2005 election, some 41 additional Ohio counties (of 88) were switched to Diebold touchscreen machines. Despite polls showing overwhelming voter approval, two electoral reform issues went down improbable defeat. Issue Two, meant to make voting easier, and Issue Three, on campaign finance reform, were shown by highly reliable Columbus Dispatch polls to be passing handily.
The Dispatch was within 0.5% on Issue One, a bond issue, and has rarely been significantly wrong in its many decades of Ohio polling. Even opponents of Issues Two and Three conceded that they were highly likely to pass.
On the Sunday before the Tuesday 2005 election, the Dispatch predicted Issue Two would pass by a vote of 59% to 33%, with about 8% undecided. But Tuesday's official vote count showed Issue Two failing with just 36.5% in favor and 63.5% opposed. For that to have happened, the Dispatch had to have been wrong on Issue Two's support by more than 20 points. Nearly half those who said they would support Issue Two would have had to vote against it, along with all the undecideds.
The numbers on Issue Three are equally startling. The Dispatch showed it winning with 61%, to just 25% opposed and some 14% undecided. Instead just 33% of the votes were counted in its favor, with 67% opposed, an almost inconceivable weekend turnaround.
No other numbers were comparable on November 8, 2005, or elsewhere in the recent history of Dispatch polling. The startling outcome has thus raised even more suspicion and doubt about the use of electronic voting and tabulating machines in Ohio, which account for virtually 100% of the state's vote count.
The federal General Accountability Office (GAO) has recently issued a major report confirming that tampering with and manipulating such machines can be easily done by a very small number of people. Charges are widespread that this is precisely what gave George W. Bush Ohio's electoral votes, and thus the presidency, in 2004, not to mention the suspicious referenda outcomes in 2005.
HB3 will make it virtually impossible for any challenge to be mounted involving any votes cast or counted on electronic machines or tabulators -- meaning virtually every vote cast in Ohio.
Indeed, HB3 will raise the cost of mounting a recount from $10 per precinct to $50 per precinct. In 2004, Secretary of State Blackwell forced citizen groups to raise private funds for a recount, which he proceeded to sabotage. The process, which became a futile electronic charade, cost donors committed to democracy more than $100,000. Three partial, meaningless faux recounts resulted. To date more than 100,000 votes cast in Ohio remain uncounted, including some 93,000 easily-read machine-rejected ballots. .
During the 2004 election process Blackwell, manipulated the number of precincts in Ohio, and issued inaccurate information about their location and boundaries, making a meaningful precise number hard to come by. But with more than 10,000 precincts still in existence, HB3 would make funding an attempt at another recount in 2006 or 2008 cost more than $500,000.
Such an effort might also result in official retaliation. In 2004, Blackwell and Ohio Attorney-General Jim Petro -- both of whom are now Republican candidates for governor -- tried to impose stiff financial sanctions against attorneys who filed a legal challenge to the seating of the Ohio electors who gave George W. Bush the presidency. The Ohio Supreme Court disallowed the sanctions after the challenge was withdrawn. But HB3 would make such a federal election challenge illegal altogether.
With the electoral process in Ohio all but disemboweled, those hoping for a change of party in upcoming state and national elections are probably kidding themselves.
The 2004 election in the Buckeye state was riddled with deception, fraud, intimidation, manipulation and outright theft, all of which were essential to the triumph of George W. Bush. In 2005, four electoral reform ballot initiatives were allegedly defeated despite huge poll margins showing the almost certain passage of two of them. The most credible explanation for their defeat lies in electronic manipulation of voting machines, tabulators and memory cards which the GAO confirms have no credible security safeguards.
With campaign finance, voter registration, electronic voting, public recounts, district gerrymandering and overall electoral administration now firmly in the pocket of the GOP, and with Democratic opposition that is virtually non-existent on the issue of vote fraud and election manipulation, there is little reason to believe the Republican grip on Ohio will be loosened at any point in the near future.
In traditional terms, the scandal-ridden Ohio GOP would appear to be more vulnerable than ever. Governor Robert Taft has become the only Ohio governor to be convicted of a crime while in office. With an astonishing 7% approval rating, he has been compared to Homer Simpson by the state's leading Republican newspaper. Republican US Senator Mike DeWine appears highly vulnerable. The GOP has never won the White House without winning the Buckeye State.
But HB3 will solidify the GOP's iron grip on the electronic voting process and all that surrounds it. Unless they break that grip, Democrats who believe they can carry any part of Ohio in 2006 or 2008 are kidding themselves.
When it comes to 2008, can you say "Jeb Bush"?
Full Version: Election Fraud legalized in Ohio
The more things like this happen, esp in light of the extreme election irregularties since 2000, and the more voters shrug their shoulders in disinterest ............. Then there is no chance of reversing the trend. If Americans would stand up to protest this and other limits on our civil rights, things like this would crumble like an old cookie.
But voters don't care. Republicans nationwide will take whatever steps they can to secure their power for years to come. Democrats seem to be missing in action again. And people like us who do care, are restricted to "free speech zones" that are out of sight and out of mind.
Gotta give it to whoever came up with that zone idea. They knew that Americans will happily go along with whatever is dished out as long as it doesn't inconvience them and they don't have to see it.
But voters don't care. Republicans nationwide will take whatever steps they can to secure their power for years to come. Democrats seem to be missing in action again. And people like us who do care, are restricted to "free speech zones" that are out of sight and out of mind.
Gotta give it to whoever came up with that zone idea. They knew that Americans will happily go along with whatever is dished out as long as it doesn't inconvience them and they don't have to see it.
It's time for me to begin the steps necessary to arrange for my children and grandchildren to live outside this country, and to take my legacy with them.
There's not much hope for their futures if they stay here.
The "American way of life" is now a lie.
There's not much hope for their futures if they stay here.
The "American way of life" is now a lie.
Well, its the new Demokkkracy! Lord hope the courts can burn the states runaway fraud. 
Here's an idea that's been bandied about by some! Let's blame the Democrats! Then let's all stay home on election day, or vote for Nader!
QUOTE(MrJim @ Dec 15 2005, 01:26 PM)
For the 2005 election, some 41 additional Ohio counties (of 88) were switched to Diebold touchscreen machines. Despite polls showing overwhelming voter approval, two electoral reform issues went down improbable defeat. Issue Two, meant to make voting easier, and Issue Three, on campaign finance reform, were shown by highly reliable Columbus Dispatch polls to be passing handily.
The Dispatch was within 0.5% on Issue One, a bond issue, and has rarely been significantly wrong in its many decades of Ohio polling. Even opponents of Issues Two and Three conceded that they were highly likely to pass.
On the Sunday before the Tuesday 2005 election, the Dispatch predicted Issue Two would pass by a vote of 59% to 33%, with about 8% undecided. But Tuesday's official vote count showed Issue Two failing with just 36.5% in favor and 63.5% opposed. For that to have happened, the Dispatch had to have been wrong on Issue Two's support by more than 20 points. Nearly half those who said they would support Issue Two would have had to vote against it, along with all the undecideds.
The numbers on Issue Three are equally startling. The Dispatch showed it winning with 61%, to just 25% opposed and some 14% undecided. Instead just 33% of the votes were counted in its favor, with 67% opposed, an almost inconceivable weekend turnaround.
No other numbers were comparable on November 8, 2005, or elsewhere in the recent history of Dispatch polling. The startling outcome has thus raised even more suspicion and doubt about the use of electronic voting and tabulating machines in Ohio, which account for virtually 100% of the state's vote count.
The Dispatch was within 0.5% on Issue One, a bond issue, and has rarely been significantly wrong in its many decades of Ohio polling. Even opponents of Issues Two and Three conceded that they were highly likely to pass.
On the Sunday before the Tuesday 2005 election, the Dispatch predicted Issue Two would pass by a vote of 59% to 33%, with about 8% undecided. But Tuesday's official vote count showed Issue Two failing with just 36.5% in favor and 63.5% opposed. For that to have happened, the Dispatch had to have been wrong on Issue Two's support by more than 20 points. Nearly half those who said they would support Issue Two would have had to vote against it, along with all the undecideds.
The numbers on Issue Three are equally startling. The Dispatch showed it winning with 61%, to just 25% opposed and some 14% undecided. Instead just 33% of the votes were counted in its favor, with 67% opposed, an almost inconceivable weekend turnaround.
No other numbers were comparable on November 8, 2005, or elsewhere in the recent history of Dispatch polling. The startling outcome has thus raised even more suspicion and doubt about the use of electronic voting and tabulating machines in Ohio, which account for virtually 100% of the state's vote count.
Before we take all of this as the gospel truth, people might want to look at the following:
http://www.mysterypollster.com/main/2005/1...anksgiving.html
QUOTE
A New Take on Fraud in Ohio - Hamilton College Political Science Professor Phillip Klinker has posted a "quick and dirty" regression analysis of the Ohio's county level vote on the blog "PolySigh." Once Klinker controlled for county level variables like race, Kerry's 2004 vote and 2005 turnout, the statistical impact of different types of voting equipment on the level of support for Ohio Issues 2 through 5 was tiny. If anything, the electronic counting equipment that the fraud theorists argue was used to rig the outcome correlated with higher vote for Issues 3, 4 and 5. These results imply that if "fraud" occurred anywhere in Ohio, it occurred everywhere, including ballots cast on punch cards or optically scanned paper ballots. See my last post for why that's important.
http://www.mysterypollster.com/main/2005/1...bus_dispat.html
(Note: The text is rather long, so for this post I am only providing the introduction and summary, the complete text is available on the link above.)
QUOTE
"Past performance is no guarantee of future results." We typically hear that disclaimer applied to financial investments, but in an era of declining response rates, it should apply just as well to polls. Last week, I neglected to include such a disclaimer in a post touting a survey with a long and remarkable history of success -- the Columbus Dispatch mail-in poll -- less than 24 hours before it turned in one of its most disastrous performances ever. While we may never know the exact reasons why, it is clear in retrospect that problems stem from the very different challenges the Dispatch poll faced this year and the modifications to its methodology made in response.
First, let's review what we know about what happened and then speculate a bit about why.
[Update: This post is long even by MP standards. On refelection, I thought readers in a hurry might appreciate an executive summary of the detail that follows about the Columbus Dispatch poll and what was different in 2005:
It has always been less accurate in statewide issue races than in candidate contests.
It had never before been used to forecast an off-year statewide election featuring only ballot issues.
It departed from past practice this year by including an undecided option and not replicating the actual ballot language - two practices that helped explain the poll's past accuracy.
Its response rate this year was significantly lower than roughly half that obtained in recent elections, including a similarly low turnout election in 2002.
The timing of the poll would have missed any shifts over the final weekend, and the final poll showed support trending down for all four initiatives. Meanwhile a post-election survey showed that nearly half the "no" voters made up their minds in the days after the Dispatch poll came out of the field.
First, let's review what we know about what happened and then speculate a bit about why.
[Update: This post is long even by MP standards. On refelection, I thought readers in a hurry might appreciate an executive summary of the detail that follows about the Columbus Dispatch poll and what was different in 2005:
It has always been less accurate in statewide issue races than in candidate contests.
It had never before been used to forecast an off-year statewide election featuring only ballot issues.
It departed from past practice this year by including an undecided option and not replicating the actual ballot language - two practices that helped explain the poll's past accuracy.
Its response rate this year was significantly lower than roughly half that obtained in recent elections, including a similarly low turnout election in 2002.
The timing of the poll would have missed any shifts over the final weekend, and the final poll showed support trending down for all four initiatives. Meanwhile a post-election survey showed that nearly half the "no" voters made up their minds in the days after the Dispatch poll came out of the field.
QUOTE(TheRestofUs @ Dec 15 2005, 02:00 PM)
Here's an idea that's been bandied about by some! Let's blame the Democrats! Then let's all stay home on election day, or vote for Nader!Sounds about right. I know several Democrats who aren't inclined to vote mostly because of the deafening silence from Democratic leaders when crap like this happens.
They wanted to be our leaders .............. so why aren't they leading????
QUOTE(Dyan @ Dec 15 2005, 02:06 PM)
Sounds about right. I know several Democrats who aren't inclined to vote mostly because of the deafening silence from Democratic leaders when crap like this happens.
They wanted to be our leaders .............. so why aren't they leading????
They wanted to be our leaders .............. so why aren't they leading????
The Democrats that you know, what do you think would be their intelligent, considered response to what I just posted from the MysteryPoller website? (And he has stuff on the whole notion that the exit polls "statistically prove" vote fraud in the 2004 election.)
"exempts electronic voting from public scrutiny"....
Hmmm...
Wouldn't that seem to be the issue in a nutshell?
Isn't this unconstitutional on the face of it?
Hmmm...
Wouldn't that seem to be the issue in a nutshell?
Isn't this unconstitutional on the face of it?
Arneoker -- you are still disputing election fraud, which is okay. But the bulk of that article is about really bad laws that will make such fraud almost undetectbable in the future.
Why would somebody pass such laws?
A crime to challenge a presidential election???
5x cost to do recounts????
Cannot inspect Diebold machines???
WHY? WHY? WHY?
Why would somebody pass such laws?
A crime to challenge a presidential election???
5x cost to do recounts????
Cannot inspect Diebold machines???
WHY? WHY? WHY?
QUOTE(MrJim @ Dec 15 2005, 02:42 PM)
Arneoker -- you are still disputing election fraud, which is okay. But the bulk of that article is about really bad laws that will make such fraud almost undetectbable in the future.
Why would somebody pass such laws?
A crime to challenge a presidential election???
5x cost to do recounts????
Cannot inspect Diebold machines???
WHY? WHY? WHY?
Why would somebody pass such laws?
A crime to challenge a presidential election???
5x cost to do recounts????
Cannot inspect Diebold machines???
WHY? WHY? WHY?
And I only responded to the article which concerned the whole referenda "fraud" issue. I didn't pass on the rest. Now I must admit than when I see what seems to be premature conclusions in a general list of charges that it makes me wonder about the credibility of the authors and the rest of what they say. But I would guess that that these guys are not liars, and even if they are being too alarmist and exaggerating the significance of some of this stuff they do seem to be pointing to some things which look pretty bad (and are likely to be pretty bad) and need to be looked at. I won't just blithely dismiss the stuff which I'm not actually familiar with and don't have something solid that I can counter it with. And I never said that everything in Ohio was on the up and up in 2004 or think that people are unfarily picking on Blackwell, because I do think that they have all sorts of serious problems there and that Blackwell is a part of the problem, not the solution.
Gee, you'd think something in the constitution would prevent this? 
QUOTE
Gee, you'd think something in the constitution would prevent this?
Yes, and all we have to do is take it to the Supreme Court.
Uh oh...
QUOTE(MrJim @ Dec 15 2005, 02:59 PM)
Yes, and all we have to do is take it to the Supreme Court.
Uh oh...
Uh oh...
Umm, is there no one who lives in Ohio who has any sense??? But, I do have an alternate plan... let's let Ohio secede and dubya can move his residency there and be Emperor (sans clothes and brains and WMD's). Just a thought
QUOTE
But, I do have an alternate plan... let's let Ohio secede and dubya can move his residency there and be Emperor
And Blackwell can be his personal ass kisser.
QUOTE(Arneoker @ Dec 15 2005, 02:10 PM)
The Democrats that you know, what do you think would be their intelligent, considered response to what I just posted from the MysteryPoller website? (And he has stuff on the whole notion that the exit polls "statistically prove" vote fraud in the 2004 election.)
It's not just Ohio or the issue of possible fraud, though. That's why I said "crap like this". Too many of them are like you and I ............ they lived through Nixon and thought THAT would wake up America and that something like that would never happen again. Yet, here we are. The Repubicans are methodically, piece by piece putting through the laws that they want, the abuse of power grows daily, encroachment on our rights happens increasingly. This is worse than Nixon because no one in the general public seems to care enough to actually DO something.
As for my personal view, I stand by what I have often said in frustration in other threads about voting fraud. When we have flawed results in 2006, will people FINALLY agree that we should investigate whether or not something is going on??? What about 2008???? How many elections will it take?
QUOTE(EvelyninTexas @ Dec 15 2005, 03:02 PM)
Umm, is there no one who lives in Ohio who has any sense??? But, I do have an alternate plan... let's let Ohio secede and dubya can move his residency there and be Emperor (sans clothes and brains and WMD's). Just a thought
Thanks but no thanks. I live in Ohio and I have some sense. I dam sure don't want Bush here. I don't want hm in the Whitehouse either. Siberia sounds about right. He can take Blackwell and his administration with him to keep him warm.
The people in Ohio with all the sense are outnumbered by the drooling idiots, and are therefore powerless. I guess the same could be true of just about every state in the nation, though. The stupid will ALWAYS outnumber the smart. To paraphrase a "joke" I heard George Carlin tell the other night, "the world is populated by incredibly stupid people, and they ALL vote." Another great quote I heard recently (but can't remember the source) is, "Society as a whole is getting stupider..............AND more opinionated."
On to the topic at hand, I read an article in the paper today that basically said House Bill 3 essentially would cut Ken Blackwell's candidacy off at the knees, because it's an admission of how incompetently he has run elections in the State of Ohio. This might not be as bad as it seems.
Here's the article:
GOP legislators focused on undercutting Blackwell
By Dan Williamson / December 15, 2005
Right about now is when you should be seeing the Ohio Republican Party coalescing around Ken Blackwell.
Supporters of Blackwell's two chief rivals for the GOP gubernatorial nomination—Jim Petro and Betty Montgomery—are increasingly skeptical that either can pull off an upset against the frontrunner.
Meanwhile, the Democrats appear to have a likely nominee in Congressman Ted Strickland.
This is where the Republicans unite behind their guy and go about the business of kicking some serious donkey ass. It's what Republicans do.
Only they're not doing it.
Instead, the Republicans running the Ohio General Assembly are advancing legislation that appears intended to embarrass the incumbent Ohio secretary of state.
Majority lawmakers used House Bill 3—the controversial elections bill that would require voter IDs—as a blunt instrument with which to swat their party's odds-on favorite for governor.
Citing First Amendment concerns, legislative leaders killed a provision of the bill that would have prohibited the secretary of state from actively participating in statewide ballot issues. But the political damage was already done.
By raising questions about Blackwell's political and partisan activities as the state's top elections official—and essentially legitimizing what had previously been Democratic complaints about him—legislative Republicans made it clear they are not yet on board the Blackwell bandwagon.
Gene Pierce, spokesman for the Blackwell campaign, said the most important thing that happened last week is that the General Assembly backed off the anti-Blackwell portion of H.B. 3.
"The revised bill is more of a win," Pierce said. "They backed off of just singling us out." Pierce noted that some of the state senators supporting the provision in question are supporting Blackwell's primary opponents. For example, Senate President Bill Harris supports Montgomery, and the No. 2 senator, Jeff Jacobson, is a Petro man.
But many Republican lawmakers' antipathy toward the secretary of state goes deeper than an intraparty skirmish.
One GOP legislator said a significant number of General Assembly Republicans have been discussing "how far we have to go to oppose him"—not just in the primary but next November against a Democrat.
The lawmaker said if the Democrats nominate state Sen. Eric Fingerhut, he would probably earn public endorsements from a number of his Republican colleagues at the Statehouse.
If, as expected, Strickland wins the nomination, Republicans aren't likely to publicly oppose Blackwell—"other than not voting for him."
Race and the race
Mike Coleman had barely completed his withdrawal speech Nov. 29 when the Blackwell camp began calling reporters to point out there was now only one African-American candidate in the governor's race.
"With Coleman out and Strickland in," Gene Pierce noted, "Ken has an opportunity to attract voters who might otherwise vote Democrat."
It's an intriguing point. Conventional wisdom says that for Democrats to win a statewide contest in Ohio, they need heavy turnout from their base—the most reliable portion of which is the black vote.
But if Blackwell is the Republican nominee, how do you get those voters fired up about keeping the state from electing its first black governor?
Strickland acknowledged that would be a challenge but said he'd be up to it. He said he'll need to stress his positions on issues that are important to black voters.
He added that in a Strickland-Blackwell race, he isn't the only candidate who would have to worry about keeping members of his own party in the fold.
"I'm not gonna concede the Republican constituency in this state," he said. "I think, given Mr. Blackwell's views—that I believe are perceived by many moderate Republicans as extreme—that I will have an opportunity to significantly capture the votes of moderate Republicans. So all that will work itself out."
On to the topic at hand, I read an article in the paper today that basically said House Bill 3 essentially would cut Ken Blackwell's candidacy off at the knees, because it's an admission of how incompetently he has run elections in the State of Ohio. This might not be as bad as it seems.
Here's the article:
GOP legislators focused on undercutting Blackwell
By Dan Williamson / December 15, 2005
Right about now is when you should be seeing the Ohio Republican Party coalescing around Ken Blackwell.
Supporters of Blackwell's two chief rivals for the GOP gubernatorial nomination—Jim Petro and Betty Montgomery—are increasingly skeptical that either can pull off an upset against the frontrunner.
Meanwhile, the Democrats appear to have a likely nominee in Congressman Ted Strickland.
This is where the Republicans unite behind their guy and go about the business of kicking some serious donkey ass. It's what Republicans do.
Only they're not doing it.
Instead, the Republicans running the Ohio General Assembly are advancing legislation that appears intended to embarrass the incumbent Ohio secretary of state.
Majority lawmakers used House Bill 3—the controversial elections bill that would require voter IDs—as a blunt instrument with which to swat their party's odds-on favorite for governor.
Citing First Amendment concerns, legislative leaders killed a provision of the bill that would have prohibited the secretary of state from actively participating in statewide ballot issues. But the political damage was already done.
By raising questions about Blackwell's political and partisan activities as the state's top elections official—and essentially legitimizing what had previously been Democratic complaints about him—legislative Republicans made it clear they are not yet on board the Blackwell bandwagon.
Gene Pierce, spokesman for the Blackwell campaign, said the most important thing that happened last week is that the General Assembly backed off the anti-Blackwell portion of H.B. 3.
"The revised bill is more of a win," Pierce said. "They backed off of just singling us out." Pierce noted that some of the state senators supporting the provision in question are supporting Blackwell's primary opponents. For example, Senate President Bill Harris supports Montgomery, and the No. 2 senator, Jeff Jacobson, is a Petro man.
But many Republican lawmakers' antipathy toward the secretary of state goes deeper than an intraparty skirmish.
One GOP legislator said a significant number of General Assembly Republicans have been discussing "how far we have to go to oppose him"—not just in the primary but next November against a Democrat.
The lawmaker said if the Democrats nominate state Sen. Eric Fingerhut, he would probably earn public endorsements from a number of his Republican colleagues at the Statehouse.
If, as expected, Strickland wins the nomination, Republicans aren't likely to publicly oppose Blackwell—"other than not voting for him."
Race and the race
Mike Coleman had barely completed his withdrawal speech Nov. 29 when the Blackwell camp began calling reporters to point out there was now only one African-American candidate in the governor's race.
"With Coleman out and Strickland in," Gene Pierce noted, "Ken has an opportunity to attract voters who might otherwise vote Democrat."
It's an intriguing point. Conventional wisdom says that for Democrats to win a statewide contest in Ohio, they need heavy turnout from their base—the most reliable portion of which is the black vote.
But if Blackwell is the Republican nominee, how do you get those voters fired up about keeping the state from electing its first black governor?
Strickland acknowledged that would be a challenge but said he'd be up to it. He said he'll need to stress his positions on issues that are important to black voters.
He added that in a Strickland-Blackwell race, he isn't the only candidate who would have to worry about keeping members of his own party in the fold.
"I'm not gonna concede the Republican constituency in this state," he said. "I think, given Mr. Blackwell's views—that I believe are perceived by many moderate Republicans as extreme—that I will have an opportunity to significantly capture the votes of moderate Republicans. So all that will work itself out."
Arne --- Are You Out of Your Head???
You know about the phone banks w/regards to get out the vote a Democratic Program had their phones jammed and the guys who did it ...
UH HELLO --- ADMITTED IT !!! YES CHEATED !!!
I'm taking aback by your indifference and sullen mood that we are not what we are a hacked and hijacked party by the Republican'ts.
I don't understand you sometimes ... you act very contrarian. Your like the Devils advocate in favor only of the devil ... which I perceive as Republican'ts.
You really have a way of confusing the issue.
I'm dissapointed in you ... no stiff upper lip ... no strong jaw.
:tree:
How should I say it ... your so Laise a Faire ...
Pitiful.
You know about the phone banks w/regards to get out the vote a Democratic Program had their phones jammed and the guys who did it ...
UH HELLO --- ADMITTED IT !!! YES CHEATED !!!
I'm taking aback by your indifference and sullen mood that we are not what we are a hacked and hijacked party by the Republican'ts.
I don't understand you sometimes ... you act very contrarian. Your like the Devils advocate in favor only of the devil ... which I perceive as Republican'ts.
You really have a way of confusing the issue.
I'm dissapointed in you ... no stiff upper lip ... no strong jaw.
:tree:
How should I say it ... your so Laise a Faire ...
Pitiful.
QUOTE(Dyan @ Dec 15 2005, 08:01 PM)
It's not just Ohio or the issue of possible fraud, though. That's why I said "crap like this". Too many of them are like you and I ............ they lived through Nixon and thought THAT would wake up America and that something like that would never happen again. Yet, here we are. The Repubicans are methodically, piece by piece putting through the laws that they want, the abuse of power grows daily, encroachment on our rights happens increasingly. This is worse than Nixon because no one in the general public seems to care enough to actually DO something.
As for my personal view, I stand by what I have often said in frustration in other threads about voting fraud. When we have flawed results in 2006, will people FINALLY agree that we should investigate whether or not something is going on??? What about 2008???? How many elections will it take?
As for my personal view, I stand by what I have often said in frustration in other threads about voting fraud. When we have flawed results in 2006, will people FINALLY agree that we should investigate whether or not something is going on??? What about 2008???? How many elections will it take?
I would say:
1. That we're always going to have "crap like this" to some extent because we're always going to have misguided, stupid, obtuse, and downright evil politicians. We can only be alert and minimize it. But remembering Nixon brings up this important point, the importance of knowing some history and reflecting on what we can learn from it.
2. I am skeptical that the 2004 election was actually "stolen", although I certainly do think that there were flaws and outright injustices in how it was conducted. But I still think that the election should be investigated, even if I thought that it was near perfect I think that election results and how they were conducted should at least be audited as a matter of course. And even if very few if any votes were tampered with in 2004 (which I don't know for sure, as I don't know that they were) if these new machines are as vulnerable to tampering as respected, neutral sources like the GAO say they are this problem needs to be seriously addressed, because even if the last election wasn't stolen, one day an election will be.
QUOTE(USA#1 @ Dec 16 2005, 12:23 AM)
Arne --- Are You Out of Your Head???
You know about the phone banks w/regards to get out the vote a Democratic Program had their phones jammed and the guys who did it ...
UH HELLO --- ADMITTED IT !!! YES CHEATED !!!
I'm taking aback by your indifference and sullen mood that we are not what we are a hacked and hijacked party by the Republican'ts.
I don't understand you sometimes ... you act very contrarian. Your like the Devils advocate in favor only of the devil ... which I perceive as Republican'ts.
You really have a way of confusing the issue.
I'm dissapointed in you ... no stiff upper lip ... no strong jaw.
:tree:
How should I say it ... your so Laise a Faire ...
Pitiful.
You know about the phone banks w/regards to get out the vote a Democratic Program had their phones jammed and the guys who did it ...
UH HELLO --- ADMITTED IT !!! YES CHEATED !!!
I'm taking aback by your indifference and sullen mood that we are not what we are a hacked and hijacked party by the Republican'ts.
I don't understand you sometimes ... you act very contrarian. Your like the Devils advocate in favor only of the devil ... which I perceive as Republican'ts.
You really have a way of confusing the issue.
I'm dissapointed in you ... no stiff upper lip ... no strong jaw.
:tree:
How should I say it ... your so Laise a Faire ...
Pitiful.
Even if I'm just a Devil's Advocate, isn't that of some value? The Vatican instituted the office of the Devil's Advocate. Are you suggesting that it would be dangerous to be as open to contrary views as that institution, that perhaps they are just a little too loose and free at the Vatican?
Concerning the bit about the phone banks I believe that you are talking about what happened in New Hampshire, and of course I know that story. I know of several stories, and undoubtedly there are many more that I don't know about. I know about a story that I have repeated here several times, about people passing out fliers in a Black neighborhood in Baltimore in 2002 warning people that they could not vote if they weren't up to date in their rent payments, etc.
I think that the Democrats should make an issue out of electoral reform, and put the emphasis on outrages that we know happened, as opposed to outrages that many "know in their gut" happened but don't have proof that is convincing to people not already predisposed to believe in such charges. That way they have a solid case. If you lead off with the most sensational charges, but those charges have little evidence behind them, then your opponents will eviscerate your case on the sensational charges and thereby discredit your whole argument, including your strong points. By all means call for examination, investigation and scrutiny. And if you suspect foul play on a vast scale do some real analysis to point people to where they might find something.
And I must note again that I have provided links several times to the Mystery Poller site and absolutely no one has responded! Are people worried that their case is so weak that they cannot deal with contrary views? Concerning the 2004 election and the exit polls I am going to again provide a link to that site, which has several links that people might find interesting, I would recommend in particular that people look at O'Dell's paper. I would note that his paper, which people may or may not find convincing, at least tries to be balanced, and does not conclude that there is nothing to worry about. Quite the contrary.
http://www.mysterypollster.com/main/2005/0...cv_vs_uscv.html
Let me just say that the Democrats almost certainly need to do much more than deal with election fraud to win. The basic reason that Democrats lose elections is that not enough people vote for them. Now the reasons behind that reason are a lot more complicated, and there is plenty of controversy over what they basically are, and there is certainly a lot of controversy as to what the solutions are. Pretty difficult to deal with, but I think that we have no choice but to deal with them.
QUOTE(Arneoker @ Dec 16 2005, 08:18 AM)
I think that the Democrats should make an issue out of electoral reform, and put the emphasis on outrages that we know happened, as opposed to outrages that many "know in their gut" happened but don't have proof that is convincing to people not already predisposed to believe in such charges
Best be careful lest it get tossed right back in their faces. Methinks the party which seemed to condone the political antics of James Michael Curley, Richard Daley, Boss Tweed, Huey Long and a myriad of others won't stand up to the scrutiny, eh?IMHO there's been enough election fraud on the part of Democrats to get them condemned too. We saw it here in Little Rhody as recently as last month, and I'd be bettin' there's been plenty more we don't hear 'bout on sites like this 'cause of its political bent, but out there just the same.
Methinks politics is a dirty game. If we take off the blinders methinks we'll see plenty of folks in both parties with dirty hands.
QUOTE(flydangler @ Dec 16 2005, 08:35 AM)
Best be careful lest it get tossed right back in their faces. Methinks the party which seemed to condone the political antics of James Michael Curley, Richard Daley, Boss Tweed, Huey Long and a myriad of others won't stand up to the scrutiny, eh?
IMHO there's been enough election fraud on the part of Democrats to get them condemned too. We saw it here in Little Rhody as recently as last month, and I'd be bettin' there's been plenty more we don't hear 'bout on sites like this 'cause of its political bent, but out there just the same.
Methinks politics is a dirty game. If we take off the blinders methinks we'll see plenty of folks in both parties with dirty hands.
IMHO there's been enough election fraud on the part of Democrats to get them condemned too. We saw it here in Little Rhody as recently as last month, and I'd be bettin' there's been plenty more we don't hear 'bout on sites like this 'cause of its political bent, but out there just the same.
Methinks politics is a dirty game. If we take off the blinders methinks we'll see plenty of folks in both parties with dirty hands.
Good points. Of course Curley, Daley, Tweed and Long are in the past, but as you also point out Democrats are sometimes guilty of this stuff too. Now I believe that we should seek to stamp out such malfeasance no matter who commits it, Democrat or Republican, and excuse it nowhere. But it is sobering to reflect that this issue may not be a sure-fired advantage to the Democrats all of the time. And if we make poorly supported charges against the Republicans, do people really think that the party of Karl Rove will be nice and scrupulous and not do the same against Democrats, if not much, much worse?
QUOTE(Arneoker @ Dec 16 2005, 09:18 AM)
Even if I'm just a Devil's Advocate, isn't that of some value? The Vatican instituted the office of the Devil's Advocate. Are you suggesting that it would be dangerous to be as open to contrary views as that institution, that perhaps they are just a little too loose and free at the Vatican?
Concerning the bit about the phone banks I believe that you are talking about what happened in New Hampshire, and of course I know that story. I know of several stories, and undoubtedly there are many more that I don't know about. I know about a story that I have repeated here several times, about people passing out fliers in a Black neighborhood in Baltimore in 2002 warning people that they could not vote if they weren't up to date in their rent payments, etc.
I think that the Democrats should make an issue out of electoral reform, and put the emphasis on outrages that we know happened, as opposed to outrages that many "know in their gut" happened but don't have proof that is convincing to people not already predisposed to believe in such charges. That way they have a solid case. If you lead off with the most sensational charges, but those charges have little evidence behind them, then your opponents will eviscerate your case on the sensational charges and thereby discredit your whole argument, including your strong points. By all means call for examination, investigation and scrutiny. And if you suspect foul play on a vast scale do some real analysis to point people to where they might find something.
And I must note again that I have provided links several times to the Mystery Poller site and absolutely no one has responded! Are people worried that their case is so weak that they cannot deal with contrary views? Concerning the 2004 election and the exit polls I am going to again provide a link to that site, which has several links that people might find interesting, I would recommend in particular that people look at O'Dell's paper. I would note that his paper, which people may or may not find convincing, at least tries to be balanced, and does not conclude that there is nothing to worry about. Quite the contrary.
http://www.mysterypollster.com/main/2005/0...cv_vs_uscv.html
Let me just say that the Democrats almost certainly need to do much more than deal with election fraud to win. The basic reason that Democrats lose elections is that not enough people vote for them. Now the reasons behind that reason are a lot more complicated, and there is plenty of controversy over what they basically are, and there is certainly a lot of controversy as to what the solutions are. Pretty difficult to deal with, but I think that we have no choice but to deal with them.
Concerning the bit about the phone banks I believe that you are talking about what happened in New Hampshire, and of course I know that story. I know of several stories, and undoubtedly there are many more that I don't know about. I know about a story that I have repeated here several times, about people passing out fliers in a Black neighborhood in Baltimore in 2002 warning people that they could not vote if they weren't up to date in their rent payments, etc.
I think that the Democrats should make an issue out of electoral reform, and put the emphasis on outrages that we know happened, as opposed to outrages that many "know in their gut" happened but don't have proof that is convincing to people not already predisposed to believe in such charges. That way they have a solid case. If you lead off with the most sensational charges, but those charges have little evidence behind them, then your opponents will eviscerate your case on the sensational charges and thereby discredit your whole argument, including your strong points. By all means call for examination, investigation and scrutiny. And if you suspect foul play on a vast scale do some real analysis to point people to where they might find something.
And I must note again that I have provided links several times to the Mystery Poller site and absolutely no one has responded! Are people worried that their case is so weak that they cannot deal with contrary views? Concerning the 2004 election and the exit polls I am going to again provide a link to that site, which has several links that people might find interesting, I would recommend in particular that people look at O'Dell's paper. I would note that his paper, which people may or may not find convincing, at least tries to be balanced, and does not conclude that there is nothing to worry about. Quite the contrary.
http://www.mysterypollster.com/main/2005/0...cv_vs_uscv.html
Let me just say that the Democrats almost certainly need to do much more than deal with election fraud to win. The basic reason that Democrats lose elections is that not enough people vote for them. Now the reasons behind that reason are a lot more complicated, and there is plenty of controversy over what they basically are, and there is certainly a lot of controversy as to what the solutions are. Pretty difficult to deal with, but I think that we have no choice but to deal with them.
I'm not so big on the Election Fraud issue as some here but what I am upset about is the machines that we use, Diebold etc. are hackable. They have made it out to be a failsafe system and not succeptible to corruption, but the recent Leon County, FL tests prove that Voter Fraud CAN HAPPEN ... And that is just not open in my mind to allow the use of these Machines EVER AGAIN !!!
They need to be banned. Regarding the article above ok ... nothing conlusive based on exit polls. Sorry Arne a Exit Poll doesn't mean as much to me as you or it's value. But a compputer chip that can be loaded with votes and inseted into a Diebold machine and GO UNDETECTED, CHANGING VOTES ... Worries the pee out of me !!!
And if we're going to focus on something lets put our energy into banning these machines and exposing their ease & accesibility to Corrupt HACKING.
Huddle Up Folks
Let's get on the same page here ... I wrote my Mayor about the News Regarding www.BlackBoxVoting.org
I also wrote My Supervisor of Elections ... I'm being proactive.
This is my email w/My Name Redacted, back from the Mayor's Office ... Received YESTERDAY
QUOTE
Dear Mr. & Mrs. CGCS'er>>>
Thanks for your note. I appreciate you bringing this matter to my attention.
I am passing your e-mail on to Jerry Holland, Supervisor of Elections for Duval County, and I am sure he will direct his staff to investigate your concerns and respond directly to you.
Sincerely,
John Peyton
Thanks for your note. I appreciate you bringing this matter to my attention.
I am passing your e-mail on to Jerry Holland, Supervisor of Elections for Duval County, and I am sure he will direct his staff to investigate your concerns and respond directly to you.
Sincerely,
John Peyton
*************************************************
(My Original Email to the mayor.)
QUOTE
The Honorable John Peyton
4th Floor, City Hall at St. James
117 W. Duval Street
Jacksonville, FL 32202
Dear Mayor Peyton;
I have just learned that the Supervisor of Elections in Leon County, FL has seen a demonstration of Voting Machines that had their results changed.
I, a Duval County resident, am very concerend and have been about the security of our electronic voting and read many articles from a Not-For Profit watchdog organization www.BlackBoxVoting.org and the fact that they had a Monkey hack the system (before the 2004 Elections).
Now they have been tested in Leon County, FL and the evidence is in. Proved through testing the votes can be changed and votes can be uploaded !!!
The links in the announcement below allows you to review what I have said and learn for yourself that these systems are not only not failsfe, you will learn that.
1.) THE CEO, Wally O'Dell of DIEBOLD, Inc has Resigned!
2.) A Stockholders Classaction Suit has been filed against DIBOLD, INC.
3.) Leon County, FL Supervisor of Elections, Ion Sancho, told Black Box Voting that he will never again use Diebold in an election.
Here's the article with links .... Please see for yourself.
May I make one suggestion, If you want to use electronic voting, I would like a receipt (like I get when I use my VISA card) of the votes that I cast, including the time and date and votes cast. I then can, if called in a contested election, return with my receipt in hand and PROVE that I voted the way I did. Paperless voting is, as been proven here, a sham on the good citizens of the USA.
********************************************************************************
********************************************************************************
*
BREAKING : 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. This comes on the heels of the resignation of Diebold CEO Wally
O'Dell, and the announcement that a stockholder's class action suit has been filed against Diebold by
Scott & Scott.
Black Box Voting: http://www.blackboxvoting.org
Leon County Election Supervisor Ion Sancho:
http://www.leonfl.org/elect/MeetTheSupervisor.htm
Finnish security expert Harri Hursti proved that Diebold lied to Secretaries of State across the nation when
Diebold claimed votes could not be changed on the memory card.
A test election was run in Leon County Tusday Dec. 13 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.
On Oct. 17, 2005 Diebold Elections Systems Research and Development chief Pat Green specifically told the
Cuyahoga County (Ohio) board of elections that votes cannot be changed using only a memory card.
Video of Pat Green, Cuyahoga County
According to Public Records responses obtained by Black Box Voting in response to our requests shows that
Diebold promulgated this misrepresentation to as many as 800 state and local elections officials.
In other news, a stockholder suit was filed today against Diebold by the law offices of Scott and Scott:
http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories....04233556&EDATE=
Diebold CEO resigns: http://www.informationweek.com/news/showAr...cleID=175001748
# # # # #
Black Box Voting is a nonpartisan, nonprofit 501c(3) elections watchdog group. This organization is not affiliated in
any way with any political party or any vendor. Without your important support, we do not exist. To donate:
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/donate.html or mail to:
Black Box Voting
330 SW 43rd St. Suite K
PMB 547
Renton WA 98055
********************************************************************************
*********************************************************
Thank you, mayor for taking the time to learn of my concerns. I hope you and the Supervisor of Elections act quickly to remedy the current Non-Secure Voting systems currently in place.
(I have sent a copy to the Supervisor Of Elections here in Jacksonville, FL)
4th Floor, City Hall at St. James
117 W. Duval Street
Jacksonville, FL 32202
Dear Mayor Peyton;
I have just learned that the Supervisor of Elections in Leon County, FL has seen a demonstration of Voting Machines that had their results changed.
I, a Duval County resident, am very concerend and have been about the security of our electronic voting and read many articles from a Not-For Profit watchdog organization www.BlackBoxVoting.org and the fact that they had a Monkey hack the system (before the 2004 Elections).
Now they have been tested in Leon County, FL and the evidence is in. Proved through testing the votes can be changed and votes can be uploaded !!!
The links in the announcement below allows you to review what I have said and learn for yourself that these systems are not only not failsfe, you will learn that.
1.) THE CEO, Wally O'Dell of DIEBOLD, Inc has Resigned!
2.) A Stockholders Classaction Suit has been filed against DIBOLD, INC.
3.) Leon County, FL Supervisor of Elections, Ion Sancho, told Black Box Voting that he will never again use Diebold in an election.
Here's the article with links .... Please see for yourself.
May I make one suggestion, If you want to use electronic voting, I would like a receipt (like I get when I use my VISA card) of the votes that I cast, including the time and date and votes cast. I then can, if called in a contested election, return with my receipt in hand and PROVE that I voted the way I did. Paperless voting is, as been proven here, a sham on the good citizens of the USA.
********************************************************************************
********************************************************************************
*
BREAKING : 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. This comes on the heels of the resignation of Diebold CEO Wally
O'Dell, and the announcement that a stockholder's class action suit has been filed against Diebold by
Scott & Scott.
Black Box Voting: http://www.blackboxvoting.org
Leon County Election Supervisor Ion Sancho:
http://www.leonfl.org/elect/MeetTheSupervisor.htm
Finnish security expert Harri Hursti proved that Diebold lied to Secretaries of State across the nation when
Diebold claimed votes could not be changed on the memory card.
A test election was run in Leon County Tusday Dec. 13 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.
On Oct. 17, 2005 Diebold Elections Systems Research and Development chief Pat Green specifically told the
Cuyahoga County (Ohio) board of elections that votes cannot be changed using only a memory card.
Video of Pat Green, Cuyahoga County
According to Public Records responses obtained by Black Box Voting in response to our requests shows that
Diebold promulgated this misrepresentation to as many as 800 state and local elections officials.
In other news, a stockholder suit was filed today against Diebold by the law offices of Scott and Scott:
http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories....04233556&EDATE=
Diebold CEO resigns: http://www.informationweek.com/news/showAr...cleID=175001748
# # # # #
Black Box Voting is a nonpartisan, nonprofit 501c(3) elections watchdog group. This organization is not affiliated in
any way with any political party or any vendor. Without your important support, we do not exist. To donate:
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/donate.html or mail to:
Black Box Voting
330 SW 43rd St. Suite K
PMB 547
Renton WA 98055
********************************************************************************
*********************************************************
Thank you, mayor for taking the time to learn of my concerns. I hope you and the Supervisor of Elections act quickly to remedy the current Non-Secure Voting systems currently in place.
(I have sent a copy to the Supervisor Of Elections here in Jacksonville, FL)
:tree:
I'm trying to change the future ... not live in the past !!!
USA #1, I agree with you that the security of the Diebold (and other electronic) machines is a serious issue. If you read the O'Dell paper in its entirety you will see that he makes the same point, even if he throws cold water on the whole, "The exit polls statistically prove that the election was stolen" thesis.
One doesn't have to demonize Diebold as much as some have here to be very concerned about what is going on. We really must stiffen up our standards on all of this. It seems to me that Diebold may be trying to make a quick buck by peddling a cut-rate, shoddy product. The Economist magazine of London, hardly a redoubt of left-wing conspiracy theories, has called this electronic voting equipment "dodgy machines."
So I don't think that you're misguided for writing your letters or pursuing this issue. Quite the contrary, I commend you for doing so. I just want to provide some perspective on this issue that I think some are missing.
One doesn't have to demonize Diebold as much as some have here to be very concerned about what is going on. We really must stiffen up our standards on all of this. It seems to me that Diebold may be trying to make a quick buck by peddling a cut-rate, shoddy product. The Economist magazine of London, hardly a redoubt of left-wing conspiracy theories, has called this electronic voting equipment "dodgy machines."
So I don't think that you're misguided for writing your letters or pursuing this issue. Quite the contrary, I commend you for doing so. I just want to provide some perspective on this issue that I think some are missing.
Election Problems --- Want Some Election Problem Factoids w/Links
********************************************************
The United States is the only major democracy that allows private partisan corporations to secretly count and tabulate the votes with proprietary non-transparent software.
Last week the only 3 major election systems bid for North Carolina's switch to The Amazing Disappearing Vote "blackbox" electronic voting systems.
http://www.charlotte.com/mld/observer/news...al/13304893.htm
The firms were Diebold, ES&S and Sequoia. Let's take them one at a time.
Diebold, formally known for making safes and security systems that stop people from stealing money, now makes machines that help people steal votes.
These companies refuse to reveal the source code that runs and calculates the votes with the excuse that it is proprietary and it violates copyright protection laws to reveal it. Because, I suppose, the corporations' copyright rights are much more important than the citizens' right to free and fair elections.
Secret source code could be written to do anything. It could be as simple as saying:
Bush Votes = Previous Bush votes + 2
Which would double Bush's votes, and also explain why many places including Missouri had FAR more votes than registered voters. The Justice Department is currently investigating that.
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle....URI-LAWSUIT.xml
So Congress pressured E-voting firms to provide their code to be kept in escrow at the National Library. North Carolina passed a state law requiring the code be put in escrow. And when the County Superior Court rejected Diebold's challenge of the law Diebold decided it would give up a contract worth 100s of millions of dollars rather than divulge its code.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051129/ap_on_...voting_problems
But then, like the Amazing Disappearing Vote, Diebold got the Immaculate Certification, and was certified yesterday despite it's not compliance with the law and its violation of the court's ruling!
http://www.bradblog.com/archives/00002105.htm
Other interesting Diebold facts:
The Department of Homeland Security's very own United States Computer Readiness Team website cites Diebold (one of the 3 major voting systems) as having "A vulnerability exists due to an undocumented backdoor account, which could a local or remote authenticated malicious user modify votes." Those Homeland Security Geeks need some grammar help but what they are saying is Diebold wrote code into their software allowing someone to change the votes remotely. What more needs to be said?!
http://www.us-cert.gov/cas/bulletins/SB04-252.html#diebold
California has halted all use of Diebold machines until it can have them tested yet again. Though many accuse the State seems to be shutting out any groups who have any interest but getting the machines approved.
http://rawstory.com/news/2005/California_v...oting_1201.html
They are also suing Diebold for over $12 million dollars due to massive failures of their software during the March primary elections where in San Diego alone over half the machines did not work.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/09/08/calif_sues_diebold/
Diebold CEO Walden O'Dell is estimated to have donated at least $100,00 to the Bush campaign. Not only that, but he's hosted President Bush at his home as well as sent invitations to over 100 wealthy republicans to dine at his home as part of Bush's 2004 election campaign. In the invitation O'Dell pronounced he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president" in 2004.
One of the longest-serving Diebold directors is W.R. "Tim" Timken. Like O'Dell, Timken is a Republican loyalist and a major contributor to GOP candidates. Since 1991 the Timken Company and members of the Timken family have contributed more than a million dollars to the Republican Party and to GOP presidential candidates such as George W. Bush. Between 2000 and 2002 alone, Timken's Canton-based bearing and steel company gave more than $350,000 to Republican causes, while Timken himself gave more than $120,000. This year, he is one of George W. Bush's campaign Pioneers, and pulled in more than $350,000 for the president's reelection bid.
Diebold purchased Texas-based GES in 2002. GES director Michael K Graye Pleaded guilty in 1998 to charges of tax-fraud and money laundering involving $18 million. In 2000 GES hired Jeffrey Dean as Sr. VP despite the fact he had served time on 23 felony counts of embezzlement involving, according to the SEC, "a high degree of sophistication and planning in the use and alteration of records in the computerized accounting system." Graye's friend and fellow inmate, convicted on cocaine charges, runs all systems involved with printing ballots for GES.
Diebold took over all of Georgia's elections in 2002. The popular Democratic senator, Max Cleland, a Vietnam veteran, disabled in combat, was called unpatriotic by his republican opponent, a pro-Iraq invasion activist who avoided military service in Vietnam. Cleland lost by 7% although the polls had him to win by 7%. These two elections gave the Senate to the Republicans giving the Republicans the House, Senate and Presidency.
Also on that day, Democratic Governor Roy Barnes lost to Sonny Purdue by 5% though he was ahead in the polls by 11%. Polls can be wrong you might argue, however this was the first Republican governor in 134 years!
Even more disturbing, Diebold workers had illegally loaded an uncertified "patch" on machines in Georgia and California just weeks before the election and then changed the flash memory after the election making it virtually impossible to examine the voting record.
And even more disturbing than that is a file named "Rob-Georgia on Diebold's unsecure FTP site with instructions on how to replace files in the voting tabulators
ES&S (Election Systems & Software):
The Vice President of the largest e-voting firm Election Systems and Software was involved in a bribery and kickback scheme, for which Arkansas' Secretary of State was convicted.
Howard Ahmanson Jr., a right-wing Christian fundamentalist millionaire based in California, bankrolled the founders of ES&S. After she left office, former Florida Secretary of State Sandra Mortham, a one-time running mate of Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, became a lobbyist for both ES&S and the Florida Association of Counties. During that time, the association signed an exclusive endorsement deal with ES&S to earn a commission on any contracts that counties signed with the voting company.
Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel was chairman of ES&S before quitting and running for Senate 2 weeks later. He won his seat in an unprecedented victory with two major upsets in the primary and the general election, beating his opponent's 65% lead in the polls and becoming the first Republican senator since 1972! Not only that but he obtained a resounding win with black voters who had never voted in a republican. When he won another landslide victory his opponent demanded a recount but the state's contract with ES&S (Which Nagle helped write) forbids any examination of the machines or software and there WAS NO PAPER TRAIL. 7 years later he still held up to $5 million in investments with ES&S that he had failed to disclose in any campaign filings. Oh, by the way, Hagel was also one of the few people considered as President Bush's Vice President in the 2000 campaign.
Sequoia:
Sequoia Employees were indicted for facilitating a 10-year kickback scheme involving election officials and millions of dollars in overcharges for voting equipment.
The following is some of the government's own findings last month by the Government Accounting Office about the 2004 election:
1. Some electronic voting machines "did not encrypt cast ballots or system audit logs, and it was possible to alter both without being detected." In other words, the GAO now confirms that electronic voting machines provided an open door to flip an entire vote count. More than 800,000 votes were cast in Ohio on electronic voting machines, some seven times Bush's official margin of victory.
2. "It was possible to alter the files that define how a ballot looks and works so that the votes for one candidate could be recorded for a different candidate." Numerous sworn statements and affidavits assert that this did happen in Ohio 2004.
3. "Vendors installed uncertified versions of voting system software at the local level." 3. Falsifying election results without leaving any evidence of such an action by using altered memory cards can easily be done, according to the GAO.
4. The GAO also confirms that access to the voting network was easily compromised because not all digital recording electronic voting systems (DREs) had supervisory functions password-protected, so access to one machine provided access to the whole network. This critical finding confirms that rigging the 2004 vote did not require a "widespread conspiracy" but rather the cooperation of a very small number of operatives with the power to tap into the networked machines and thus change large numbers of votes at will. With 800,000 votes cast on electronic machines in Ohio, flipping the number needed to give Bush 118,775 could be easily done by just one programmer.
5. Access to the voting network was also compromised by repeated use of the same user IDs combined with easily guessed passwords. So even relatively amateur hackers could have gained access to and altered the Ohio vote tallies.
6. The locks protecting access to the system were easily picked and keys were simple to copy, meaning, again, getting into the system was an easy matter.
7. One DRE model was shown to have been networked in such a rudimentary fashion that a power failure on one machine would cause the entire network to fail, re-emphasizing the fragility of the system on which the Presidency of the United States was decided.
8. GAO identified further problems with the security protocols and background screening practices for vendor personnel, confirming still more easy access to the system.
In essence, the GAO study makes it clear that no bank, grocery store or mom & pop chop shop would dare operate its business on a computer system as flimsy, fragile and easily manipulated as the one on which the 2004 election turned.
The GAO findings are particularly damning when set in the context of an election run in Ohio by a Secretary of State simultaneously working as co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign. Far from what election theft skeptics have long asserted, the GAO findings confirm that the electronic network on which 800,000 Ohio votes were cast was vulnerable enough to allow a a tiny handful of operatives -- or less -- to turn the whole vote count using personal computers operating on relatively simple software.
The GAO documentation flows alongside other crucial realities surrounding the 2004 vote count. For example:
# The exit polls showed Kerry winning in Ohio, until an unexplained last minute shift gave the election to Bush. Similar definitive shifts also occurred in Iowa, Nevada and New Mexico, a virtual statistical impossibility.
# A few weeks prior to the election, an unauthorized former ES&S voting machine company employee, was caught on the ballot-making machine in Auglaize County
# Election officials in Mahoning County now concede that at least 18 machines visibly transferred votes for Kerry to Bush. Voters who pushed Kerry's name saw Bush's name light up, again and again, all day long. Officials claim the problems were quickly solved, but sworn statements and affidavits say otherwise. They confirm similar problems in Franklin County (Columbus). Kerry's margins in both counties were suspiciously low.
# A voting machine in Mahoning County recorded a negative 25 million votes for Kerry. The problem was allegedly fixed.
# In Gahanna Ward 1B, at a fundamentalist church, a so-called "electronic transfer glitch" gave Bush nearly 4000 extra votes when only 638 people voted at that polling place. The tally was allegedly corrected, but remains infamous as the "loaves and fishes" vote count.
# In Franklin County, dozens of voters swore under oath that their vote for Kerry faded away on the DRE without a paper trail.
# In Miami County, at 1:43am after Election Day, with the county's central tabulator reporting 100% of the vote - 19,000 more votes mysteriously arrived; 13,000 were for Bush at the same percentage as prior to the additional votes, a virtual statistical impossibility.
# In Cleveland, large, entirely implausible vote totals turned up for obscure third party candidates in traditional Democratic African-American wards. Vote counts in neighboring wards showed virtually no votes for those candidates, with 90% going instead for Kerry.
# Prior to one of Blackwell's illegitimate "show recounts," technicians from Triad voting machine company showed up unannounced at the Hocking County Board of Elections and removed the computer hard drive.
# In response to official information requests, Shelby and other counties admit to having discarded key records and equipment before any recount could take place.
# In a conference call with Rev. Jackson, Attorney Cliff Arnebeck, Attorney Bob Fitrakis and others, John Kerry confirmed that he lost every precinct in New Mexico that had a touchscreen voting machine. The losses had no correlation with ethnicity, social class or traditional party affiliation---only with the fact that touchscreen machines were used.
# In a public letter, Rep. Conyers has stated that "by and large, when it comes to a voting machine, the average voter is getting a lemon - the Ford Pinto of voting technology. We must demand better."
But the GAO report now confirms that electronic voting machines as deployed in 2004 were in fact perfectly engineered to allow a very small number of partisans with minimal computer skills and equipment to shift enough votes to put George W. Bush back in the White House.
http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2005/1529No
The following is a short list of voting problems since adopting E-voting machines:
•A software programming error caused Dallas County, Texas’s new, $3.8 million high-tech ballot system to miss 41,015 votes during the November 1998 election. The system refused to count votes from 98 precincts, telling itself they had already been counted. Operators and election officials didn’t realize they had a problem until after they’d released “final” totals that omitted one in eight votes.
• In 2000 in Allamakee County, Iowa, 300 ballots fed into an ES&S optical-scan machine produced 4 million votes. The machine broke down repeatedly and flashed absurd numbers throughout the evening, election auditor Bill Roe Jr. told the Chicago Tribune.
•Last year in Fairfax County, Virginia, which used machines made by Advanced Voting Solutions, voters in three precincts complained that when they touched the box next to school board member Rita Thompson's name to vote for her, an "X" appeared in the box, but then disappeared. They had to press the box up to five times before their selection took. Thompson lost the election by 1 percent of the vote.
•In the 2002 general election in Scurry County, Texas, poll workers grew suspicious when two Republican commissioners won landslide victories on ES&S optical-scan machines. When officials recounted the ballots twice by hand, the wins went to their Democratic opponents instead.
•In the Alabama 2002 general election, machines made by Election Systems and Software (ES&S) flipped the governor’s race. Six thousand three hundred Baldwin County electronic votes mysteriously disappeared after the polls had closed and everyone had gone home. Democrat Don Siegelman’s victory was handed to Republican Bob Riley, and the recount Siegelman requested was denied. Six months after the election, the vendor shrugged. “Something happened. I don’t have enough intelligence to say exactly what,” said Mark Kelley of ES&S.
•In the 2002 general election, a computer miscount overturned the House District 11 result in Wayne County, North Carolina. Incorrect programming caused machines to skip several thousand party-line votes, both Republican and Democratic. Fixing the error turned up 5,500 more votes and reversed the election for state representative.
•An Orange County, California, election computer made a 100 percent error during the April 1998 school bond referendum. The Registrar of Voters Office initially announced that the bond issue had lost by a wide margin; in fact, it was supported by a majority of the ballots cast. The error was attributed to a programmer’s reversing the “yes” and “no” answers in the software used to count the votes.
•A software programming error gave the election to the wrong candidate in November 1999 in Onondaga County, New York. Bob Faulkner, a political newcomer, went to bed on election night confident he had helped complete a Republican sweep of three open council seats. But after Onondaga County Board of Elections staffers rechecked the totals, Faulkner had lost to Democratic incumbent Elaine Lytel. Just a few hours later, election officials discovered that a software programming error had given too many absentee ballot votes to Lytel. Faulkner took the lead.
•Akron, Ohio, discovered its votes got scrambled in its December 1997 election. It was announced that Ed Repp had won the election, however a "a programming error" was discovered — Repp actually lost. Another error in the same election resulted in incorrect totals for the Portage County Board election. Turns out the bond referendum results were wrong, too.
• In a 1998 Salt Lake City election, 1,413 votes never showed up in the total. A "programming error" caused a batch of ballots not to count, though they had been run through the machine like all the others. When the 1,413 missing votes were counted, they reversed the election.
•For the third time in as many elections, Pima County, Arizona, found errors in its tallies. The computers recorded no votes for 24 precincts in the 1998 general election, but voter rolls showed thousands had voted at those polling places. Pima used Global Election Systems machines, which now are sold under the Diebold company name.
•Officials in Broward County, Florida, had said that all the precincts were included in the Nov. 5, 2002, election and that the new, unauditable ES&S touch-screen machines had counted the vote without a major hitch. The next day, the County Elections Office discovered 103,222 votes had not been counted.
•Ten days after the November 2002 election, Richard Romero, a Bernalillo County, New Mexico, Democrat, noticed that 48,000 people had voted early on unauditable Sequoia touch-screen computers, but only 36,000 votes had been tallied — a 25 percent error. Sequoia vice president Howard Cramer apologized for not mentioning that the same problem had happened before in Clark County, Nevada. A “software patch” was installed and Sequoia technicians in Denver e-mailed the “correct” results!
•In Atlanta, Georgia, a software programming error caused some votes for Sharon Cooper, considered a “liberal Republican candidate,” not to register in the July 1998 election. Cooper was running against conservative Republican Richard Daniel. According to news reports, the problem required “on-the-spot reprogramming!”
•The most famous example of election flipping occurred in the hotly contested 2000 presidential election in Florida when the tabulation system for Diebold's optical-scan system subtracted votes from Al Gore's total. While hanging chads distracted the nation, a few people noticed that in a Volusia County precinct where only 412 people voted, a Diebold system actually deleted votes for Gore, giving him minus 16,022 votes. Bush received 2,813 votes. And a Socialist Party candidate unexplainably received 9,000 votes. It was this incident that caused the media to declare Florida for Bush, and Gore to nearly concede early.
This was only caught because a poll monitor noticed Gore's vote going DOWN as MORE people voted! Diebold blamed the episode on a"faulty memory chip" which anyone with any computer knowledge knows is just not credible. Memo's from Diebold employees are equally as damning. One memo from Lana Hires of Global Election Systems, now part of Diebold, complains, "I need some answers! Our department is being audited by the County. I have been waiting for someone to give me an explanation as to why Precinct 216 gave Al Gore a minus 16,022 [votes] when it was uploaded." Another, from Talbot Ireland, Senior VP of Research and Development for Diebold, refers to key "replacement" votes in Volusia County as "unauthorized."
•A "glitch" in Ohio caused a "memory card" reader made by Danaher Controls to give George W. Bush 3,893 more votes than he should have received.
•Franklin County's unofficial results gave Bush 4,258 votes to Democratic challenger John Kerry's 260 votes in Precinct 1B. Records show only 638 voters cast ballots in that precinct.
•10 touch-screen voting machines failed at precincts in Broward County, Ohio.
•Voters in Florida and Texas complained about calibration problems with touch-screen machines. Problems occurred when voters touched the screen next to one candidate's name and an "X" appeared in a box next to another candidate's name.
•Voters in Palm Beach County, Florida, reported that when they went to vote on Sequoia machines some races on their electronic ballots were already pre-marked before they started voting. They had to ask poll workers to assist them in removing the selections from the ballot so they could start with a clean ballot. In some cases they weren't successful in doing this.
•In Texas, voters casting straight-party tickets reported that machines cast ballots for candidates outside of their chosen party.
•In Laporte, Indiana it was noticed that the first three printouts from individual precinct reports all listed an identical number of voters. Each precinct was listed as having 300 registered voters totaling 56,800 less voters than there actually are, resulting in a 2 and a half hour delay in voting from 7-9:30 PM.
•In North Carolina a systems software "glitch" in Craven County's electronic voting equipment is being blamed for a vote miscount that, when corrected, changed the outcome of at least one race in Tuesday's election. Then, in the rush to make right the miscalculation that swelled the number of votes for president here by 11,283 more votes than the total number cast, a human mistake further delayed accurate totals.
•In Carteret County, North Carolina, memory limitation on DRE caused over 4500 votes to be permanently lost. The vendor claimed their paperless voting machines would store 10,500 votes, but they only store 3,005. After the first 3,005 voters, the machines accepted -- but did not store -- the ballots of 4,530 people.
http://www.votersunite.org/info/previousmessups.asp
http://www.wired.com/news/evote
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_...64/ai_111979619
http://theory.lcs.mit.edu/~rivest/voting/index.html
http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/origi...1022484,00.html
http://blackboxvoting.org
http://www.TheRandiRhodesShow.com
http://www.electoral-vote.com/
Light Reading ... It Shouldn't Be Called Black Box Voting
It should be appropriately called BLACK HOLE VOTING !!!
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The United States is the only major democracy that allows private partisan corporations to secretly count and tabulate the votes with proprietary non-transparent software.
Last week the only 3 major election systems bid for North Carolina's switch to The Amazing Disappearing Vote "blackbox" electronic voting systems.
http://www.charlotte.com/mld/observer/news...al/13304893.htm
The firms were Diebold, ES&S and Sequoia. Let's take them one at a time.
Diebold, formally known for making safes and security systems that stop people from stealing money, now makes machines that help people steal votes.
These companies refuse to reveal the source code that runs and calculates the votes with the excuse that it is proprietary and it violates copyright protection laws to reveal it. Because, I suppose, the corporations' copyright rights are much more important than the citizens' right to free and fair elections.
Secret source code could be written to do anything. It could be as simple as saying:
Bush Votes = Previous Bush votes + 2
Which would double Bush's votes, and also explain why many places including Missouri had FAR more votes than registered voters. The Justice Department is currently investigating that.
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle....URI-LAWSUIT.xml
So Congress pressured E-voting firms to provide their code to be kept in escrow at the National Library. North Carolina passed a state law requiring the code be put in escrow. And when the County Superior Court rejected Diebold's challenge of the law Diebold decided it would give up a contract worth 100s of millions of dollars rather than divulge its code.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051129/ap_on_...voting_problems
But then, like the Amazing Disappearing Vote, Diebold got the Immaculate Certification, and was certified yesterday despite it's not compliance with the law and its violation of the court's ruling!
http://www.bradblog.com/archives/00002105.htm
Other interesting Diebold facts:
The Department of Homeland Security's very own United States Computer Readiness Team website cites Diebold (one of the 3 major voting systems) as having "A vulnerability exists due to an undocumented backdoor account, which could a local or remote authenticated malicious user modify votes." Those Homeland Security Geeks need some grammar help but what they are saying is Diebold wrote code into their software allowing someone to change the votes remotely. What more needs to be said?!
http://www.us-cert.gov/cas/bulletins/SB04-252.html#diebold
California has halted all use of Diebold machines until it can have them tested yet again. Though many accuse the State seems to be shutting out any groups who have any interest but getting the machines approved.
http://rawstory.com/news/2005/California_v...oting_1201.html
They are also suing Diebold for over $12 million dollars due to massive failures of their software during the March primary elections where in San Diego alone over half the machines did not work.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/09/08/calif_sues_diebold/
Diebold CEO Walden O'Dell is estimated to have donated at least $100,00 to the Bush campaign. Not only that, but he's hosted President Bush at his home as well as sent invitations to over 100 wealthy republicans to dine at his home as part of Bush's 2004 election campaign. In the invitation O'Dell pronounced he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president" in 2004.
One of the longest-serving Diebold directors is W.R. "Tim" Timken. Like O'Dell, Timken is a Republican loyalist and a major contributor to GOP candidates. Since 1991 the Timken Company and members of the Timken family have contributed more than a million dollars to the Republican Party and to GOP presidential candidates such as George W. Bush. Between 2000 and 2002 alone, Timken's Canton-based bearing and steel company gave more than $350,000 to Republican causes, while Timken himself gave more than $120,000. This year, he is one of George W. Bush's campaign Pioneers, and pulled in more than $350,000 for the president's reelection bid.
Diebold purchased Texas-based GES in 2002. GES director Michael K Graye Pleaded guilty in 1998 to charges of tax-fraud and money laundering involving $18 million. In 2000 GES hired Jeffrey Dean as Sr. VP despite the fact he had served time on 23 felony counts of embezzlement involving, according to the SEC, "a high degree of sophistication and planning in the use and alteration of records in the computerized accounting system." Graye's friend and fellow inmate, convicted on cocaine charges, runs all systems involved with printing ballots for GES.
Diebold took over all of Georgia's elections in 2002. The popular Democratic senator, Max Cleland, a Vietnam veteran, disabled in combat, was called unpatriotic by his republican opponent, a pro-Iraq invasion activist who avoided military service in Vietnam. Cleland lost by 7% although the polls had him to win by 7%. These two elections gave the Senate to the Republicans giving the Republicans the House, Senate and Presidency.
Also on that day, Democratic Governor Roy Barnes lost to Sonny Purdue by 5% though he was ahead in the polls by 11%. Polls can be wrong you might argue, however this was the first Republican governor in 134 years!
Even more disturbing, Diebold workers had illegally loaded an uncertified "patch" on machines in Georgia and California just weeks before the election and then changed the flash memory after the election making it virtually impossible to examine the voting record.
And even more disturbing than that is a file named "Rob-Georgia on Diebold's unsecure FTP site with instructions on how to replace files in the voting tabulators
ES&S (Election Systems & Software):
The Vice President of the largest e-voting firm Election Systems and Software was involved in a bribery and kickback scheme, for which Arkansas' Secretary of State was convicted.
Howard Ahmanson Jr., a right-wing Christian fundamentalist millionaire based in California, bankrolled the founders of ES&S. After she left office, former Florida Secretary of State Sandra Mortham, a one-time running mate of Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, became a lobbyist for both ES&S and the Florida Association of Counties. During that time, the association signed an exclusive endorsement deal with ES&S to earn a commission on any contracts that counties signed with the voting company.
Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel was chairman of ES&S before quitting and running for Senate 2 weeks later. He won his seat in an unprecedented victory with two major upsets in the primary and the general election, beating his opponent's 65% lead in the polls and becoming the first Republican senator since 1972! Not only that but he obtained a resounding win with black voters who had never voted in a republican. When he won another landslide victory his opponent demanded a recount but the state's contract with ES&S (Which Nagle helped write) forbids any examination of the machines or software and there WAS NO PAPER TRAIL. 7 years later he still held up to $5 million in investments with ES&S that he had failed to disclose in any campaign filings. Oh, by the way, Hagel was also one of the few people considered as President Bush's Vice President in the 2000 campaign.
Sequoia:
Sequoia Employees were indicted for facilitating a 10-year kickback scheme involving election officials and millions of dollars in overcharges for voting equipment.
The following is some of the government's own findings last month by the Government Accounting Office about the 2004 election:
1. Some electronic voting machines "did not encrypt cast ballots or system audit logs, and it was possible to alter both without being detected." In other words, the GAO now confirms that electronic voting machines provided an open door to flip an entire vote count. More than 800,000 votes were cast in Ohio on electronic voting machines, some seven times Bush's official margin of victory.
2. "It was possible to alter the files that define how a ballot looks and works so that the votes for one candidate could be recorded for a different candidate." Numerous sworn statements and affidavits assert that this did happen in Ohio 2004.
3. "Vendors installed uncertified versions of voting system software at the local level." 3. Falsifying election results without leaving any evidence of such an action by using altered memory cards can easily be done, according to the GAO.
4. The GAO also confirms that access to the voting network was easily compromised because not all digital recording electronic voting systems (DREs) had supervisory functions password-protected, so access to one machine provided access to the whole network. This critical finding confirms that rigging the 2004 vote did not require a "widespread conspiracy" but rather the cooperation of a very small number of operatives with the power to tap into the networked machines and thus change large numbers of votes at will. With 800,000 votes cast on electronic machines in Ohio, flipping the number needed to give Bush 118,775 could be easily done by just one programmer.
5. Access to the voting network was also compromised by repeated use of the same user IDs combined with easily guessed passwords. So even relatively amateur hackers could have gained access to and altered the Ohio vote tallies.
6. The locks protecting access to the system were easily picked and keys were simple to copy, meaning, again, getting into the system was an easy matter.
7. One DRE model was shown to have been networked in such a rudimentary fashion that a power failure on one machine would cause the entire network to fail, re-emphasizing the fragility of the system on which the Presidency of the United States was decided.
8. GAO identified further problems with the security protocols and background screening practices for vendor personnel, confirming still more easy access to the system.
In essence, the GAO study makes it clear that no bank, grocery store or mom & pop chop shop would dare operate its business on a computer system as flimsy, fragile and easily manipulated as the one on which the 2004 election turned.
The GAO findings are particularly damning when set in the context of an election run in Ohio by a Secretary of State simultaneously working as co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign. Far from what election theft skeptics have long asserted, the GAO findings confirm that the electronic network on which 800,000 Ohio votes were cast was vulnerable enough to allow a a tiny handful of operatives -- or less -- to turn the whole vote count using personal computers operating on relatively simple software.
The GAO documentation flows alongside other crucial realities surrounding the 2004 vote count. For example:
# The exit polls showed Kerry winning in Ohio, until an unexplained last minute shift gave the election to Bush. Similar definitive shifts also occurred in Iowa, Nevada and New Mexico, a virtual statistical impossibility.
# A few weeks prior to the election, an unauthorized former ES&S voting machine company employee, was caught on the ballot-making machine in Auglaize County
# Election officials in Mahoning County now concede that at least 18 machines visibly transferred votes for Kerry to Bush. Voters who pushed Kerry's name saw Bush's name light up, again and again, all day long. Officials claim the problems were quickly solved, but sworn statements and affidavits say otherwise. They confirm similar problems in Franklin County (Columbus). Kerry's margins in both counties were suspiciously low.
# A voting machine in Mahoning County recorded a negative 25 million votes for Kerry. The problem was allegedly fixed.
# In Gahanna Ward 1B, at a fundamentalist church, a so-called "electronic transfer glitch" gave Bush nearly 4000 extra votes when only 638 people voted at that polling place. The tally was allegedly corrected, but remains infamous as the "loaves and fishes" vote count.
# In Franklin County, dozens of voters swore under oath that their vote for Kerry faded away on the DRE without a paper trail.
# In Miami County, at 1:43am after Election Day, with the county's central tabulator reporting 100% of the vote - 19,000 more votes mysteriously arrived; 13,000 were for Bush at the same percentage as prior to the additional votes, a virtual statistical impossibility.
# In Cleveland, large, entirely implausible vote totals turned up for obscure third party candidates in traditional Democratic African-American wards. Vote counts in neighboring wards showed virtually no votes for those candidates, with 90% going instead for Kerry.
# Prior to one of Blackwell's illegitimate "show recounts," technicians from Triad voting machine company showed up unannounced at the Hocking County Board of Elections and removed the computer hard drive.
# In response to official information requests, Shelby and other counties admit to having discarded key records and equipment before any recount could take place.
# In a conference call with Rev. Jackson, Attorney Cliff Arnebeck, Attorney Bob Fitrakis and others, John Kerry confirmed that he lost every precinct in New Mexico that had a touchscreen voting machine. The losses had no correlation with ethnicity, social class or traditional party affiliation---only with the fact that touchscreen machines were used.
# In a public letter, Rep. Conyers has stated that "by and large, when it comes to a voting machine, the average voter is getting a lemon - the Ford Pinto of voting technology. We must demand better."
But the GAO report now confirms that electronic voting machines as deployed in 2004 were in fact perfectly engineered to allow a very small number of partisans with minimal computer skills and equipment to shift enough votes to put George W. Bush back in the White House.
http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2005/1529No
The following is a short list of voting problems since adopting E-voting machines:
•A software programming error caused Dallas County, Texas’s new, $3.8 million high-tech ballot system to miss 41,015 votes during the November 1998 election. The system refused to count votes from 98 precincts, telling itself they had already been counted. Operators and election officials didn’t realize they had a problem until after they’d released “final” totals that omitted one in eight votes.
• In 2000 in Allamakee County, Iowa, 300 ballots fed into an ES&S optical-scan machine produced 4 million votes. The machine broke down repeatedly and flashed absurd numbers throughout the evening, election auditor Bill Roe Jr. told the Chicago Tribune.
•Last year in Fairfax County, Virginia, which used machines made by Advanced Voting Solutions, voters in three precincts complained that when they touched the box next to school board member Rita Thompson's name to vote for her, an "X" appeared in the box, but then disappeared. They had to press the box up to five times before their selection took. Thompson lost the election by 1 percent of the vote.
•In the 2002 general election in Scurry County, Texas, poll workers grew suspicious when two Republican commissioners won landslide victories on ES&S optical-scan machines. When officials recounted the ballots twice by hand, the wins went to their Democratic opponents instead.
•In the Alabama 2002 general election, machines made by Election Systems and Software (ES&S) flipped the governor’s race. Six thousand three hundred Baldwin County electronic votes mysteriously disappeared after the polls had closed and everyone had gone home. Democrat Don Siegelman’s victory was handed to Republican Bob Riley, and the recount Siegelman requested was denied. Six months after the election, the vendor shrugged. “Something happened. I don’t have enough intelligence to say exactly what,” said Mark Kelley of ES&S.
•In the 2002 general election, a computer miscount overturned the House District 11 result in Wayne County, North Carolina. Incorrect programming caused machines to skip several thousand party-line votes, both Republican and Democratic. Fixing the error turned up 5,500 more votes and reversed the election for state representative.
•An Orange County, California, election computer made a 100 percent error during the April 1998 school bond referendum. The Registrar of Voters Office initially announced that the bond issue had lost by a wide margin; in fact, it was supported by a majority of the ballots cast. The error was attributed to a programmer’s reversing the “yes” and “no” answers in the software used to count the votes.
•A software programming error gave the election to the wrong candidate in November 1999 in Onondaga County, New York. Bob Faulkner, a political newcomer, went to bed on election night confident he had helped complete a Republican sweep of three open council seats. But after Onondaga County Board of Elections staffers rechecked the totals, Faulkner had lost to Democratic incumbent Elaine Lytel. Just a few hours later, election officials discovered that a software programming error had given too many absentee ballot votes to Lytel. Faulkner took the lead.
•Akron, Ohio, discovered its votes got scrambled in its December 1997 election. It was announced that Ed Repp had won the election, however a "a programming error" was discovered — Repp actually lost. Another error in the same election resulted in incorrect totals for the Portage County Board election. Turns out the bond referendum results were wrong, too.
• In a 1998 Salt Lake City election, 1,413 votes never showed up in the total. A "programming error" caused a batch of ballots not to count, though they had been run through the machine like all the others. When the 1,413 missing votes were counted, they reversed the election.
•For the third time in as many elections, Pima County, Arizona, found errors in its tallies. The computers recorded no votes for 24 precincts in the 1998 general election, but voter rolls showed thousands had voted at those polling places. Pima used Global Election Systems machines, which now are sold under the Diebold company name.
•Officials in Broward County, Florida, had said that all the precincts were included in the Nov. 5, 2002, election and that the new, unauditable ES&S touch-screen machines had counted the vote without a major hitch. The next day, the County Elections Office discovered 103,222 votes had not been counted.
•Ten days after the November 2002 election, Richard Romero, a Bernalillo County, New Mexico, Democrat, noticed that 48,000 people had voted early on unauditable Sequoia touch-screen computers, but only 36,000 votes had been tallied — a 25 percent error. Sequoia vice president Howard Cramer apologized for not mentioning that the same problem had happened before in Clark County, Nevada. A “software patch” was installed and Sequoia technicians in Denver e-mailed the “correct” results!
•In Atlanta, Georgia, a software programming error caused some votes for Sharon Cooper, considered a “liberal Republican candidate,” not to register in the July 1998 election. Cooper was running against conservative Republican Richard Daniel. According to news reports, the problem required “on-the-spot reprogramming!”
•The most famous example of election flipping occurred in the hotly contested 2000 presidential election in Florida when the tabulation system for Diebold's optical-scan system subtracted votes from Al Gore's total. While hanging chads distracted the nation, a few people noticed that in a Volusia County precinct where only 412 people voted, a Diebold system actually deleted votes for Gore, giving him minus 16,022 votes. Bush received 2,813 votes. And a Socialist Party candidate unexplainably received 9,000 votes. It was this incident that caused the media to declare Florida for Bush, and Gore to nearly concede early.
This was only caught because a poll monitor noticed Gore's vote going DOWN as MORE people voted! Diebold blamed the episode on a"faulty memory chip" which anyone with any computer knowledge knows is just not credible. Memo's from Diebold employees are equally as damning. One memo from Lana Hires of Global Election Systems, now part of Diebold, complains, "I need some answers! Our department is being audited by the County. I have been waiting for someone to give me an explanation as to why Precinct 216 gave Al Gore a minus 16,022 [votes] when it was uploaded." Another, from Talbot Ireland, Senior VP of Research and Development for Diebold, refers to key "replacement" votes in Volusia County as "unauthorized."
•A "glitch" in Ohio caused a "memory card" reader made by Danaher Controls to give George W. Bush 3,893 more votes than he should have received.
•Franklin County's unofficial results gave Bush 4,258 votes to Democratic challenger John Kerry's 260 votes in Precinct 1B. Records show only 638 voters cast ballots in that precinct.
•10 touch-screen voting machines failed at precincts in Broward County, Ohio.
•Voters in Florida and Texas complained about calibration problems with touch-screen machines. Problems occurred when voters touched the screen next to one candidate's name and an "X" appeared in a box next to another candidate's name.
•Voters in Palm Beach County, Florida, reported that when they went to vote on Sequoia machines some races on their electronic ballots were already pre-marked before they started voting. They had to ask poll workers to assist them in removing the selections from the ballot so they could start with a clean ballot. In some cases they weren't successful in doing this.
•In Texas, voters casting straight-party tickets reported that machines cast ballots for candidates outside of their chosen party.
•In Laporte, Indiana it was noticed that the first three printouts from individual precinct reports all listed an identical number of voters. Each precinct was listed as having 300 registered voters totaling 56,800 less voters than there actually are, resulting in a 2 and a half hour delay in voting from 7-9:30 PM.
•In North Carolina a systems software "glitch" in Craven County's electronic voting equipment is being blamed for a vote miscount that, when corrected, changed the outcome of at least one race in Tuesday's election. Then, in the rush to make right the miscalculation that swelled the number of votes for president here by 11,283 more votes than the total number cast, a human mistake further delayed accurate totals.
•In Carteret County, North Carolina, memory limitation on DRE caused over 4500 votes to be permanently lost. The vendor claimed their paperless voting machines would store 10,500 votes, but they only store 3,005. After the first 3,005 voters, the machines accepted -- but did not store -- the ballots of 4,530 people.
http://www.votersunite.org/info/previousmessups.asp
http://www.wired.com/news/evote
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_...64/ai_111979619
http://theory.lcs.mit.edu/~rivest/voting/index.html
http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/origi...1022484,00.html
http://blackboxvoting.org
http://www.TheRandiRhodesShow.com
http://www.electoral-vote.com/
Light Reading ... It Shouldn't Be Called Black Box Voting
It should be appropriately called BLACK HOLE VOTING !!!
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