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Electronic Voting: Your Worst Nightmares are True
jfreon writes "On Democracy Now Bev Harris of BlackBoxVoting fame, disclosed (near the end of the transcript) that in the compromised 1.8Gigs off Diebold's FTP site they uncovered "an actual election file containing actual votes on election day from San Luis Obispo County, California". Problem is, the date stamp was 3:31pm - during voting hours! The Diebold system uses a wireless network card. Worse: "So that means if they can pull the information in, they can also send information back into those machines. ""
The Commonweal Institute has compiled quite a bit of information (scroll down to the links) about the problems with electronic voting machines.
Don't just complain, act: There is a bill in Congress introduced by Rush Holt, D-NJ. It is called "The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2003". It is H.R. 2239. It currently has 29 cosponsors and needs more support. The Summary page is here. The press page is here. Congress is in session again now. Contact your Congressperson and demand they support this bill. It would require a voter-verifiable paper trail.
skkkoooonnnggggkkk ptui
The idea of EVM2003 is to create Free Software voting machine, and to implement machines that also produce voter-verifiable paper trails (i.e. visually readable printed ballots). We will do a number of security things right, where the commercial companies have done them wrong... they have aimed for "security through obscurity" or "just trust us." As well, part of our requirement is to have fully blind-accessible voting that maintains complete anonymity.
Anyway, I (David Mertz) have taken over as Developer Lead recently, and am trying to get the development of the demo rolling. Part of that effort is recruiting some more developers, and splitting the project into several only loosely connected parts. Feel free to contact me--the standard ballot system (in the demo version at least) is being done in wxPython; but conceivably we would choose other languages/technologies for bar-code reading, printing, blind-voting, etc. (my preference is to use Python though, for consistency and rapid development).
Buy Text Processing in Python
problem with that is it is likley that DIEBOLD also knows this and is willing to sell this info to different political parties and lobby groups.
Yep. And guess what party that woud be?
From the article:
According to Harris, a study of the campaign contributions made by Diebold and its employees revealed an unusual pattern: Hundreds of thousands of dollars were being funneled to a few Republican candidates with very little to any other party.
The first amendment does NOT state that God should be kept out of government affairs.
This clause, however, does:
Clause 2: This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.
Note also that it does not restrict state governments in this area at all.
Again, the above clause does. Any law based on religion passed by a state government must be consistent and not conflict with the Constitution, including the Bill of Rights. You cannot, therefore, pass a law that says, for example, that you cannot take the Lord's name in vain, as that violates the First Amendment.
This should be obvious but your comments force me to point it out once again. Most laws I could think of based on religion that aren't also based on common morality (ie. "thou shalt not kill") would conflict with the Constitution in some way. You couldn't say the Pope is the ultimate judge of whether a convicted killer lives or dies, for example - that's up to the Supreme Court, according to the Constitution. This clause was partly (or possibly mainly) intended to promote separation of church and state.
I am not under the impression that the Democrats are without blame, but I never heard that Dan Rostenkowski commited voter fraud.
The 17 counts he went to jail on were for mail fraud and paying people to do nothing.
Maybe there is a better example? Say in Chicago
Please provide the source for your statement. Otherwise it should be modded as -1 for troll.
Look around the web on site:
here,
here,
here,
here, and lots more places.
It is clear that the majority intent of Florida's voters was to send Gore to the White House. Furthermore, it is clear that Florida's voting process was seriously biased against minorities, who predominantly vote Democratic.
The only reason why this wasn't discovered during the recount was because the Bush family managed to cut the recount short as long as it was still favorable for Bush.
Or we need to add a new mod of "+1 strong opinion of of a bitter loser."
With Bush as president, we all are losing: we are getting wars, economic problems, huge budget deficits, a failing educational system, rollback of civil rights protections, deterioration of international relations, etc.
It is pretty depressing that Republicans care more about who the President had sex with than about how the country is doing.
In several races with electronic voting machines, there were noticeable differences between pre-election polls and the actual election results. In Georgia, both Roy Barnes and Max Cleland led their opponents until the actual election.
Other Dieboldalical results (from a source found via Google) are here.
Chuck Hagel's opponent wanted a hand-recount, but by the terms of the signed contract, it was illegal for government election workers to review the votes.
Short form: what you describe happened, and you didn't even notice. (Final tinfoil hat moment - did we mention that there was a file named "rob-georgia" containing patches not tested by the state on the Diebold FTP site?)
You mentioned Clinton's sexual escapades, now let's talk about Bush's escapades.
I.) Bush LIED about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He's STILL LYING! Not one has been found since the war started, not one was used. American soldiers are dying because of this lie. For this alone George W. Bush should be IMPEACHED! The charge is treason.
II.) Bush said the war in Iraq was about terrorism. Why is it that, when the secret proceedings of the Energy policy hearings Chaired by Cheney were finally extracted from the White House by court order, they showed the Bush team carving up Iraq, months before 9/11? More treason, they were going to go to war with Iraq from the begining, 9/11 was an excuse.
III.) The Patriot act was some thousands of pages long. Do you really think it was written up after 9/11?
IV.) In case you missed it
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=03/09 /04/159216
V.) Finally, since you mentioned Clinton, what did an affair with an intern have to do with a real estate deal that happened a thousand miles away and a decade before? Did I mention that no charges were brought on that matter because Clinton did nothing wrong?
The NORC data did not "count" votes. This was the great con. All they did was note the condition of undercounted ballots:
For example:
"Voter puched the 'Al Gore' punch. Voter emphasized the vote by CIRCLING the punch. Voter further empasized their intention by writing AL GORE on the ballot.
Cannot count as Al Gore because we're not counting."
The Miami Herald did a similar study that actually COUNTED the ballots and found Al Gore the winner.
The true story of the election can be found at www.gregpalast.com. Yes, Greg Palast DOES have an axe to grind. He hates liars and hypocrites. The first two chapters of "The Best Democracy Money" is available their.
To summarize:
DBT Online/ChoicePoint was selected as a high-ball at $2.3 million dollars. The company who had previously did the job charged $5700.
They were supposed to record cross-checking against public databases and verification phone calls. They did none of this. They were instructed NOT TO.
ChoicePoint was instructed to search for similar names and reduced Jack to John etc... It was supposed to create the maximum number of matches provided the individuals.
The County offices were ORDERED to scrub everyone on the list without doing verification because ChoicePoint was SUPPOSED to have done that verification.
" The State of Florida was content with a partial match of four: names( the first four letters were good enough), ate of birth, gender and race. Not even the address or state mattered in the mad dash to maximize the number of citizens stripped of their civil rights."
- The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, p56
Of course you probably listen to Rush. AS if he hastened spent 6 hours a day grinding axes for the last 15 years.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!