Voting Machines as a Giant Ponzi Scheme

[babylonsister]

http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_nancy_to_070220_voting_machines_as_a.htm

February 20, 2007 at 05:20:45

Voting Machines as a Giant Ponzi Scheme

by Nancy Tobi


Just posted at http://www.blackboxvoting.org - A brilliant analysis by Nancy
Tobi that uncovers the actual schedules and timelines for the voting machine
product development cycle, revealing it to be a fraud on the American taxpayer.
I've excerpted the introduction here, but STRONGLY encourage those of you who
are in it for the long haul to read the whole article. It provides powerful
ammunition that should be passed along to ELECTIONS OFFICIALS, the MEDIA, and
BUDGET COMMITTEES. A PDF version will be uploaded tomorrow.

Full article:
http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/1954/46701.html


INTRODUCTION

A Ponzi Scheme, by definition, is an artifice that is insolvent from its
inception, thereby defrauding its funders (in this case, the taxpayers). Ponzi
schemes work on the "rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul" principle, as new investment
(taxpayer) money is needed to fulfill promises made on earlier investments (tax
monies) until the whole scheme collapses.

Our nation has already suffered an incalculable blow from the use of expensive
computerized voting equipment, which, by all accounts, has been an abysmal
failure by every reasonable criterion: product quality, reliability, accuracy,
and security.

Taxpayers are now being required to invest in a certification and voting machine
procurement program built on a cycle of lag, non-implementation and
obsolescence:

• Products procured before guidelines are established for them;
• Guidelines and testing programs, while trying to catch up to features in
already-purchased equipment, add new requirements;
• Each new wave of guidelines obsoletes existing equipment;
• Successive waves of new investments (by taxpayers) are required to catch up to
previous assurances

When you peel back the veneer of the whole Election Assistance Commission (EAC)
Certification program, with its National Institute of Standards and Technology
(NIST) and its National Voluntary Laboratory Accreditation Program (NVLAP)
testing process, what you learn is that the entire system is, in effect,
insolvent. Meanwhile, your tax dollars continue to flow into the system (to the
tune of nearly $3 million in the EAC's 2005 budget plus nearly $5 million in
2006 and a requested $6 million in its 2007 budget).

more...

[livvy]

1. Hi, Sis! Welcome to the forum!

Interesting article. I've read many of Tobi's pieces before, and found them easy to read and understand.
This struck me in the article:

Furthermore, the 2005 EAC Voting System Guidelines state the following stringent requirements for the text conversion device:

quote:

4.1.5.2 Ballot Reading Accuracy
This paper-based system requirement governs the conversion of the physical ballot into electronic data. Reading accuracy for ballot conversion refers to the ability to:
a. Recognize vote punches or marks, or the absence thereof, for each possible selection on the ballot
b. Discriminate between valid punches or marks and extraneous perforations, smudges, and folds
c. Convert the vote punches or marks, or the absence thereof, for each possible selection on the ballot into digital signals
To ensure accuracy, paper-based systems shall:
d. Detect punches or marks that conform to vendor specifications with an error rate not exceeding the requirement indicated in Subsection 4.1.1
e. Ignore, and not record, extraneous perforations, smudges, and folds
f. Reject ballots that meet all vendor specifications at a rate not to exceed 2 percent

Spending all this time and money to create a machine that the naked eye can do, with other naked eyes watching to make sure it's done accurately. $5,000 pencil indeed.

[Stevepol]

2. Best analogy I've seen for our election system: Giant Ponzi Scheme!!

I was just going to post this article when I saw this posting.

This has got to be one of the best ways to look at the voting machine scam and con game. The players, the companies, are almost certainly criminal in their ownership and management, certainly in their marketing and business strategies and tactics. It's based on obvious lies. The vendors are as bad as the snake oil salesmen of the old west. You can't believe a word they say. They know it and everybody with a lick of sense knows it, but the elections officials go for their marketing nonsense hook line and sinker.

And yet it goes on. I think it makes the Teapot Dome scandal look like a bump in the road. It far surpasses any other purely political scandal that I can think of or even imagine.

It's a little like a mass psychosis or delusion, like the whole country just going crazy for 10 to 15 years. How can people even remotely consider totally secret vote counting without verification as having any resemblance to democracy? It's totally insane and if the US somehow cripples on after this long night of mental derangement, historians will eventually see it that way. Mass psychosis.

[kster]

3. This is good read,

that is if you can keep up with the article. What a bunch of CROOKS we are dealing with. Diebold, ES&S and Sequoia are only small fish in this vote rigging scam, if they didn't have the Politicians on their side, forcing these machines on us, they would never be able to sell their garbage machines anywhere.

I like this part:

"To that end, we are now hearing talk about turning existing DREs into "ballot marking devices" – that is, voting machines that don't count the vote, just mark the ballot for you -- basically, turning each DRE into a $5,000 pencil."

K&R