Reply #13: It's MUCH worse than most people think...but here's some GOOD news [View All]

[monroncrief]

This is from Peter Phillips,a Professor of Sociology at Sonoma State University and Director of Project Censored. For a listing of current censored news stories see http://www.projectcensored.org/

"Election Systems & Software (ES&S), Diebold, and Sequoia are the companies primarily involved in implementing the new voting stations throughout the country. All three have strong ties to the Bush Administration. The largest investors in ES&S, Sequoia, and Diebold are government defense contractors Northrup-Grumman, Lockheed-Martin, Electronic Data Systems (EDS) and Accenture. Diebold hired Scientific Applications International Corporation (SAIC) of San Diego to develop the software security in their voting machines. A majority of officials on SAIC's board are former members of either the Pentagon or the CIA including:

* Army Gen. Wayne Downing, formerly on the National Security Council

* Bobby Ray Inman; former CIA Director

* Retired Adm. William Owens, former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

* Robert Gates, another former director of the CIA.

So, we have a CIA/military private firm that programmed the security in the voting machines for companies owned by some of the largest military contracts in the country. No wonder the Co-founder of the Citizens Alliance for Secure Elections, Susan Truitt said November 3: "Seven counties in Ohio have electronic voting machines and none of them have paper trails. That alone raises issues of accuracy and integrity as to how we can verify the count. A recount without a paper trail is meaningless; you just get a regurgitation of the data. Last year, Blackwell tried to get the entire state to buy new machines without a paper trail.

The exit polls, virtually the only check we have against tampering with a vote without a paper trail, had shown Kerry with a lead. ... A poll worker told me this morning that there were no tapes of the results posted on some machines; on other machines the posted count was zero, which obviously shouldn't be the case.

Our level of non-participation really means democracy has failed in the US. Democracy is the people making decisions about the important issues in their lives. Freedom is the ability to act on these decisions. Without an electoral choice democracy is non-existent and freedom only means the right to choose your own brand of toothpaste. Without an active independent media informing on the powerful, we lack both freedom and democracy."

and THIS from voxfux.com

MASSIVE VOTE FRAUD!---ALL ELECTRONIC VOTING MACHINES SUSPECT.........ALL ELECTRONIC VOTING MACHINES PRODUCED BY CONSERVATIVE REPUBLICAN EXTREMISTS...........ALL ELECTRONIC VOTING MACHINES ARE A FRAUD...........REPUBLICANS THROUGHOUT THE COUNTRY WIN OVER DEMOCRATS BY GAINING 18,181 VOTES.........TEXAS REPUBLICANS DANNY SCHEEL, CARTER CASTEEL and JEFF WENTWORTH ALL RECIEVED EXACTLY THE SAME NUMBER OF VOTES - 18,181............TIME TO WAKE UP........... THE CHANCES OF ALL THREE GETTING THE EXACT SAME NUMBER OF VOTES IS ON THE ORDER OF MILLIONS TO ONE - YET THE CORPORATE MEDIA REFUSES TO REPORT THIS FACT.......... BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE..............TURNS OUT THAT MICHIGAN REPUBLICAN CANDICE MILLER BEAT HER DEMOCRATIC OPPONENT - SHE GOT 18,181 VOTES.....HMMMMM.....AND REPUBLICAN MICHAEL SMIGIEL FROM MARYLAND BEAT HIS CHALLENGER - CAN YOU GUESS HOW MANY VOTES HE GOT? YOU GUESSED IT - 18,181...

The # of irregularities, "lost" votes and malfunctions causing HOURS worth of votes to be lost are legion and for those that don't believe in exit polling, analysis of the polling data vs actual data and voting systems supports the hypothesis that evoting may be to blame in the discrepancies. Nevada has evoting but with verified receipts. In that state the Exit Polling matches the actual results within .1% accuracy. Exit polling had been an uncannily accurate predictor of vote results prior to Evoting and continues to be accurate in places where receipts are required or where they are not used. Coincidence?

Bev Harris of blackboxvoting.org is launching "the largest Freedom of Information action in history. At 8:30 p.m. Election Night, Black Box Voting blanketed the U.S. with the first in a series of public records requests, to obtain internal computer logs and other documents from 3,000 individual counties and townships. Networks called the election before anyone bothered to perform even the most rudimentary audit.

America: We have permission to say No to unaudited voting. It is our right.

Among the first requests sent to counties (with all kinds of voting systems -- optical scan, touch-screen, and punch card) is a formal records request for internal audit logs, polling place results slips, modem transmission logs, and computer trouble slips.

An earlier FOIA is more sensitive, and has not been disclosed here. We will notify you as soon as we can go public with it.

Such a request filed in King County, Washington on Sept. 15, following the primary election six weeks ago, uncovered an internal audit log containing a three-hour deletion on election night; “trouble slips” revealing suspicious modem activity; and profound problems with security, including accidental disclosure of critically sensitive remote access information to poll workers, office personnel, and even, in a shocking blunder, to Black Box Voting activists."

These machines are a joke and are largely responsible for a # of Repubs winning seats over the years in areas where, again, the exit polling and prior indicators said it was impossible. If you are unaware how long this has been going on and the true depth of "irregularities" and "errors" and "missing votes" Bev has her book
available online at http://www.blackboxvoting.org