The Diebold response is analagous to "We don't care. We have our money, and our sweet government contract." And, of course, none of this should be any reason for not having a paper trail. I'm still not sure (well...) why so many are so insistent on there being no paper record at all when voting on these machines. It seems a bit suspicious, doesn't it?
As long as we're talking about voting... Looks like it's ll here... cronyism, iincompetence, blaming the careerists for bad stuff while praising the politicos, whacked interpretation of laws and regulations to perversely do what they were designed to prevent, and of course, decisions that somehow just come out to favor the GOP. I'm also curious as to what "tilting to the left" means in regards to voting rights. I suspect it means a more inclusive electorate at the expense of one "tilted" to the GOP. This current administration isn't really Republican. It's not really Conservative. It's more power-mad than anything.
You cannot check the votes either now: http://www.adn.com/news/alaska/story/7386582p-7298824c.html State rebuffs raw vote demand STANDOFF: Democrats want 2004 base election data; machine firm is playing coy. By LISA DEMER Anchorage Daily News Published: January 24, 2006 Last Modified: January 24, 2006 at 02:26 AM The state Division of Elections has refused to turn over its electronic voting files to the Democrats, arguing that the data format belongs to a private company and can't be made public. The Alaska Democratic Party says the information is a public record essential for verifying the accuracy of the 2004 general election and must be provided. The official vote results from the last general election are riddled with discrepancies and impossible for the public to make sense of, the Democrats said Monday. A detailed analysis of the underlying data could answer lingering questions about an election many thought was over more than a year ago, they say. "Basically what they say is they want to give us a printout from the (electronic) file. They don't want to give us the file itself. It doesn't enable us to get to the bottom of what we need to know," said Kay Brown, spokeswoman for the party. At this point, it's impossible to say whether the correct candidates were declared the winner in all Alaska races from 2004, Brown said. The private contractor hired to provide Alaska's electronic voting machines is Diebold Election Systems. It has told Alaska officials it owns the "structure of the database" though the data itself is public. State officials say the Democrats have it wrong. "The issue is not about whether public information can be released, because the Division of Elections has already offered to provide the information requested by the (Alaska Democratic Party)," elections director Whitney Brewster said in a written statement. "The issue is that the (Democratic Party) is asking for a file format the state of Alaska uses but does not own." Diebold told the state it owns the format, which can't be released because it's a company secret. Diebold maintains its voting systems produce accurate results, as proven through recounts in numerous close races, said Mark Radke, Diebold director of marketing. Questions still hound the company. Some elections officials in other states are questioning whether its electronic machines are secure. Investors have sued the Ohio-based parent company, Diebold Inc., over whether it concealed problems with its voting machines, among other issues. Its chief executive, who once vowed to deliver Ohio electoral votes to President Bush, recently stepped down. The latest controversy concerns the database holding the results of Alaska's 2004 general election. Democrats say it's important for them to see the database in its original structure ---- the format in which the data was created and now is stored and reported. That's how they hope to figure out if the votes were registered and reported accurately. But under the state's contract with Diebold, that cannot be released, Brewster said. Documents provided by the Democrats show that Brewster contacted Diebold and was told the public data can be released only after being transferred to a common format such as Microsoft Excel. In a Jan. 6 e-mail, Diebold's lawyer, Charles R. Owen, told Brewster that "the structure of the database file ... is proprietary information." Perhaps, but it's not secret. Anyone can examine Diebold's format on a Web site set up by activists who have been raising questions about the company, the Alaska Democrats said. "Copies of these kinds of files have been sitting on the Internet for over two years, with Diebold's knowledge," said Jim March, an investigator with Black Box Voting, a private organization that calls itself a national consumer protection group for voters. Diebold has blocked the group's efforts to get election files in California, Colorado and Washington state, March said. But the data format has been released in a Florida county and in Memphis, Tenn., during a challenge of a mayoral election, he said. What the state has offered leaves out "the forensic traces we need to figure out what really happened," March said. The Black Box group is helping the Alaska Democratic Party. "The results from the 2004 election in Alaska just plain look squirrelly," March said. For instance, district-by-district vote totals add up to 292,267 votes for President Bush, but his official total was only 190,889. Election officials have an explanation. Early votes for statewide candidates were not recorded by House district but rather were tallied for each of the state's four election regions. Those regional totals then were reported for every House district, essentially inflating the vote total many times over. The results should be reported differently next time, officials have said. Democrats also contend more than 2,000 Alaskans cast valid absentee ballots that weren't counted in official totals. Unless they get the entire file, they won't be able to understand what caused the "bizarre and inaccurate reports" from Alaska's 2004 election, they say. "These votes belong to us," Brown said. "These are all public record. It's wrong that a contractor like Diebold can keep us from seeing the record." EDIT: I just reread this again, Insane. Absolutely Insane.
Still going... http://www.sltrib.com/ci_3646075 Earth to Demma: "Maybe the point was to have a third party evaluation because, warranty be damned, making sure the voting machines are ACCURATE IS MORE IMPORTANT." Earth to Diebold: "Sorry - people do not just blindly trust you with their votes. Maybe it would help if YOUR FRIKKIN' CEO didn't say things like 'I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president.'"
By and large their is no way the common man can know who wins what election it is just too much information to be processed by one person so we only have FAITH that our news orgs and our Government are telling the truth That is all Rocket River
What would be classic is if in 2008, somehow George W. Bush managed to get votes in Ohio even though he won't be on the ballot.
RR, do you have faith that our government is going to insure that these voting machines are used properly? I do not. Frankly, I think this may become one of the most gigantic scandals of our time. The Diebold system, from everything I've read about it, and I've been following this, off and on, for a long time, simply cries out to be hacked. Why don't they simply print out a paper copy of each vote? How hard could that be? If there were hints of fraud, then you could check the paper ballot copies, which would have remained locked up, against the computer voting. Why isn't this being done? That is almost as big a mystery, to me, as using these machines in the first place. Keep D&D Civil.
VOTE FRAUD: WHAT THEY AREN'T TELLING YOU By: Devvy October 22, 2004 NewsWithViews.com "The real rulers in Washington are invisible and exercise power from behind the scenes." -- Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter,1952 The issue of vote fraud has been all over the news for months. The first time I ran for Congress in the '93-'94 cycle, my campaign put out 25,000 flyers on Jim Collier's book VoteScam: The Stealing of America. Vote fraud and electronic ballot machines have been one of my pet issues and crusades since 1993. I find it ironic that the ones making the most noise about this are the Democrats, bona fide experts when it comes to vote fraud. There was vote fraud in the March 1996 primary when I ran as a Republican against the nitwit incumbent, Congressman Wally Herger. Just one of the many things that happened: While I was legally on the ballot, in the largest county in the district, my name didn't even appear on the ballot in one of the biggest precincts! When all was said and done, the Secretary of State, Republican Bill Jones, refused to investigate and in his short, terse letter to me said if I didn't like the outcome of the election, sue the state. By that time, the vote had been certified and it was all over. At that point I realized the "Grand Old Party" wasn't interested in the truth or fair elections, the party was over, I kissed the GOP good bye and have never regretted my decision. Following the phony primary in 1996, I wrote a 45 page booklet titled Blind Loyalty. This little booklet is filled with page after page after page of verifiable vote fraud. It was updated in 2000; I retired it earlier this year after selling 700,000 copies. However, if you click here, I have pulled some excerpts from the booklet that are on my CD so you can examine the numbers. The Democrats are already gearing up to create court battles in many states of the Union the minute the polls close on election day. One columnist recently wrote "If the abuses continue, we may have reached the point that Jefferson foretold." He was referring to Jefferson's comment about the tree of liberty must from time to time be refreshed with the blood of patriots. There already is violence over the Bush/Kerry ticket, which I find truly pathetic considering either candidate spells more disaster for our Republic. America is going to see monstrous problems that will make Florida 2000 pale in comparison. The whole horse and pony show that you will see is going to be deliberately engineered. Certainly, the voting system in this country is a mess and there will be provable fraud, but the Democrats are determined to create chaos which will, of course, keep the people divided and their attention diverted from what's really going on behind the scenes in furtherance of a one world government. The real fraud is inside the machines “I am concerned for the security of our great nation, not so much because of any threat from without, but because of the insidious forces working from within.”— General Douglas MacArthur Magicians use something called a 'magician's distraction.' They direct your attention to one hand while the other hand is busy doing the magic trick. Right now, everyone is watching the ballots and registrations, but they're ignoring what's inside these machines we pay for with our tax dollars, and according to the high court here in California, we have no right to do so to protect "proprietary interests" of the manufacturer. Let me enlighten you by quoting from a vote fraud newsletter (Cincinnatus News Service), December 1996: "The missing link in the vote fraud investigation has been found. The November 1996 issue of Relevance Magazine reveals that two-way hidden modems are being built into the ever growing number of computerized optical scanner/direct recording voting machines in use all across the country from New England to California. "These ostensibly independent voting machines are each driven by its own mini-computer. For example, the citizen, immediately after voting, feeds his ballot through an optical scanner which "reads" the vote and allegedly records the results immediately. Right after the polls close, a precinct worker obtains the cumulative "results" from that polling place by pushing a button which causes the mini-computer to issue a printed sheet. "How can tens of thousands of these independent voting machines in tens of thousands of separate locations possibly be manipulated without involving tens of thousands of people?....The bombshell from O'Halloran's article is that these hidden modems are accessible by remote cell phone technology. In other words, these voting machines can be accessed and manipulated from a central super computer without a phone line connected to the wall, and without the local precinct workers knowing that anything is happening at all. "According to Dr. O'Halloran, "Of course, when the same company that writes the source code, also designs the internal modem, the possibilities are endless for accessing the computer either before, during or after the election to alter, or at least interrogate the computer's vote count. It raises the specter of a remote high-speed, vote rigging computer automatically and surreptitiously contacting, querying and rapidly adjusting the votes inside many precincts and/or central counting machines nationwide." "Dr. O'Halloran verified his bombshell findings from the following sources: (1) Global Election Systems which makes the popular Accu-vote optical scanner; (2) the web site (www.mrcp.com) of the largest supplier of computer voting systems in the USA, Business Records Corporation (BRC); (3) PJ Lyon, 25 year computer veteran with BRC at Berkeley who maintains the BRCs source code; (4) Penelope Bonsall, long standing spokes person for the FEC; and (5) the Clerk's Office of Birmingham, Michigan." Dr. O'Halloran also confirmed by contacting Doubleday Publishing of Kalamzaoo, Michigan which sells the GES "Accu-Vote system, "A programming technician matter-of-factly told me that there are modems inside each of the vote counting computers which are used to transfer results from dozens of precincts to computer counting computers. They talk between modems. There is a modem between each computer unit." This means the voting counting computers can talk to a central computer mainframe and are vulnerable to outside access. Dr.O'Halloran went on to say, "The Doubleday technician explained that special command cards can be inserted into the machine to tell the precinct computer to call the central computer with results. According the technicians, "You have to program the phone number into the card, the card accesses the modem and the card tells it to dial into the central computer. To close the election you slide the 'ender-card' - like a special ballot - which has certain codes on it and tells it to lock up the election." GES isn't the only manufacturer of these internal modems. Dr. O'Halloran further investigated a Florida based company, Optech, and found the following on it's web site: "Modem communications and results transfer capability from the precinct with the OPTECH III-P Eagle and regional accumulation with the Smart Pack Receiving System." This alarmed O'Halloran because "the presence of an internal (hidden) modem which could allow outside access to the computer without anyone's knowledge." At that point, Dr. O'Halloran contacted Ronnie Dugger, author of a highly acclaimed November 1997 article in New Yorker about computerized election fraud. For those who are interested, you can read one of Dugger's articles here; another detailed article on vote rigging via these insidious machines is here. "A modem in an election computer would be highly suspect," Dr. O'Halloran quoted Dugger. "You can't insulate a computer from outside communication if you have a modem in it. There would be a sub-routine (in the source-code) program which would cause the results being turned into the central computer to be phoned to you too, so that you could find out how many votes you needed to steal the election." Here's another example: Voting machine fails inspection By Robert Lemos, Staff Writer, CNET News.com, July 24, 2003: University researchers delivered a serious blow to the current crop of electronic voting systems in an analysis of one such system's source code in which they concluded that a voter could cast unlimited ballots without detection. Using an earlier version of the source code that powers machines manufactured by Diebold Election Systems, the security experts--three from Johns Hopkins University and a colleague from Rice University--performed an audit and found numerous security holes. "Our analysis shows that this voting system is far below even the most minimal security standards applicable in other contexts," said the researchers in a paper published Wednesday on the Internet, concluding that "as a society, we must carefully consider the risks inherent in electronic voting, as it places our very democracy at risk." The criticisms echo a fundamental issue that many security researchers have raised with most current systems: There is no way to verify that a vote was correctly recorded and no permanent record is kept." Full article is at: http://news.com.com/2100-1009_3-5054088.html For those who jump into a state of denial that this couldn't possibly happen in America, it has and it will on election day. As long as we the people have no access to the internal workings of those machines, we will never know what is being fed into them via software programming and those internal modems. Get rid of all electronic machines, period and stop the fraud. While the parties are busy bickering and fighting about the ballots and registrations, the real fraud will occur during the voting process - regardless of what company manufactured the machine. Electronic ballot machine voting is the most secret process you've ever seen and it reeks of fraud. High stakes means controlling the vote Americans are woefully uninformed about the bigger picture, a subject I have been writing about for more than a decade. Here's the bottom line for vote fraud: Control the vote, you control who gets "elected" into positions of power. These elected officials will then work to fulfill the agenda of the international banking cartel that owns the White House, Congress and the two "mainstream" political parties. If they don't, they lose their next election. That's how the game is played and if you play the game, it will play you. After the pretend elections in 2000, the duplicitous in Congress got busy looking indignant, outraged and set forth to appropriate tens of millions of dollars to provide a uniform voting system in America using what else? Electronic voting machines. The feds cannot force the states to use these machines. This is a Tenth Amendment issue that the states must enforce and tell Congress to take a walk. The only way this will happen is through your legislatures and your county supervisors. Mark my words: We will never know the true vote count next month on election day no matter how many times the ballots are run through a machine or how many lawsuits the Democrats file against the Republicans and visa versa. All of this is just smoke and mirrors. We will never know how many votes were actually cast for Michael Peroutka representing the Constitution Party. In the end, America will get one of the two new world order facilitators (Bush or Kerry) jammed down our throats. As someone who has run for public office, put their whole heart into the effort, along with all the volunteers and the financial generosity of so many, I would rather have waited four or five days for a real vote count than be cheated. I don't want election results at the speed of a button, I want a true vote count. 21st Century high-technology is fine, but not for our elections. Speed should not be the order of the day. Fairness and impartiality to obtain an honest outcome should be the number one consideration. Do we really need to know who won the election one minute after 8:00 pm Pacific Standard Time? How come Peter Jennings and the big networks know the winners of so many races within a few hours of all polls closing with only 2% of the precincts "reporting"? How is it that USA TODAY can report on July 25, 2004 that Bush is going to win by so many electoral college votes months before the election? The electors don't cast their electoral college vote until the second week in December. How do these state polls or strategists seem to know the outcome long before the election? We always hear on election night that so and so won X number of electoral college votes with only a few percentage points of precincts "reporting." How is this possible? "Exit polls"? Now, there's another hoax. What can be done? A must is to get rid of the insidious Motor Voter Law of 1993. All states of the Union must purge their voting rolls and start over from scratch. There is a two year period between elections. That's more than enough time for anyone who has a real desire to vote, to obtain a certified birth certificate and personally get down to the county clerk's office to register. If someone can't find those few minutes over a two year period, then fine, keep them out of the voting booth. County clerk offices across the country can stay open on Saturdays during this process or even a few evenings a month until 7:00 pm. It's a small price to pay for fair and impartial elections. Voting rolls all across the country are filled with deceased folks, felons and massive numbers of illegal aliens. I know because I have investigated this issue quite thoroughly. We must have paper ballots that are marked with a black felt pen that are then put into a clear plastic box that sits in everyone's view until time to count. The count must take place in front of anyone who wants to watch. This will accomplish a number of things: 1. With a plain, sturdy paper ballot, using a black felt pen, there can be no mistakes about chads or other diversions. If someone makes a mistake, they can either X it out clearly and remark their choice, or bad ballots would be shredded right there in front of everyone and a new ballot issued. 2. All ballots placed in a clear plastic box that never leaves the precinct so they can be lost, stolen or stuffed behind closed doors; neither will anyone be able to alter the ballots. After the count, the boxes would then be escorted by the county sheriff and deputies to the county clerk's office for secured storage in the event a recount is requested. The process now means you vote, put the ballot in a cardboard box, walk out the door and never know what happened to your ballot after that. I know what happened with mine in the 1996 primary; it was a joke, a open invitation for fraud. 3. Break down the precincts. No more than 20,000 voters per precinct so that hand counting is manageable, accurate and time effective. There are more than enough volunteers in this country who want fair and impartial elections to assist on election day. In 2000, up in Canada with tens of millions of votes to count by hand, it was done and finished in less than 24 hours. Where there's a will there's a way. Paper ballots, hand counted in the precinct in front of anyone who wants to watch is the only way to ensure fair and impartial elections, period. "The real menace of our Republic is this invisible government which like a giant octopus sprawls its slimy length over city, state and nation. Like the octopus of real life, it operates under cover of a self created screen. At the head of this octopus are the Rockefeller Standard Oil interests and a small group of powerful banking houses generally referred to as international bankers. The little coterie of powerful international bankers virtually run the United States government for their own selfish purposes. They practically control both political parties." NY Mayor John F. Hylan, 1922 Believe it. If the American people want to be the masters of their own destiny, they must put aside this absurd blind loyalty to a political party and fight for our right to fair and impartial elections in 2006, because you won't be getting it next month. With the way things are going in this police state environment, we'll be lucky to even have elections two years from now. Our Republic is in deep peril and we need real honest to goodness statesmen and constitutionalists elected. The only way that is going to happen is to clean up the voting process. © 2004 Devvy Kidd - All Rights Reserved link
I don't know, FB. In the past, when one would feel like throwing their hands up in despair, the country has lurched back on track to preserve our system of government, as we have known it. Whether it was FDR attempting to pack the Supreme Court, or Nixon attempting to subvert an election, one of the "checks and balances" of our political system has come into play, and/or the truth eventually came out, and a price was paid by those who would do our system harm, for their own ends, whatever their reasons might be. But I feel you. George W. Bush has been even worse than Nixon, in my opinion, and the Forth Estate has been slow to provide a check to his power by vigorous reporting, as happened to Nixon, and the Congress has allowed far too much of it's power under the Constitution to be subverted by him. That has surprised me, even though both branches have been controlled by the President's party. Congress has always jealously guarded it's powers under our Constitution, whether they were in the control of the President's party or not, and to say they have been remiss is a vast understatement. Several prominent and powerful Republicans in the House, and especially the Senate, were some of Nixon's harshest critics, and their willingness to vote for impeachment led to his resignation. We don't see the same leadership from the GOP today. Instead, they have appeared as corrupt as the President. In my opinion, we will see a price paid this November, and the GOP will suffer grievous losses. The pendulum has begun swinging the other way, thank god. Now, if the press would just do a better job! That would help a great deal. Keep D&D Civil.
We'll see. If the fix is in, the polling is again proved wrong and the Repubs manage to squeak out a couple of tight Senate races and add 1 or 2 to the House. Irregularities occur. All seem to favor Republicans. Nothing else happens. Rinse, repeat in 2008.
I understand bouncing back, and setting the problems right. That deals with the strength of America. But the strength of our democracy, whith more redistricting than normal(I know there is always some), less accuracy in voting, harder for third parties to run, and nearly impossible to have them be included in debates, it just makes for a weak democracy period. Combine that with Bush's abuse of power, and it is pretty bad.
