Voting Fraud - Long Threads, History, 2004 (Yet Again) & Media Lockdown

Here is a good effective summary of more recent voting irregularities in the States, many to do with Diebolds.

It has some frightrening incidents in a really good list for bedtime reading, you won't fall asleep.

Down with ANY electronic voting brought about by this corrupt admin.

workersrighttovote.org...


Samples:

* Among the problems outlined by the Democratic Party in the infamous Florida election in 2000: A faulty �memory card� in a polling machine, which counts and reports the tally by modem, resulted in a DeLand precinct's reporting that presidential candidate Al Gore had negative 16,022 votes. The computerized vote tally gave the Socialist Workers Party candidate almost 10,000 votes � about half the number he received nationwide.

� In a Salt Lake City Republican primary election, 1,413 votes never showed up in the total. A software programming error caused a batch of ballots not to count, even though they had been run through the machine like all the others. When the 1,413 missing votes were counted, it reversed the election

� November 1998 Franklin County, Ohio � One candidate was incorrectly credited with 14,967 votes; another received 6,889 in error. Congress Pryce and Kasich gained 13,427 votes and 9,784 votes, respectively, after election officials hand-checked vote totals in 371 machines that were affected by a software programming error.

I agree current corruption can not be stopped.

But I think that it all has a limit. ANd that is when the masses have had enough, and the opposition sets up a good propaganda machine.

omega

Opposition machinery barely coming into view on the horizon.

Middle America is busy and those who care are only just in sight of the enormity of the great Bush swindle, and the magnitude of the voting machine problem...


Gaffe casts doubts on electronic voting
Monday, September 15, 2003 Posted: 5:41 PM EDT (2141 GMT)

SAN JOSE, California (AP) -- The strange case of an election tally that appears to have popped up on the Internet hours before polls closed is casting new doubts about the trustworthiness of electronic voting machines.

During San Luis Obispo County's March 2002 primary, absentee vote tallies were apparently sent to an Internet site operated by Diebold Election Systems Inc., the maker of the voting machines used in the election.

At least that's what timestamps on digital records showed.

County election officials say the unexplained gaffe probably didn't influence the vote, and Diebold executives -- who only recently acknowledged the lapse -- say voters should have confidence in the election process.

Further evidence of problems

But computer programmers say the incident is further evidence that electronic voting technology could allow a politically connected computer hacker to monitor balloting and, if the vote was going the wrong way, mobilize voters to swing the election.

More here:

www.cnn.com...

This is another good article on the history of election fraud, dating to 1970s local elections and the first time counting responsibility shifted away from local community scrutineers...

www.votefraud.org...

..... How Your Parents' Votes Were Counted

Once upon a time, Americans voted by Paper Ballot. At the end of the day after the polls had closed, neighborhood people, Democrats and Republicans, worked together to count the votes in the precinct (polling place) BEFORE the votes left that precinct. The count was then posted at the precinct polling place for all to see. This is the only way to insure a verifiable election. Variations of method are possible, but the elements of physical ballots which are counted and posted at the precinct before the ballots leave each precinct are essential to insure a fair and honest count.

To rig an election with the above safeguards built in, one would have to bribe many hundreds of neighborhood people, including key Democrats and Republicans in each precinct you hoped to rig. Finally, the group of people bribed at each precinct would only have access to a tiny fraction of the vote.


The Greatest Coverup Begins

About 1974 a sinister development was in full swing all over the United States. In many areas, especially high populations regions, the votes were no longer being counted in the precincts by neighborhood people. The switch was on to computer vote counting systems. Typical was Cincinnati, Ohio where votes were bundled up immediately after the polls closed and sent to a mysterious central computer room to be counted by secret computer codes. To add insult to injury, the votes were counted away from the watchful eye of the entire electorate and the press......

The conspiracy to thieve the next election takes a new turn, with the shutting down of a site that used actual voting material and analysis of the software code to show how corruptible the Diebold process is.

This company needs to be got rid of.

What's left of the blackbox voting site is this:

NOTICE

Due to a dispute with Diebold, Incorporated, and its wholly owned subsidiary Diebold Election Systems, Inc. (collectively "Diebold"), which is claiming links to certain materials that do not reside on the blackboxvoting.org website constitute copyright infringement, blackboxvoting.org has been temporarily disabled.

We regret any inconvenience this may cause visitors and journalists to the blackboxvoting.org site and hope to have this matter resolved shortly.

In the interim, send questions or information requests to [email protected].

I want to make an addenum to my www.meetup.com/ posts:

MC pointed out somewhere that people would just show up to take your dollar. This isn't quite true for churches (where I stole the idea from) but for something like this it could happen. So what you have to do is ask the members that show up to bring a print out of their member information. That way they at least signed up into the meetup system and can join other activist projects, which is worthy of a dollar, i believe. If it keep it to 30 bucks, also, you should be able to pay for everyone. I don't think more than 30 people will come. And as you do, if, the oldersters won't take the money and it'll create social pressure (hopefully) for newbies not to take the money if they see everyone else refusing it.

Sadly, it appears, no one gives a flying # anyway
I think at this point it's best to get everyone on the board registered to vote and debate about the candiates and vote. *shrugs*

I give a flying frock.

It is interesting that public awareness of the elctronic voting fraud is still low, and where there is capability on the part of Diebold they move into censorship of critical websites on copyright grounds.

There is every possibility that that behavior (which most would see as a case based on denial of analysis and free speech, and not copyright theft at all) will be what brings Diebold unstuck.

To a point, it may depend on how corrupt the Court hearing this motion is.

I still have faith in some parts of the jurisdiction, and I think what comes out of this may yet be positive (except for Diebold and the corrupt admin).

HaHa MA ---still at it hahahahahahahahahhahahahhaha

The Mods might find it interesting to look at the above laughing one-post wonder!

Here's an interesting comment on the taking down of blackboxvoting...

"Comment
From Alfred Lehmberg
alienview.net
9-24-3

This is outrage bereft of all hyperbole!

I take this act of Diebold as a clear and active threat to any SEMBLANCE of continuing to live in a free society for any one of us! Additionally, it is an unwarranted, unwelcome, and unnecessary religion intrusion (with regard to the convictions of the, too few, owners) on same! Next, at best, it is hobblingly regressive! At worst it's culturally dangerous! Among too many other criticisms to list, it is socially unrewarding and without any respect for the individual aspiring to quality-- its biggest injury/insult.

I'd suggest that this -abomination- of biased control through -our- (...public! You can bet we paid for it!) voting software and hardware (by an -extremely- canted minority), is an affront to our nation constitutionally and a clear conflict of public interest!

This is an -unambiguous- case of the corrupt behemoth crushing the tiny righteous whistle-blower, and so it is an illustration of our programmed and manipulated times, though... What's Diebold Afraid Of? They're a freaking -monopoly-, by all god's, saints, and sinners! The Justice Department (yeah, -right-!) should take them down and NATIONALIZE the company!

CONGRESS! NATIONALIZE OUR VOTING MACHINERY AND INDUSTRY, NOW! It is obvious that it is TOO damned important to leave in the hands of a few private companies of debated competence and arguable veracity!"


Sounds a bit like one of our writers here at ATS, only on the opposite side of the coin, that is, anti-corruption....




[Edited on 26-9-2003 by MaskedAvatar]

This is a longer post.

Some of the material on the Diebold voting machine fraud has been difficult to digest for some people, who either have said they don't understand why there is a problem with the electronic voting machines or that they are unconvinced.

Look at the post above. Diebold have pursued censorship, on copyright grounds, of their fraudulence in design. Also look up BoutTime's post, where he observed that the principal of Diebold has come out in full support of Bush as the winner for 2004...

The level of corruption is sordid and disgusting.

This is the investigation (covered outside the US, for obvious reasons) that started the US fringe media's interest, before the issues got to be mainstream:



Bigger Than Watergate!

The story you are about to read is in this writer's view the biggest political scandal in American history, if not global history. And it is being broken today here in New Zealand.

This story cuts to the bone the machinery of democracy in America today. Democracy is the only protection we have against despotic and arbitrary government, and this story is deeply disturbing.

Imagine if you will that you are a political interest group that wishes to control forevermore the levers of power. Imagine further that you know you are likely to implement a highly unpopular political agenda, and you do not wish to be removed by a ballot driven backlash.

One way to accomplish this outcome would be to adopt the Mugabe (Zimbabwe) or Hun Sen (Cambodia) approach. You agree to hold elections, but simultaneously arrest, imprison and beat your opponents and their supporters. You stuff ballot boxes, disenfranchise voters who are unlikely to vote for you, distort electoral boundaries and provide insufficient polling stations in areas full of opposition supporters.

However as so many despots have discovered, eventually such techniques always fail � often violently. Hence, if you are a truly ambitious political dynasty you have to be a bit more subtle about your methods.

Imagine then if it were possible to somehow subvert the voting process itself in such a way that you could steal elections without anybody knowing.

Imagine for example if you could:

- secure control of the companies that make the voting machines and vote counting software;
- centralise vote counting systems, and politicise their supervision;
- legislate for the adoption of such systems throughout your domain, and provide large amounts of money for the purchase of these systems;
- establish systems of vote counting that effectively prevent anybody on the ground in the election � at a booth or precinct level - from seeing what is happening at a micro-level;
- get all the major media to sign up to a single exit-polling system that you also control � removing the risk of exit-polling showing up your shenanigans.

And imagine further that you:

- install a backdoor, or numerous backdoors, in the vote counting systems you have built that enable you to manipulate the tabulation of results in real time as they are coming in.

Such a system would enable you to intervene in precisely the minimum number of races necessary to ensure that you won a majority on election night. On the basis of polling you could pick your marginal seats and thus keep your tweaking to a bare minimum.

Such a system would enable you to minimise the risks of discovery of your activities.

Such a system would enable you to target and remove individual political opponents who were too successful, too popular or too inquisitive.

And most importantly of all, such a system would enable you to accomplish all the above without the public being in the least aware of what you were doing. When confronted with the awfulness of your programme they would be forced to concede that at least it is the result of a democratic process.

How To Rig An Election In The United States

So how would such a system actually work?

Well one way to run such a corrupt electoral system might look like this.

- Each voting precinct (or booth) could be fitted with electronic voting systems, optical scanning systems, punch card voting systems or the more modern touchscreen electronic voting machines;

- At the close of play each day the booth/precinct supervisor could be under instructions to compile an electronic record of the votes cast in their booth;

- They might print out a report that contains only the details of the total votes count for that precinct/booth, and then file via modem the full electronic record of votes through to the County supervisor;

- The County Supervisor could be equipped with a special piece of software and a bank of modems that enables all these results to be received and tabulated in the internals of the computer;

- The County Supervisors themselves could be assured that their system was bullet proof, certified and contained tamper-protection mechanisms par excellence;

- The Country Supervisor could be given a range of tools for looking at the data within this software, but nothing to enable them to directly manipulate the results;

- But unbeknownst to the County Supervisor the software could actually create three separate records of the voting data;

- Meanwhile - also unbeknownst to the County Supervisor - these three tables of voting data could be in fact completely insecure and accessible simply through a common database programme, say Microsoft Access;

- Having the three tables would enable you to keep the real data in place � so the system could pass spot tests on individual precincts and booth results (should a precinct supervisor be particularly astute) - while simultaneously enabling you to manipulate the bottom line result;

- Finally you might also enhance the election hacker's powers by including within the software a utility to enable them to cover their tracks by changing the date and time stamps on files and remove evidence of your tampering.

Fantasy Becomes Reality

The above description of a corrupt voting system is not the result of an overactive imagination. Rather it is the result of extensive research by computer programmers and journalists working around the globe. Principally it is the work of investigative Journalist Bev Harris, author of the soon to be published book "Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering In The 21st Century".

And most important of all it is the result of research focussed on investigating the actual software distributed by one of the largest voting systems companies operating in the recent U.S. Elections.

CAVEAT: It is important to note that the research into this subject has not established that the files we have been working on were in fact in situ in County Election Supervisors offices at the last election � nor have we proof that the back door we have discovered - which might enable the rigging of elections - was actually used in any recent election. However it is the considered opinion of all those involved in this investigation that it is not up to us as journalists or programmers to prove that elections were rigged, rather it is a responsibility of the electoral system itself to prove its integrity.

What you read here amounts to revelation of evidence of motive, opportunity, method, prior conduct, and a variety of items of consistent unexplained circumstantial evidence. Significantly we do not believe we have sufficient resources to complete this investigation to its conclusion and are therefore making available our findings to the media, community organisations, political parties, computer scientists and geeks in the anticipation that they will pick up the torch and take extend this inquiry into every county in the United States.

How We Discovered The Backdoor

The story of how this story emerged is a great tale in itself, most of which has already been told in this report by Bev Harris.

SYSTEM INTEGRITY FLAW DISCOVERED AT DIEBOLD ELECTION SYSTEMS
www.scoop.co.nz...

The short version of the story is relatively simple.

In the course of investigating the issue of the integrity of new electronic voting machines Bev Harris learned that people around the world had been downloading from an open FTP site belonging to Diebold Election Systems one of the leading manufactures of voting systems.

This website contained several gigabytes of files including manuals, source codes and installation versions of numerous parts of the Diebold voting system, and of its vote counting programme GEMS.

Realising we had stumbled across what might be the equivalent of the Pentagon Papers for elections, the full contents of this website have been secured around the world at several locations. The original website was itself taken down on January 29th 2003.

We can now reveal for the first time the location of a complete online copy of the original data set. As we anticipate attempts to prevent the distribution of this information we encourage supporters of democracy to make copies of these files and to make them available on websites and file sharing networks.

users.actrix.co.nz...

As many of the files are zip password protected you may need some assistance in opening them, we have found that the utility available at the following URL works well:

www.lostpassword.com...

Finally some of the zip files are partially damaged, but these too can be read by using the utility at:

www.zip-repair.com...

At this stage in this inquiry we do not believe that we have come even remotely close to investigating all aspects of this data. I.E. There is no reason to believe that the security flaws discovered so far are the only ones.

Therefore we expect many more discoveries to be made. We want the assistance of the online computing community in this enterprise and we encourage you to file your findings at the forum HERE

Finally, for obvious reasons it is important that this information is distributed as widely as possible as quickly as possible. We encourage all web bloggers, web publishers and web media to re-publish and link to this article and to its companion article by Bev Harris which contains detailed descriptions of how to use the GEMS software to rig an election.

To conclude this overview article I will make a few more comments on the evidence we have thus far that the U.S. election system has been compromised. As stated earlier we do not at this stage have proof that it has in fact been been compromised through this method, just a great deal of circumstantial evidence that it could have been.

If this was Watergate, we are effectively at the point of discovering evidence of a break-in and have received the call from deep-throat telling us that should dig much deeper.

Proof will follow in time we expect, but only if the work we have begun is completed and this inquiry is taken into every corner of the U.S. electoral system.

Evidence Of Motive

This is probably the easiest part of this puzzle to get your head around. The motivation of the Republican Party in general and the current administration in particular to gain ever greater amounts of power - by whatever means possible and damn the consequences - is evidenced most recently in the Supreme Court's partisan appointment of George [W.] Bush [...] as President, the attempt to recall California Governor Gray Davis, and the Ken Starr investigation and attempted impeachment of President Clinton.

Evidence Of Opportunity

Republican connected control over the major election systems companies in the United States has been thoroughly researched.

Bob Urosevich, CEO of Diebold Election Systems is also the founder of ES&S, a competing voting machine company. Together these two companies are responsible for tallying around 80% of votes cast in the United States. Also significant, from what we can determine about the architecture of the software, is that its basic structure was specifically a creation of Mr Urosevich's company I-Mark. For more background on Diebold Systems connections to the Republican Party see:

Diebold - The Face Of Modern Ballot Tampering
www.scoop.co.nz...

Meanwhile Presidential wannabee and Republican Party United States Senator Chuck Hagel has been directly connected to ES&S via his campaign finance director, Michael McCarthy, who has admitted that Senator Hagel still owns a beneficial interest in the ES&S parent company, the McCarthy Group.

Senate Ethics Director Resigns; Senator Hagel Admits Owning Voting Machine Company
www.scoop.co.nz...

Evidence Of Method

The evidence of method has been detailed in a companion article by Bev Harris, author of the soon to be published block-buster Black Box Voting.

Inside A U.S. Election Vote Counting Program
www.scoop.co.nz...

In this article � which contains screenshots from the software and detailed instructions on how one might rig an election - Bev Harris explains security flaws thus:

"The GEMS election file contains more than one "set of books." They are hidden from the person running the GEMS program, but you can see them if you go into Microsoft Access.

"You might look at it like this: Suppose you have votes on paper ballots, and you pile all the paper ballots in room one. Then, you make a copy of all the ballots and put the stack of copies in room 2.

"You then leave the door open to room 2, so that people can come in and out, replacing some of the votes in the stack with their own.

"You could have some sort of security device that would tell you if any of the copies of votes in room 2 have been changed, but you opt not to.

"Now, suppose you want to count the votes. Should you count them from room 1 (original votes)? Or should you count them from room 2, where they may or may not be the same as room 1? What Diebold chose to do in the files we examined was to count the votes from "room 2.""

Evidence Of Prior Conduct

It is a recorded fact that every system of balloting established in America has been gamed and rigged. I.E. America's political practitioners have a very long history of ballot rigging and vote tampering. This is nothing new and evidence of the sort we have uncovered has been long predicted by computer scientists such as Dr Rebecca Mercuri.

In more recent history investigative Journalist Greg Palast has documented in detail Katherine Harris's use of electronic data matching technologies to disenfranchise thousands of Florida voters in advance of the 2000 Presidential election.

We highly recommend readers purchase a copy of "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy" by Greg Palast to read much more about this.

A compendium of links on Palast's investigations can be found via a Google search on: "greg palast florida katherine harris".

Consistent Unexplained Circumstantial Evidence

During the 2002 Mid-term there were numerous reports of unusual happenings in counties throughout the United States.

Among the phenomena reported were voting numbers suddenly fluctuating in the middle of the counting process, something you might expect to see if the backdoor identified above were used clumsily.

An organisation called Votewatch was set up during the 2002 elections to record unusual happenings and its archives can be viewed here.

pub103.ezboard.com...

It will suffice here to cite a couple of specific examples � these are excerpts from the soon to be published " Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering In The 21st Century". These examples of actual events are consistent with the existence and use of an electronic vote counting hack described above.

November 1990, Seattle, Washington - Worse than the butterfly ballot, some Democratic candidates watched votes alight, then flutter away. Democrat Al Williams saw 90 votes wander off his tally between election night and the following day, though no new counting had been done. At the same time, his opponent, Republican Tom Tangen, gained 32 votes. At one point several hundred ballots added to returns didn�t result in any increase in the number of votes. But elsewhere, the number of votes added exceeded the number of additional ballots counted. A Republican candidate achieved an amazing surge in his absentee percentage for no apparent reason. And no one seemed to notice (until a determined Democratic candidate started demanding an answer) that the machines simply forgot to count 14,000 votes.

November 1996, Bergen County, New Jersey - Democrats told Bergen County Clerk Kathleen Donovan to come up with a better explanation for mysterious swings in vote totals. Donovan blamed voting computers for conflicting tallies that rose and fell by 8,000 or 9,000 votes. The swings perplexed candidates of both parties. For example, the Republican incumbent, Anthony Cassano, had won by about 7,000 votes as of the day after the election but his lead evaporated later. One candidate actually lost 1,600 votes during the counting. �How could something like that possibly happen?� asked Michael Guarino, Cassano�s Democratic challenger. �Something is screwed up here.�

November 1999, Onondaga County, New York - Computers gave the election to the wrong candidate, then gave it back. 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.

April 2002, Johnson County, Kansas - Johnson County�s new Diebold touch screen machines, proclaimed a success on election night, did not work as well as originally believed. Incorrect vote totals were discovered in six races, three of them contested, leaving county election officials scrambling to make sure the unofficial results were accurate. Johnson County Election Commissioner Connie Schmidt checked the machines and found that the computers had under- and over-reported hundreds of votes. �The machines performed terrifically,� said Bob Urosevich, CEO of Diebold Election Systems. �The anomaly showed up on the reporting part.�

The problem, however, was so perplexing that Schmidt asked the Board of Canvassers to order a hand re-count to make sure the results were accurate. Unfortunately, the touch screen machines did away with the ballots, so the only way to do a hand recount is to have the machine print its internal data page by page. Diebold tried to re-create the error in hopes of correcting it. �I wish I had an answer,� Urosevich said. In some cases, vote totals changed dramatically.

November 2002, Comal County, Texas - A Texas-sized lack of curiosity about discrepancies: The uncanny coincidence of three winning Republican candidates in a row tallying up exactly 18,181 votes each was called weird, but apparently no one thought it was weird enough to audit. Conversion to alphabet: 18181 18181 18181 ahaha ahaha ahaha.

November 2002, Baldwin County, Alabama - No one at the voting machine company can explain the mystery votes that changed after polling places had closed, flipping the election from the Democratic winner to a Republican in the Alabama governor�s race. �Something happened. I don�t have enough intelligence to say exactly what,� said Mark Kelley of ES&S. Baldwin County results showed that Democrat Don Siegelman earned enough votes to win the state of Alabama. All the observers went home. The next morning, however, 6,300 of Siegelman�s votes inexplicably had disappeared, and the election was handed to Republican Bob Riley. A recount was requested, but denied.

November 2002, New York - Voting machine tallies impounded in New York: Software programming errors hampered and confused the vote tally on election night and most of the next day, causing elections officials to pull the plug on the vote-reporting Web site. Commissioners ordered that the voting machine tallies be impounded, and they were guarded overnight by a Monroe County deputy sheriff.

November 2002, Georgia - Election officials lost their memory: Fulton County election officials said that memory cards from 67 electronic voting machines had been misplaced, so ballots cast on those machines were left out of previously announced vote totals. No hand count can shine any light on this; the entire state of Georgia went to touch-screen machines with no physical record of the vote. Fifty-six cards, containing 2,180 ballots, were located, but 11 memory cards still were missing two days after the election: Bibb County and Glynn County each had one card missing after the initial vote count. When DeKalb County election officials went home early Wednesday morning, they were missing 10 cards.

Anti�opyright Sludge 2003



[Edited on 29-9-2003 by MaskedAvatar]

And a comment on the injunction against blackboxvoting.org , from The Inquirer:

www.theinquirer.net...


Diebold takes down blackboxvoting.org

US election fraud? Perish the thought!

By Egan Orion: Wednesday 24 September 2003, 11:27

DIEBOLD ELECTION SYSTEMS has brandished lawyers' threats to take down that pesky citizens activist website blackboxvoting.org. It seems they charged copyright infringement regarding materials on other websites that blackboxvoting.org merely linked to, despite such links having been ruled legal by appellate courts in other instances.

This appears to be a public relations gaffe of staggering proportions on Diebold's part. It's not like bunging the terms "Diebold election fraud" into Google brings up only that blackboxvoting.org site -- just it and about 1,889 other hits, including a recent story at Salon, another at Wired, and two pieces here at the INQUIRER, as well as articles in major news publications. What can they be thinking?



Kind of what I said, but it's still before the Court, and we can hope that makes it much worse for Diebold when they lose.

All future elections will be considerably affected by the quality and security of any new machines. I wonder how many people are confident that their home state is doing the right thing.

This article has a decent assessment of two others as well as the dreaded Diebold rubbish.


www.zwire.com...

New York State is shopping for new voting machines. The new $7,000 electronic voting machines which are currently being considered would cost the state $140 million and may not be as accurate as the old ones they will replace, according to computer programmer Bo Lipari.

Lipari, a member of the Finger Lakes 2004 Election Committee gave a presentation about the proposed voting machines in the Borg Warner Room of the Tompkins County Library on Monday evening.

At the very least the new machines require the voting software to be flawless, he said.

"Any computer professional will tell you that is impossible to achieve," Lipari said. "I'll let you all in on a dirty little secret every programmer knows. All software programs ship with bugs."

Be that as it may, Congress and states are now passing legislation allocating funds for the new electronic machines in hopes of avoiding kind of controversy that surrounded the Florida vote recall scandal during the Gore-Bush 2000 presidential election.

Congress passed the Help America Vote Act of 2002 which allocates $3.8 billion to for states to buy the latest voting technologies - electronic touchscreen machines and Internet voting stations.

If New York State purchases the new machines, Lipari believes they could malfunction or be hacked to produce misleading results.

Two types of electronic machines currently exist according to Lipari. One is called a Direct Recording Electronic voting machine or a DRE. The other is an optical scanning machine which scans paper ballots. The problem according to Lipari is with the DREs. A voter using a DRE to vote chooses candidates by making choices on a touchscreen. The paper record will only be produced at the end of an election. That's where the potential for error lies, he said.

The optical scan machine scans a paper ballot. They are cheaper than touchscreens. There is a voter verifiable paper ballot. The ballot can be monitored for overvotes and undervotes. It is used in 80 percent of the U. S. elections.

A company called Diebold manufactures a paperless DRE that has a magnetic card slot. At the polling place voters are handed a magnetic "smartcard." Lipari, said that it would be easy for someone with limited experience to hack the cards. If they did they could vote more than once or even gain administrator access to the voting machines.

Lipari demonstrated to the audience that the machines also fail because they keep several lists of voting records. Computers are capable of keeping several lists in memory and thus presenting misleading results. Paper ballots insure a verifiable record of the voter's choice, Lipari said....

(Continues, including advocacy for the disabled, corruption amongst the principals of the manufacturers, lack of public scrutiny of software because of 'trade secrets', and more scandal than the entire Political Mudpit in a whole month)...


[Edited on 3-10-2003 by MaskedAvatar]

Did you see that Buzzflash finally picked up on Bev? *edit...

[Edited on 3-10-2003 by kukla]

I went looking for Deb as a new twist (?!), and came back to find your edit.

The work of Bev Harris, unlike some other Harrises, is honest and very good, and should be picked up everywhere.

While I looked at the Buzzflash site, I did gain some new insight into how wide a net they cast, good stuff.

They're mainstream these days...

Alexa puts them at #1 for political sites every other day..

Humorous, yet depressing...

www.toostupidtobepresident.com...

This is quite frightening. It's what the Diebold bastards are prepared to do to bury the evidence that is the worst feature.

Be sure to check out the whole chain of internal Diebold correspondence, as well as people's reactions to it...


Diebold Memos Disclose Florida 2000 E-Voting Fraud
The Diebold Memos' Smoking Gun Volusia Co.
Memos Disclose Election 2000 Vote Fraud

October 23, 2003
First Published in Scoop

"DELAND, Fla., Nov. 11 - Something very strange happened on election night to Deborah Tannenbaum, a Democratic Party official in Volusia County. At 10 p.m., she called the county elections department and learned that Al Gore was leading George W. Bush 83,000 votes to 62,000. But when she checked the county's Web site for an update half an hour later, she found a startling development: Gore's count had dropped by 16,000 votes, while an obscure Socialist candidate had picked up 10,000--all because of a single precinct with only 600 voters."
Washington Post Sunday November 12, 2000 - Page A22

Yes. Something very strange happened in Volusia County on election night November 2000, the night that first Gore won Florida, then Bush, and then as everybody can so well remember there was a tie. Something strange indeed. But what exactly? In the above report (click for full version), written days after the election, hotshot Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank goes on to attribute the strange 16,022 negative vote tally from Volusia's precinct 216 to an apparently innocent cause. "[F]aulty 'memory cards' in the machines caused the 16,000-vote disappearance on election night. The glitch was soon fixed," she wrote. But thanks to recent investigations into Black Box Voting by Washington State writer Bev Harris, we now know this explanation is not correct. In fact it is not even in the ballpark. According to recently discovered internal Diebold Election Systems memos, Global Election Systems' (which was later purchased by Diebold) own technical staff were also stumped by the events in Volusia County. In Chapter 11 of her new book, Black Box Voting In the 21st Century, released early today in PDF format at Blackboxvoting.com and here at Scoop, Ms Harris observes:

"If you strip away the partisan rancor over the 2000 election, you are left with the undeniable fact that a presidential candidate conceded the election to his opponent based on [results from] a second card that mysteriously appears, subtracts 16,022 votes, then just as mysteriously disappears."

Working in parallel with Ms Harris, Scoop has also been inquiring into the events on election night in Volusia county. Much of the material that follows is similar to that which appears in Chapter 11 of her book. The starting point in this shocking discovery about election 2000 came in a series of internal Diebold ES technical support memos. The following is an abbreviated version of the exchange concerning the peculiar events in Volusia county. For the purposes of research the exchange is included in full as an Appendix to this report (APPENDIX TWO). The discussion took place in early 2001 as an audit was underway in Volusia county into the events.

(NOTE: The names below each extract link to the full text of the emails in the appendices below)

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 16022 when it was uploaded. Will someone please explain this so that I have the information to give the auditor instead of standing here "looking dumb". Lana Hires - Volusia County Florida - January 17, 2001 8:07 AM My understanding is that the card was not corrupt after (or before) upload. They fixed the problem by clearing the precinct and re-uploading the same card. So neither of these explanations washes. That's not to say I have any idea what actually happened, its just not either of those... The problem is its going to be very hard to collect enough data to really know what happened. The card isn't corrupt so we can't post-mortem it (its not mort).

portland.indymedia.org...

While the Demogogue Propaganda Machine would like you to think that leading in ONE county is considered "winning the state" it is ludicrous at best.

There may have been an anomoly at this one county but I bet it was HUMAN ERROR on the part of the person counting the votes at the site.

Not to mention that Gore DID NOT, for ONE SECOND, EVER have a lead statewide in Florida in 2000 PERIOD.

This whole claptrap about Gore LOSING Florida to fraud is BUNK. It was never HIS to lose. The numbers were ALWAYS in Bush's Favor STATEWIDE.

PEACE...
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Originally posted by Springer
While the Demogogue Propaganda Machine would like you to think that leading in ONE county is considered "winning the state" it is ludicrous at best.

There may have been an anomoly at this one county but I bet it was HUMAN ERROR on the part of the person counting the votes at the site.

Not to mention that Gore DID NOT, for ONE SECOND, EVER have a lead statewide in Florida in 2000 PERIOD.

This whole claptrap about Gore LOSING Florida to fraud is BUNK. It was never HIS to lose. The numbers were ALWAYS in Bush's Favor STATEWIDE.

PEACE...
m...

Again, a bold statement of "THE FACTS" accompanied by no facts at all.

The issue being discussed here is machine error. Systematic machine error, purpose built to allow no auditability.

Nothing to do with manual counting. It seems that when the facts are presented to some people, including all supporting internal evidence from the company charged with the responsibility to create an accurate and reliable electronic system - which failed - some people will still be in denial, and come out with non-facts to defend their preconceived view.

Diebold machinery needs to be prohibited, pure and simple. Anyone who takes the time to read the material on this Topic will understand why.

You should READ your OWN article then my friend the WHOLE premise of YOUR propaganda is that there was a discrepency between the count the lady got on the phone and what the website showed her 30 minutes later.

The FACTS are that your propaganda is a LIE and a deception. The FACTS are that Gore was NEVER ahead statewide.

The FACTS are that this whole bloddy issue is pile of B.S. that those of us who actually LIVE IN THE U.S. and actually VOTE here are getting tired of hearing because it serves no purpose other than to devide the greatest nation on Earth. THOSE are the FACTS.

IF you are blinded by left wing propaganda that is YOUR issue to deal with NOT mine... But DON'T tell me I bring no facts when YOU bring B.S.

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