www.citybeat.com...
For years, computer scientists have warned that electronic voting systems, which generally employ touch screens or keypads to record votes onto electronic storage media, are vulnerable to tampering. Citing such security concerns, influential business magazine Fortune recently named electronic voting the Worst Technology of 2003.
Compuware also discovered that Diebold encodes the poll supervisor's smart card with an unchangeable password of "1111," which Compuware guessed in less than two minutes. ESS hard-codes its supervisor cards with two three-digit passwords and allows the sole user-defined password to be disabled. Hart includes only an optional password into its source code and, on the Sequoia system, merely pressing a button on the back of the voting machine accesses supervisory functions.
Even the paper votes are tabulated by diebold machines in Marin County California, who actually fought Diebold and thought they had won...
www.coastalpost.com...
Yes, you are handed paper. But don't you remember that you had to hand the paper over to a machine that electronically scanned the vote? (This machine is indeed manufactured by Diebold.)
Perhaps the most shocking occurrences that Stephenson witnessed were the two times that the computer crashed. He became aware that something was wrong when the Registrar's office personnel all began to desperately, "with long faces," scramble about.
Stephenson brought his video recorder along to help him accurately record the workings at hand. However, he was threatened by a person working for the Registrar to "turn off that thing or else." The "else" was the implied threat of arrest. Since elections in America are supposed to be free and open, the state laws governing open meetings always apply. (These laws are known as "open meeting laws.") It was illegal for threats to be made against Stephenson.
Get a load of the certification proceedures for voting machine companies...
Election Certification Stupidity
www.livejournal.com...
The software development process is completely incompatible with the election certification process. To get certified, companies have to send their code to an independent testing facility which takes TWO YEARS to verify code - and they just go down a checklist of expected problems, not any unexpected ones. Voting software manufacturers have to PAY for the results of the test. So what happens when they find a bug? Their options are to 1) hide it, 2) report it and go through re-certification which takes years and hundreds of thousands of dollars, or 3) install the changed software on machines without getting it certified. This last option seems most reasonable, and indeed, modified software has been found on machines in Indiana, California, Arizona, and Washington. When caught, the software manufacturers showed how the old certified software actually mis-tabulated votes, something that was not caught in the certification process. Additionally, the contracts between voting software manufacturers and these testing agencies are secret.
Case gets thrown out court because the counting software is a trade secret. WTF? How secretive should the counting of our votes be?
www.globalresearch.ca...
"The technology had a trial run in the 2002 mid-term elections. In Georgia, serviced by new Diebold systems, a popular Democratic governor and senator were both unseated in what the media called ‘amazing’ upsets, with results showing vote swings of up to 16 percent from the last pre-ballot polls. In computerized Minnesota, former Vice President Walter Mondale—a replacement for popular incumbent Paul Wellstone, who died in a plane crash days before the vote—was also defeated in a large last-second vote swing. Convenient ‘glitches’ in Florida saw an untold number of votes intended for the Democratic candidate registering instead for Governor Jeb "L'il Brother" Bush. A Florida Democrat who lost a similarly ‘glitched’ local election went to court to have the computers examined—but the case was thrown out by a judge who ruled that the innards of America's voting machines are the ‘trade secrets’ of the private companies who make them."
Now get ready to get mad, because here's the killer... from the same article...
Diebold’s Walden O’Dell, a top Bush fundraiser, publicly committed himself to delivering his home state Ohio’s votes to Bush. At Diebold, the election division is run by Bob Urosevich. Bob’s brother, Todd, is a top executive at "rival" ES&S. The brothers were originally staked by Howard Ahmanson, a member of the Council For National Policy , a right-wing steering group stacked with Bush true believers. Ahmanson is also one of the bagmen behind the extremist Christian Reconstruction Movement , which advocates the theocratic takeover of American democracy.
The four companies are interconnected; they are not four "competitors". Ahmanson has large stakes in ES&S, whose former CEO was Republican Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska. When Hagel ran for office, his own company counted the votes, and his victory was considered "an amazing upset". Hagel still has a million dollar stake in ES&S.
Sequoia is the corporate parent of a private equity firm, Madison Dearborn , which is partner in the Carlyle Group . (Also see here .)
Meanwhile, SAIC is referred to a "shadowy defense contractor". They have gotten into the vote count game both directly and through spinoffs by its top brass, including Admiral Bill Owens, former military aide to Dick Cheney, and Carlyle Group honcho Frank Carlucci and ex-CIA chief Robert Gates. SAIC’s history of fraud charges and security "lapses" haven’t prevented it from becoming one of the largest Pentagon and CIA contractors, and will doubtless encounter few obstacles in its entrance into the vote counting business.
The mad rush to install these unverifiable computers is driven by the Help America Vote Act, signed by Bush! The chief lobbying group pushing for the act (while we dumb asses sat out here and thought, ‘That sounds like a good idea!’) was a consortium of arms dealers including Northrup Grumman and Lockheed Martin .
Another must read...
www.everyweek.com...
Likewise, the nation’s largest DRE company, Election Systems & Software (ESS), is owned by Michael McCarthy, campaign finance director for Nebraska’s Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel. Hagel, a former CEO and chairman of ESS, still held ESS shares even as his finance director’s voting machines tabulated the majority of Nebraska’s election, from which Hagel emerged victorious.
VoteHere, a software company seeking to install cryptography devices into all the other companies’ voting machines, has on its board of directors Robert Gates, the former CIA director who now works at the George Bush School of Business, and VoteHere’s chairman is Admiral Bill Owens, a member of the Defense Policy Board and close supporter of Vice President Dick Cheney.
Most of this information has come to light thanks to the efforts of Bev Harris, a Seattle-based literary publicist who quit her day job in order to work on a forthcoming book, Black Box Voting, and a website, www.blackboxvoting.org, along with a team of 22 computer scientists.
“I was just on my lunch hour and I decided to search LexisNexis and find out who owns [the voting technology companies]. No big deal, right?” says Harris. “But the name that pops out was Chuck Hagel, a Republican Senator running for office at the time. So I thought, ‘Well surely this has been reported,’ but it hadn’t. Then I thought, ‘Well surely he disclosed it,’ and I looked at his disclosure documents and he hadn’t. So then I thought, ‘My goodness!’”
That discovery was the first of several that Harris would make in the ensuing months. When Diebold left thousands of internal documents available on an unprotected website, Harris downloaded them. What she found included hundreds of internal memos discussing the company’s security problems. The problems were not entirely theoretical, either. One memo discussed an “unauthorized upload” during the 2000 presidential election which negated 16,000 votes for Al Gore and added 4,000 for George W. Bush in Florida....“The memos are quite clear about this. In fact, in one, one programmer wrote, ‘Be careful. The boogieman might be reading these.’”
South Carolina Motions to protest...
216.239.41.104...:1jLop2uiqCcJ:www.state.sc.us/mmo/legal/IT/2004-217a.doc+diebold+ESS&hl=en
Texas has a lack of real choice...
www.texasobserver.org...
Virtual Democracy On January 7th and 8th, a committee formed by the Texas secretary of state’s office met behind closed doors to test four computerized voting systems for use in the 2004 election cycle. While county officials have final say on which voting systems to use, they can pick only systems that the secretary of state has certified. So far, those choices don’t look too appealing.
A few more scandals...
www.blackboxvoting.com...
not sure what this is, any idea?
www.nsrl.nist.gov...
