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Chinks in Democracy Armor
Oct. 12th, 2008 11:23 amI've written about this before, but feel the need to summarize just a bit for those unfamiliar with the situation here in the States. After all, we've got an election approaching. Essentially, I strongly feel very powerful people are in power simply because those that back them manipulated the results of several elections. I'm writing this post as a primer to those who haven't been following this information.
I don't blame those of you out there who have trouble swallowing this claim whole. The mainstream press hasn't been doing much of a job following it for you. They have instead dedicated their diminishing reporting resources to stories cheaper and easier to investigate, like Lohan and Spears, leaving labor-intensive follow-ups to voting irregularity charges largely unchecked. That doesn't mean there aren't people out there following these leads; it just means these people don't show up on the 6 O'Clock news.
Let's start with Bev Harris at Black Box Voting here in Puget Sound. As featured in the movie Hacking Democracy, she stumbled upon the source code for the Diebold voting machines online, and realized the security holes the code revealed threatened any vote handled by them. Combine that with Diebold President Waldon O'Dell's written claim that his company would work toward "helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President," one can easily see Harris's reason for concern.
Okay, one can dismiss that above claim as specious. I've noted no hard evidence for election results compromise, after all. Hacking Democracy does demonstrate quite convincingly that the Diebold machines are unsecure in a scene near the end of the movie; that demonstration, however, does not prove anything but the possibility.
How about a sworn affidavit? Clint Curtis was a life-long Republican and programmer working in Florida. His employers asked him to do something he felt wrong, to write code that would help them control the vote. Read his sworn affidavit to find out the whole story. Really, it should be turned into a Grisham novel. It's that good.
Curtis later ran for office in a district that used the machines his old employers provided. He lost, but sued, stating the election was rigged and that -- since he himself had done it -- no one would be able to see any evidence of tampering. (It looks like he is still running for office.)
On the off-chance that Curtis, with his mountain of verifiable evidence and the current investigation into the death that prompted his affidavit doesn't convince (see the BradBlog archives for the story; I apologize, but I lost it), how about the 2004 election? Here in Washington State, the governorship was won by (supposedly) less than 200 votes. The commercial media bit the GOP bait and blamed King County's registration of felons and the dead for the close race. Ah, but what almost no one hears about today happened just a few miles north of King County. In Snohomish County:
These discrepancies pointed to statistical improbabilities that truly stagger the imagination: the chances that the election results from these machines were accurate are 1 in 1,000 trillion.
Going back to 2004, how about doing some googling on Kent Blackwell, former Ohio Secretary of State (and therefore in charge of elections in 2004) . . . and the co-Chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio. When the Secretary of State stoops to abominable tricks (all verified and some in which he has claimed pride) to suppress the democratic vote, abandon all thoughts of a happy future.
"Barack Osama?" How's that for a manipulative ballot?
A quick scan of Brad's Blog shows that Sequoia is still having problems proving the integrity of their machines, and that New York voters will receive the above absentee ballot in the mail soon. Dirty, dirty tricks abound. As well, my voter-integrity friends have told me (but not sent the links to) of yet another whistle-blower. He claims we can expect a McCain victory by 3 electoral votes.
If that happens, it's time to buy a gun. All I need is a guilty target.
Addendum, Later that Day: By coincidence, I checked out the October 9 Democracy Now!, and found it was dedicated to voter suppression, the kind of shenanigans Ken Blackwell pulled. Check it out. I do especially like the fact that the new Secretary of State, Jennifer Brunner, is not a Blackwell clone.
Here's another taste, Greg Palast's piece done for the BBC and shown on DN!.
Update, After the Election: I only started to relax after I saw this year's "Treehouse of Terror" episode from The Simpsons. It aired the day before the election. It opened:
Why is this important? The Simpsons is seen widely by many who don't give a rat's ass about politics. If something "funny" happened the next day, all those who saw Homer get screwed out of his vote would wonder if something really had happened, if those ranting lefties really had a case. This short opening mainstreamed the issue of electronic election skullduggery, giving the issue far more weight than rantings on any of the Sunday morning wonk fests.
I sincerely believe Homer Simpson may have saved our country.
I don't blame those of you out there who have trouble swallowing this claim whole. The mainstream press hasn't been doing much of a job following it for you. They have instead dedicated their diminishing reporting resources to stories cheaper and easier to investigate, like Lohan and Spears, leaving labor-intensive follow-ups to voting irregularity charges largely unchecked. That doesn't mean there aren't people out there following these leads; it just means these people don't show up on the 6 O'Clock news.
Let's start with Bev Harris at Black Box Voting here in Puget Sound. As featured in the movie Hacking Democracy, she stumbled upon the source code for the Diebold voting machines online, and realized the security holes the code revealed threatened any vote handled by them. Combine that with Diebold President Waldon O'Dell's written claim that his company would work toward "helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President," one can easily see Harris's reason for concern.
Okay, one can dismiss that above claim as specious. I've noted no hard evidence for election results compromise, after all. Hacking Democracy does demonstrate quite convincingly that the Diebold machines are unsecure in a scene near the end of the movie; that demonstration, however, does not prove anything but the possibility.
How about a sworn affidavit? Clint Curtis was a life-long Republican and programmer working in Florida. His employers asked him to do something he felt wrong, to write code that would help them control the vote. Read his sworn affidavit to find out the whole story. Really, it should be turned into a Grisham novel. It's that good.
Curtis later ran for office in a district that used the machines his old employers provided. He lost, but sued, stating the election was rigged and that -- since he himself had done it -- no one would be able to see any evidence of tampering. (It looks like he is still running for office.)
On the off-chance that Curtis, with his mountain of verifiable evidence and the current investigation into the death that prompted his affidavit doesn't convince (see the BradBlog archives for the story; I apologize, but I lost it), how about the 2004 election? Here in Washington State, the governorship was won by (supposedly) less than 200 votes. The commercial media bit the GOP bait and blamed King County's registration of felons and the dead for the close race. Ah, but what almost no one hears about today happened just a few miles north of King County. In Snohomish County:
Absentee ballots composing 2/3 of the total ballots showed a Democratic lead of 97044 to 95228 votes, while the remaining 1/3 of the votes, on touch screens, showed a Republican lead of almost 5% (50,400 Republican to 42,145 Democratic). Vote-switching and machines freezing up occurred in 58 polling locations out of approximately 148 total. There is a high correlation between the problem machines — as reported by KING5 news — and the Republican percentages the machines reported. Statistical analysis of machines that recently had their CPUs repaired shows a propensity for Republican voting that is present but weak on the individual level but strong at the polling location where the machines were placed. The average of the 58 polling places reporting vote switching, freeze-ups, or repairs within two weeks of the election was 11.58% more favorable to Republican Dino Rossi than absentee voters did, and averaged 10.8% more votes than Gregoire on election day, while Rossi’s overall spread among all electronic voters at all polling locations was under 5%.
These discrepancies pointed to statistical improbabilities that truly stagger the imagination: the chances that the election results from these machines were accurate are 1 in 1,000 trillion.
Going back to 2004, how about doing some googling on Kent Blackwell, former Ohio Secretary of State (and therefore in charge of elections in 2004) . . . and the co-Chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio. When the Secretary of State stoops to abominable tricks (all verified and some in which he has claimed pride) to suppress the democratic vote, abandon all thoughts of a happy future.
"Barack Osama?" How's that for a manipulative ballot?
A quick scan of Brad's Blog shows that Sequoia is still having problems proving the integrity of their machines, and that New York voters will receive the above absentee ballot in the mail soon. Dirty, dirty tricks abound. As well, my voter-integrity friends have told me (but not sent the links to) of yet another whistle-blower. He claims we can expect a McCain victory by 3 electoral votes.
If that happens, it's time to buy a gun. All I need is a guilty target.
Addendum, Later that Day: By coincidence, I checked out the October 9 Democracy Now!, and found it was dedicated to voter suppression, the kind of shenanigans Ken Blackwell pulled. Check it out. I do especially like the fact that the new Secretary of State, Jennifer Brunner, is not a Blackwell clone.
Here's another taste, Greg Palast's piece done for the BBC and shown on DN!.
Update, After the Election: I only started to relax after I saw this year's "Treehouse of Terror" episode from The Simpsons. It aired the day before the election. It opened:
Why is this important? The Simpsons is seen widely by many who don't give a rat's ass about politics. If something "funny" happened the next day, all those who saw Homer get screwed out of his vote would wonder if something really had happened, if those ranting lefties really had a case. This short opening mainstreamed the issue of electronic election skullduggery, giving the issue far more weight than rantings on any of the Sunday morning wonk fests.
I sincerely believe Homer Simpson may have saved our country.