Biblical Reconstuctionist direct voting machine companies!!

[Carl Brennan]

Below is from: http://www.democraticunderground.com/cgi-bin/duforum/duboard.cgi?az=show_thread&om=39213&forum=DCForumID60
Hacking democracy?
Computerized vote-counting machines are sweeping the country. But they can be hacked -- and right now there's no way to be sure they haven't been.

By Farhad Manjoo
Feb. 20, 2003 |
During the past five months, Bev Harris has e-mailed to news organizations a series of reports that detail alarming problems in the high-tech voting machinery currently sweeping its way through American democracy. But almost no one is paying attention.
Harris is a literary publicist and writer whose investigations into the secret world of voting equipment firms have led some to call her the Erin Brockovich of elections. Harris has discovered, for example, that Diebold, the company that supplied touch-screen voting machines to Georgia during the 2002 election, made its system's sensitive software files available on a public Internet site. She has reported on the certification process for machines coming onto the market -- revealing that the software code running the equipment is seldom thoroughly reviewed and can often be changed with mysteriously installed "patches" just prior to an election. And in perhaps her most eyebrow-raising coup, she found that Sen. Chuck Hagel, a Nebraska Republican, used to run the company that built most of the machines that count votes in his state -- and that he still owns a stake in the firm.
Full link: <http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2003/02/20/voting_machines/index.html>
And the letter I just sent them in reply:
Farhad Manjoo states in his article about suspect voting machines, "Lewis' claim that malicious software "won't compile" is also suspect."
It's not only suspect, it's laughable. Any code that is grammatically correct according to the rules and conventions of the language will compile. Whether it works properly is another story.
Any first-year computer science student can write a program, or a routine that can easily be embedded in a program, that says, "If the system time is six o'clock or later, change every fifth vote for Candidate B to a vote for Candidate A" -- or something like it.
And it can be done, in most cases, in less than 10 lines of code.
The directors of ES&S and Diebold are a Who's Who of Republican campaign contributors, including some of the very same Christian Reconstructionists who count Attorney General John Ashcroft among their adherents. It is naive to think that a party which has proven it will stop at nothing to get and retain power, would not rig voting machines as part of that effort.
In the November 2002 election, the Voter News Service refused to release its exit polls because they were so far out of whack with the "official results" of many elections. The results were so disparate that VNS has since been disbanded. One need not be a conspiracy theorist to believe that the reason for this discrepancy is that the votes people said they cast when they left the polls are not what the machines recorded.
Free elections are vital to our Constitutional democracy. If the election process has been corrupted by people with an interest in the outcome of the election, then we might as well not have elections at all. Given that the current President has stated on at least three separate, documented occasions that he would prefer to be a dictator, it's not that difficult to connect the dots.


<http://truthout.com/docs_02/020203G.voting.mach.htm>

[PROGRESSIVE1]

1. kick

[Syrinx]

2. related thread

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x2613121

[Carl Brennan]

7. Thanks.

These fascists sure are set on destroying democracy. They want to replace the Constitution with biblical law.

[Bluebear]

3. Another related thread with awesome article link

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=132&topic_id=1331851&mesg_id=1331851

[Nimble_Idea]

4. wow crazy

eom(end of message)

[seemslikeadream]

5. Bob and Todd Urosevich and Howard Ahmanson

Two brothers, Bob and Todd Urosevich, founded AIS in the 1980s. Today Bob is president of Diebold Election Systems, while Todd is a vice president at ES&S.

Diebold Election Systems, Inc., a wholly owned operating subsidiary of Diebold, Inc., recently won a $54 million contract to overhaul Georgia’s election system technology.
http://www.americanfreepress.net/11_10_02/Secret_Group_Manipulates/secret_group_manipulates.html

Vanishing Act
by Chris Floyd
19 September 2003

It's a shell game, with money, companies and corporate brands switching in a blur of buyouts and bogus fronts. It's a sinkhole, where mobbed-up operators, paid-off public servants, crazed Christian fascists, CIA shadow-jobbers, war-pimping arms dealers – and presidential family members – lie down together in the slime. It's a hacker's dream, with pork-funded, half-finished, secretly programmed computer systems installed without basic security standards by politically partisan private firms, and protected by law from public scrutiny. It's how the United States, the "world's greatest democracy," casts its votes. And it's why George W. Bush will almost certainly be the next president of the United States – no matter what the people of the United States might want.

The American vote-count is controlled by three major corporate players – Diebold, ES&S, and Sequoia – with a fourth, Science Applications International Corporation, coming on strong. These companies – all of them hardwired into the Bushist Party power grid – have been given billions of dollars by the Bush Regime to complete a sweeping computerization of voting machines nationwide by the 2004 election. These glitch-riddled systems – many using "touch-screen" technology that leaves no paper trail at all – are almost laughably open to manipulation, according to corporate whistleblowers and computer scientists at Stanford, Johns Hopkins and other universities.

The technology had a trial run in the 2002 midterm 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 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.

Who's behind these private companies? It's hard to tell: The corporate lines – even the bloodlines – of these "competitors" are so intricately mixed. For example, at Diebold – whose corporate chief, Wally O'Dell, a top Bush fundraiser, has publicly committed himself to "delivering" his home state's votes to Bush next year – 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 in the vote-count business by Howard Ahmanson, a member of the Council for National Policy, a right-wing "steering group" stacked with Bushist faithful.

Ahmanson is also one of the bagmen behind the extremist "Christian Reconstructionist" movement, which openly advocates a theocratic takeover of American democracy, placing the entire society under the "dominion" of "Christ the King." This "dominion" includes the death penalty for homosexuals, exclusion of citizenship for non-Christians, stoning of sinners and – we kid you not – slavery, "one of the most beneficent of Biblical laws."

Ahmanson also has major holdings in ES&S, whose former CEO is Republican Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska. When Hagel ran for office, his own company counted the votes; needless to say, his initial victory was reported as "an amazing upset." Hagel still has a million-dollar stake in the parent company of ES&S. In Florida, Jeb Bush's first choice for a running mate in his 1998 gubernatorial race was ES&S lobbyist Sandra Mortham, who made a mint installing the machines that counted Jeb's votes.
more
http://www.doublestandards.org/floyd4.html

Tales From the Grassy Knoll
Text by Eva Sion
Illustration by: Isaac Novak

Theonomic Reconstructionism:
One God, One Vote:

"We protect the Bill of Rights, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Now, we protect the most sacred treasure we have, our secret ballot." -Diebold CEO Wally O'Dell, May 2002.
"My purpose is total integration of biblical law into our lives." -Howard Ahmanson

How does a fervent belief in the End of the World and a conviction that the Bible (King James only, thank you ma'am) is the actual revealed word of God factor into one's long-term investment strategies? A strange question to be sure, but one that must have been posed by at least a few of the eclectic crowd who believe in Theonomic Reconstructionism.

Theonomic Reconstructionism is a belief that the only true authority is God's, that allegiance to biblical laws trumps that of civic law and that the Kingdom of Heaven needs to be built on Earth before Jesus will come again. In addition to that, homosexuals should be put to death, women should be banned from civic office, apostates and heretics should be stoned to death and there is a great need for more Christian politicians.

Not content to philosophize about such things, the TR movement sprang into action. Funded by billionaires such as Howard Ahmanson and the Coors and Hunt families, Reconstructionists formed think tanks such as the Chalcedon Institute and the Rutherford Institute (the friendly guys that funded Paula Jones' lawsuit against Clinton) to give the Christian Right a philosophical base to draw from, and political action committees to finance their elections.

....

According to the Reconstructionists, Jesus would do what Howard Ahmanson did. Ahmanson inherited his money from his father, owner of Home Savings & Loan (during the S&L scandal of the Reagan years, Home's investors, mostly small family investments, lost over $150 million dollars. No one went to jail). In addition to funding PACs and think tanks, Howard Jr. parlayed his fortune into the majority stock of a business called American Information Systems (AIS) started by two enterprising brothers, Todd and Bob Urosevich. AIS later merged with Business Records Corporation (BRC) and became Election Systems & Solutions (ES&S). ES&S is the number one provider of touch-screen voting machines. Their website claims that their products were used in collecting 56% of the national vote in the last presidential elections.

Todd Urosevich is now Vice President of ES&S. Strangely enough, brother Bob moved on to head the second largest computerized vote-counting business, Global Election Systems, recently purchased by ATM and security giant Diebold. (They now have both the Ohio and Georgia contracts.) In a round table swap of incestuous patronage the previous executives of Global moved on to head the third largest vote-counting company in the nation, Advanced Voting Systems. Combined, these three corporations will process nearly 80% of the next nationwide elections.


more
http://www.tabletnewspaper.com/politics/73_tftgk.html

[Carl Brennan]

6. more

In any case, here's some info on ESS from <http://www.talion.com/old-voting.html>
Biggest vote-counting company financed by aggressive, radical right-wing political family
The largest vote-counting company (1) in the USA was given its grubstake in 1984 when the multi-millionaire Ahmanson family injected enough cash to get ahold of a 68 percent ownership. (2) This wealthy family has been instrumental in making the Republican Party take a hard right turn - pouring money into conservative Christian candidates and right-wing agendas.(3) They were instrumental in getting at least 24 conservatives into the California legislature; launching prop. 209, California's successful anti-affirmative action law; financing Prop. 22, California's effort to ban gay marriages; financing efforts to remove evolution from school curriculi; and financing the Chalcedon Institute, which reportedly believes in the death penalty for homosexuality and other "sins." The Ahmansons are heirs to the Home Savings of America fortune, which was the largest savings and loan association in the world during the rollicking 1980s (while the S&L scandals were taking place.) Howard Ahmanson is a major benefactor of the Christian reconstructionist movement, whose followers wish to turn certain tenets of the Bible into national law.
And here's what they intend from:

[LibertyorDeath]

8. We need a Forum at DU for all this important info This is to

important to be getting peace meal.

We need a repository for all this.
Lay it out easy for the uninitiated.
We have to help Bev spread the word on this.
We need to get people to give a shit.
American Corporate media Will Not do this.