Election Reform, Fraud, & Related News Thursday 6/16/05

[MelissaB]

Everyone is encouraged to participate.

If you can:

1. Post stories and announcements you find on the web.

2. Post stories using the "Election Fraud and Reform News Sources" listed here: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x371233

3. Re-post stories and announcements you find on DU, providing a link to the original thread with thanks to the Original Poster, too.

4. Start a discussion thread by re-posting a story you see on this thread.



Link to previous Election Reform, Fraud, & Related News: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x378183


:hi: All previous daily threads are available here: http://www.independentmediasource.com/DU_archives/du_2004erd_el_ref_fr_thr_calenders.htm

[MelissaB]

1. Corporate Control Of The Election Process

Corporate Control Of The Election Process
Friday, 17 June 2005, 12:03 pm
Opinion: www.votersunite.org

Corporate Control Of The Election Process

By John Gideon
www.VotersUnite.Org and www.VoteTrustUSA.Org
15 June 2005
Those who hold the sacred trust of overseeing the election procedures and voting systems in this country are an alphabet-soup of organizations. The National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS); the National Association of State Elections Directors (NASED), the Technical Guidelines Development Committee (TGDC), the Elections Assistance Commission (EAC); the Election Center. What do these groups have in common? They either receive their funding from the vendors or are greatly influenced by those who do receive funding from the vendors. We can only hope that the EAC can resist the influence. The others haven't.

Who are these "vendors"? The vendors are the corporate face on our elections systems the for-profit companies that develop and sell the equipment used to run our elections. They are those who have the most to gain from the influence they buy through their donations and dues to the alphabet soup, and that influence is considerable. They include names like Diebold, Elections Systems and Software (ES&S), Sequoia Voting Systems, Hart InterCivic, Accenture, UniSys, Accupoll, and more. In fact they are all proudly named on the list of corporate affiliates of NASS.<1>

...snip

The Elections Center Teaches Ethics but Shows None Much has already been printed about the Election Center and the organization's lack of ethics in taking contributions from the voting equipment vendors while at the same time giving advice and teaching ethics to county and state elections officials.

"The Election Center, which trains election workers and advises Congress and government agencies on election process issues, has taken donations from manufacturers of electronic voting machines even as it has issued strong statements supporting the security of the machines."<7>
The Election Center also arranges conferences, sponsored by vendors, where the state and local elections officials who attend are inundated with propaganda from the vendors. In August, 2004, elections officials from all over the U.S. met in Washington DC where they were treated to a dinner cruise on the Potomac sponsored by Sequoia and a welcoming party underwritten by Diebold. The graduation and send-off party was sponsored by ES&S.<8>
The Vendors Purchase a Spokesman From the Disabled Community Even the public face of the American Association of People with Disabilities (AAPD), Mr. Jim Dickson, has admitted to being in the pocket of the vendors. Mr. Dickson has testified in favor of electronic voting machines and against paper-based voting systems before governmental panels, committees, and commissions across the country. However, he doesn't begin his testimony by saying that he receives money from the vendors for that testimony.

In an article in Wired News on October 12, 2004, journalist Kim Zetter reported: "The government lobbyist for the American Association of People with Disabilities, who has traveled around the country testifying on behalf of touch-screen voting, acknowledged this year that his organization received at least $26,000 from voting companies, but only after first denying it."<9>


More: http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0506/S00236.htm

[MelissaB]

2. PA: Bucks group plans to watch voting machine changes

Bucks group plans to watch voting machine changes
Forum will be held to discuss required electronic equipment.

By Hal Marcovitz
Of The Morning Call

Leaders of a new watchdog group said Wednesday they hope to monitor Bucks County commissioners' plans to buy electronic voting machines, which the county government is required to do by the end of the year.

Mary Ann Gould, an organizer of the Bucks County Coalition for Voting Integrity, said the group's first project is to stage a forum on voting machine technology as well as the pitfalls of switching to new machines.

The forum is slated for 7 p.m. June 27 at the courthouse in Doylestown. The scheduled speakers include Rebecca Mercuri, a computer science professor at Harvard University who has written about issues with electronic voting; and Michelle Mulder, an aide to U.S. Rep. Rush Holt, a New Jersey Democrat who has sponsored amendments to the 2002 Help America Vote Act. That law requires the county to scrap its mechanical machines.

Also set to speak at the forum are Rev. Robert Moore, a voting rights activist from Princeton, N.J., and Lynn Landes, a freelance journalist who has covered voting fraud issues.


More: http://www.mcall.com/news/local/all-b2_2votingjun16,0,4880776.story?coll=all-newslocal-hed

[MelissaB]

3. BOB FITRAKIS The political scientist and newspaper editor on how, in plain

BOB FITRAKIS
The political scientist and newspaper editor on how, in plain view, the Ohio presidential election was rigged

~ By DEAN KUIPERS ~


As Election Day 2004 progressed, cold and rainy in Ohio, the exit polls were clear: Ohio had gone to John Kerry, and the presidency with it. Bob Fitrakis, Ph.D., is one of a majority of political scientists the world over who consider the Mitofsky exit poll the single most reliable polling strategy in politics, which has been used since 1967 with uncanny accuracy. But when the vote came in early the next morning, the total differed from the poll by a statistically impossible amount, and George W. Bush was president once again.

Even before the tally, however, it was apparent what had happened: voter fraud on a scale that would indicate the American polity itself is in serious trouble. Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, who, coincidentally, co-chaired the Bush-Cheney campaign in the state of Ohio, withheld voting machines from heavily-Democratic areas of Columbus, where Fitrakis and others witnessed the largest voter turnout in history simply walk away, unable to vote. And that was just the beginning. Representative John Conyers (D-MI) and the Congressional Black Caucus opened an investigation that catalogued a morass of problems, causing Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Rep. Tubbs Jones (D-OH) to contest the electoral college for the first time since 1887. Now Fitrakis and his colleagues at The Free Press, a Columbus newspaper and website published independently since 1970, have put all their findings, including the Conyers Report, in a new book: Did George W. Bush Steal America’s 2004 Election? He’s in the L.A. area the next three days talking about it.


CityBeat: Are you alleging in your book that Blackwell threw the election to Bush?

Bob Fitrakis: I think that’s what all the evidence points towards. This parallels Katherine Harris in Florida in 2000. It’s as though Karl Rove, who’s always pushed the edges of the political system and the law, realized that the key person to getting reelected is having the secretary of state in your corner. Blackwell really was engaged in activities that made papers like The Columbus Dispatch, which hasn’t endorsed a Democrat since Woodrow Wilson, question his behavior.

Did Blackwell break the law?

Well, in an all-Republican state, where every state official, including the attorney general, is a Republican, I don’t know what he would have had to do to break the law . His daily activities seemed to me to be violating the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and again, the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It seemed that, routinely, he was violating due process and equal protection. The problem is, who was going to prosecute? Especially a secretary of state who is very close to the Bush family and to the president of the United States?


...snip

Was there a recount?

Yes, there was. And it was more obviously corrupt than the election. Under Ohio state law, they “randomly select” a three percent precinct count. If that “random” three percent matches the tally on the central tabulators, you don’t then have to look at the actual paper ballots.



More: http://www.lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=2217&IssueNum=106

[MelissaB]

4. Discussion

here: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x378497

[MelissaB]

5. OH: Republicans In a Bind

Republicans In a Bind

By JOSELYN KING


...snip

"There are a few people in our party who have abused their trust," Bennett said, making reference to a scandal in which Republican office holders invested state money in rare coins. As much as $10 million in coins owned by the state are now missing.

"There could be more bad news about Republicans still to come," he added. "The word around Columbus is that some indictments could be forthcoming, and that's the way it should be.

"We have to get these officeholders off the playing field if they're guilty, prosecute them and put them in jail."

The Ohio GOP problems don't end with "Coingate," he continued. Bennett didn't mention names, but next spoke of legislators with alleged close ties to lobbyists.


More: http://www.news-register.net/news/story/0616202005_new01.asp

[MelissaB]

6. Thom Hartmann: The Theft of Your Vote is Merely a Microchip Away

The Theft of Your Vote is Merely a Microchip Away

- By Thom Hartmann, Berkeley Daily Planet
(8/1/2003)


...“A defective computer chip in the county’s optical scanner misread ballots Tuesday night and incorrectly tallied a landslide victory for Republicans,” announced the Associated Press in a story on Nov. 7, just a few days after the 2002 election. The story added, “Democrats actually won by wide margins.”

Republicans would have carried the day had not poll workers become suspicious when the computerized vote-reading machines said the Republican candidate was trouncing his incumbent Democratic opponent in the race for County Commissioner. The poll workers were close enough to the electorate—they were part of the electorate—to know their county overwhelmingly favored the Democratic incumbent.

A quick hand recount of the optical-scan ballots showed that the Democrat had indeed won, even though the computerized ballot-scanning machine kept giving the race to the Republican. The poll workers brought the discrepancy to the attention of the county clerk, who notified the voting machine company.

“A new computer chip was flown to Snyder from Dallas,” County Clerk Lindsey told the Associated Press. With the new chip installed, the computer then verified that the Democrat had won the election.

---snip

http://www.zogby.com/Soundbites/ReadClips.dbm?ID=5501



~~~~~~
The Berkeley Planet article discusses a couple more incidents, including the 18,181 Comus County situation and an Alabama gubernatorial race that I can't remember ever hearing about, possibly because the party roles were reversed.

And what is this thing about "defective computer chips"? Bad hardware usually causes a widespread failure, not an incorrect total.


Thanks to ribofunk here: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x378398