Election Reform, Fraud, & Related News May 22, 2006

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The cover looks like this


Here’s the link…

Will Your Vote Count in 2006?

'When you're using a paperless voting system,
there is no security,' says Stanford's David Dill.
By Steven Levy
Newsweek
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/12888600/site/newsweek/

Some time ago, I predicted that when * went below 35%, MSM would start covering the election fraud story. Well, I’m kind of right, maybe a letter off because MSN broke a story about the inability to verify elections. Where have they been? Oh, somewhere up…So we can assume MSN=MSN, “close enough for government work." This also means that Land Shark owes me $500 for the online bet we made on this matter. Please inform him, it’s time to fork over.

Never forget the pursuit of Truth.
Only the deluded & complicit accept election results on blind faith.
Denying that 2004 was stolen is like denying global warming.

Election Reform, Fraud, & Related News May 22, 2006

All members welcome and encouraged to participate.

Please post Election Reform, Fraud, & Related News on this thread.
1. Post stories and announcements you find on the web.
2. Post stories using the "Election Fraud and Reform News Sources" listed here:
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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.
Please

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1. FL: Sancho Swinging for the Fence – Lets it all hang out

Ion Sancho is an intellectually honest, committed civil servant. He’s not doing his job just to punch the clock. He had Hursti do two hacks, released the information, and made decision on that basis. Guess what? The state board of elections came after him for being late on the HAVA deadline. Sancho stood up to his board of supervisors, who seemed to support him despite the loss of a state grant of $500k for the missed deadline. Then Sancho hired an attorney and fired back. In addition, the Republican A.G. (running for Governor, not supported by the Jebster) filed notices to the three manufacturers who conspired; it seems, to screw Sancho. After he announced the hack, Sequoia and ESS were “too busy to sell him the equipment he needed. Moral of this tale: Do not f with Ion Sanchez; nice guys don’t finish last, not when they stand tall and face down the election the, “the miscreants” who are “elected” in reward for their election fraud. THANK YOU MR. SANCHO, ON BEHALF OF A VERY GREATFUL NATION.


Voting rights and election fraud are incompatible.
"The ERD" -- The Gold Standard in voting rights news.

http://www.news-journalonline.com/NewsJournalOnline/News/Headlines/frtHEAD03POL052106.htm

May 21, 2006
Elections chief urges citizens to demand vote accountability
By SCOTT WYLAND
Staff Writer

DAYTONA BEACH -- A maverick elections official made clear Saturday that two things remain constant: the state's flawed voting system and his passion for trying to fix it.
Eyes glinting, hands gesturing boldly, Ion Sancho, Leon County's elections supervisor, accused the state's political leaders of undermining democracy.

First, they forced counties to adopt electronic voting machines that can be tampered with, then, last year, they made it illegal to use paper ballots to recount close races, Sancho told 100 people gathered at Daytona Beach Community College.

"We need more audits. We need recounts," Sancho said. "Trust no one. If it can't be verified, it can't be used."

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6. FL: Scene of the Major Crimes...don't ever forget

SUPERB COMPENDIUM BY GREG PALAST OF GREGPALAST.COM ON FLORIDA PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS...Justice chained and blinded...

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2. World: Newsweek put down populism – shows total bias.

Here is a perfect example of how MSM tries to condition us into accepting crap. This is an anti-populism article from Newsweek. Says people just don’t get it about the whole globalization movement (“good, it’s good, umm good, HAVA some”). We should not forget that the same source that published the article about David Dill PhD and election “insecurity” also continues the drum beat for our “masters.” It's also a set up. Same media has een referring to Gores "new populism." They're one trick ponies.


Voting rights and election fraud are incompatible.
"The ERD" -- The Gold Standard in voting rights news.

March of the Populists

The movement is spreading beyond its Latin roots, as leaders from
Paris to Beijing respond to rising public worries about jobs and inequality.
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/12892617/site/newsweek/

By George Wehrfritz and Stefan Theil
Newsweek International
May 29, 2006 issue - A populist rebellion against globalization is going global. This self-destructive form of economic nationalism started along the Caracas-Moscow axis, as Presidents Vladimir Putin of Russia and Hugo Chávez of Venezuela trumpeted the classic populist promise: to steer wealth from the rich and the foreign to the poor and the homegrown. Increasingly, though, the same politics of fear is taking hold outside of troubled and newly flush oil states. What French President Dominique de Villepin calls "economic patriotism" has become acceptable from Tokyo to Washington. Multibillion-dollar campaigns to guarantee jobs or incomes for those left behind by national booms are now taking hold in the biggest markets of Asia. In Western Europe, a "populist zeitgeist" is dawning, with long-term consequences, says Antwerp University political scientist Cas Mudde. "Populism will be permanent. With so much insecurity, resentment will express itself much more readily."


The problem, and it is a problem, is much bigger than Chávez and Putin. True, Chávez's moves to nationalize energy resources and spend petrodollars for the poor, in what he bills as a post-postcolonial attack on foreign corporate imperialism, have since been copied by Bolivia and, just last week, by Ecuador. Still, only his smallest neighbors consider Chávez a model, while the populist phenomena continues to spread. From Asia to Eastern Europe, countries that were once at the forefront of economic reform, opening to the outside world, are now turning inward, reverting to the kind of state handouts their leaders once deplored.

One striking example is Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, the reformer who opened the world's largest democracy to global trade in the early 1990s. When Singh in February hailed "the most significant legislation of our time," he was not talking about his latest efforts to modernize India through new roads, or new foreign deals. He was praising Parliament for passing his National Rural Employment Guarantee, a massive makework program that echoes Indira Gandhi's anti-poverty agenda of the 1960s. It promises to fund at least one job for each of India's poorest 150 million families by 2010, and is expected to cost a staggering $25 billion. No, Singh is not exactly backtracking on reform, but he is bowing to increasingly loud, and familiar, demands to share the wealth of the global economy.

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3. MSM Covers Election Fraud (once) -- Newsweek Tech Section. Good Start

Al right, finally. There is always a first article. Now we’re ready for MSM to unleash. Remember that this was in the technology section of Newsweek, not the “news” part but I’m grateful that at least something is there.

The cover looks like this 


Here’s the link…

Will Your Vote Count in 2006?

'When you're using a paperless voting system,
there is no security,' says Stanford's David Dill.
By Steven Levy
Newsweek
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/12888600/site/newsweek/

May 29, 2006 issue - Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the voting booth, here comes more disturbing news about the trustworthiness of electronic touchscreen ballot machines. Earlier this month a report by Finnish security expert Harri Hursti analyzed Diebold voting machines for an organization called Black Box Voting. Hursti found unheralded vulnerabilities in the machines that are currently entrusted to faithfully record the votes of millions of Americans.

How bad are the problems? Experts are calling them the most serious voting-machine flaws ever documented. Basically the trouble stems from the ease with which the machine's software can be altered. It requires only a few minutes of pre-election access to a Diebold machine to open the machine and insert a PC card that, if it contained malicious code, could reprogram the machine to give control to the violator. The machine could go dead on Election Day or throw votes to the wrong candidate. Worse, it's even possible for such ballot-tampering software to trick authorized technicians into thinking that everything is working fine, an illusion you couldn't pull off with pre-electronic systems. "If Diebold had set out to build a system as insecure as they possibly could, this would be it," says Avi Rubin, a Johns Hopkins University computer-science professor and elections-security expert.

Diebold Election Systems spokesperson David Bear says Hursti's findings do not represent a fatal vulnerability in Diebold technology, but simply note the presence of a feature that allows access to authorized technicians to periodically update the software. If it so happens that someone not supposed to use the machine—or an election official who wants to put his or her thumb on the scale of democracy—takes advantage of this fast track to fraud, that's not Diebold's problem. " throwing out a 'what if' that's premised on a basis of an evil, nefarious person breaking the law," says Bear.

"The voters are saying that every vote should count, and the only way to do this is by verified audit trails," he says. But even an optimistic scenario for passage would challenge his goal of mandatory paper receipts for November's elections. In other words, it's unlikely that every voter using an electronic voting device in 2006 will know for sure that his or her vote will be reflected in the actual totals. Six years after the 2000 electoral debacle, how can this be?

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4. Times, London: “Britain’s sleaze watch” ”attack on Blair” election fraud

Just think of Blair as *, J. Kenneth Blackwell, and Liberace all rolled up into one utterly repellant individual who should never have been elected, even to dog catcher. The man who came over here with his crisp, decidedly petit bourgeois accent and lent credibility to our double digit IQ president’s “glorious” attack on a country that did not attack us.


Voting rights and election fraud are incompatible.
"The ERD" -- The Gold Standard in voting rights news.


The Sunday Times May 21, 2006

Watchdog blasts PM over sleaze

The Times did not reveal
bLIARs Liberace fetish but
hints at it
Jasper Gerard and Robert Winnett
Blair made 'major error of judgement'
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-2190422,00.html

BRITAIN’S sleaze watchdog has launched a personal attack on Tony Blair for failing to uphold standards in public life after a succession of scandals.

Sir Alistair Graham, appointed by the prime minister to oversee politicians’ behaviour, has criticised Blair for treating standards as a “minor issue, not worthy of serious consideration” and says the prime minister now faces repercussions for failing to give the issue sufficient emphasis. “I think it’s a major error of judgment,” he said this weekend in an interview in The Sunday Times.

By contrast, Gordon Brown, who met Graham last month, was much more supportive. Graham says: “I was pleasantly surprised how interested he was
in the issues; I think that is a helpful sign.”

Graham, chairman of the committee on standards in public life, criticises Labour over the alleged loans-for-honours scandal, saying the hidden loan to the party by Lord Sainsbury, the science minister, had been “very damaging” for public trust.

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5. CA: Marin County --VoterAction.Org Legal team sues MacPherson

CA: Marin County --VoterAction.Org Legal team sues MacPherson
More of VoterAction.Org, Holly Jacobson, Lowell Finley and others who are on the streets everyday fighting election fraud.


MARIN COUNTY'S NEWS MONTHLY - FREE PRESS
[phone] - [phone](fax) - P.O. Box 31, Bolinas, CA, 94924
May, 2006

Huge Victo
http://www.coastalpost.com/06/05/01.html

In Suit Against Diebold Voting Machines
By Don Deane

A precedent-making lawsuit against Secretary of State Bruce McPherson and 18 county voter registrars has prevailed as Marin, Placer, San Luis Obispo, Trinity, Tulare, Santa Barbara and Humboldt Counties have converted or have agreed to convert to paper ballots.
McPherson and 18 California county registrars are called on in the suit to ban the use and purchase of Diebold voting machines in the state of California.

The suit was filed by VoterAction.org on behalf of 25 California voter/plaintiffs, some in Bolinas. VoterAction lauded officials in the seven California counties for their commitments to use paper balloting rather than electronic voting systems.

The suit seeks to nullify Secretary of State Bruce McPherson's "conditional" certification authorizing purchase of the Diebold TSx electronic voting system which has a history of security issues, verifiability, and disability access problems.

VoterAction is the non-profit organization which brought the actions that led to both the decertification of Diebold in California in 2004 and, more recently, the ban on the purchase of Sequoia voting machines in New Mexico (which led to a new law in the state requiring a paper ballot for every vote cast.)

Diebold machines have repeatedly been linked to questionable vote outcomes across America.

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7. MI: Sneaky – Collect Signatures for an Initiave and Lie About IT!!!

Signatures were obtained for a ballot initiative that signature gatherers told signers represented a civil rights initiative. The civil right advocated by the state initiative was ELIMINATION of affirmative action. Oops. The Supreme Court of MI says that the measure is void because it’s been established that it was placed on the ballot through deception. Wonder who was behind this. Any ideas:evilgrin:


Group hears stories of fraud in affirmative action ballot bid
In final hearing, Grand Rapids-area residents can report experiences in contentious initiative.

http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060522/POLITICS/605220325/1022&template=printart


Amy Lee / The Detroit News
May 22, 2006

The Michigan Civil Rights Commission will hold its fourth and final hearing in Grand Rapids tonight on claims that people were duped into signing petitions demanding a statewide vote on affirmative action.

The controversial measure, which will be on the November ballot, would ban the use of race as a factor in determining university admissions and government hiring. It's a white-hot political issue in an already contentious election year.

The commission is investigating whether petition signers were misled about the nature of the ballot question by petition circulators. The commission is also hearing from petition circulators, some of whom claim they misled petition signers because they were not told the measure would ban affirmative action programs in Michigan, said Harold Core, spokesman for the Michigan Civil Rights Commission.

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8. CA:; Alameda County Moves Away from Dieold to “Blended” System

Bureaucracies are such fun. They bought Diebold in Alameda County. Diebold, of course, has huge problems a couple of times a year.



Article Last Updated: 5/20/2006 03:03 AM
Supervisors put off new system choice
County faces losing $9 million in federal funds on voting technology
By Ian Hoffman, STAFF WRITER
Inside Bay Area



Facing a use-it-or-lose-it situation on $9 million in federal money, Alameda County supervisors put off choosing a new voting system Wednesday night under pressure from voting activists.

The county largely has ended its three-year experiment as the first big West Coast jurisdiction to gamble on Diebold and its electronic touch-screen voting machines. The question now is what's next, and when?

County executives pressed supervisors Wednesday night to settle on a new, "blended" voting system supplied by either Diebold or Oakland-based Sequoia Voting Systems, with primarily paper ballots run through optical scanners, plus a touch screen at each polling place to guarantee accessibility for disabled voters.

The price tag is $13 million to $17 million, and with a budget deficit already on the horizon, county officials are eager to use federal grants for more than half the purchase. The grants come with conditions and tight deadlines.

"I know this has been a long and painful process," David McDonald, the county's information technology director and interim elections chief, told the supervisors. "One thing I'm positive of is we're running out of time."

But some voting activists saythe urgency is manufactured and they prefer waiting on better, more secure voting systems, even if it means losing federal grant money.

[Kurovski]

9. Kick to the top.

Thank you, Sir autorank. One of a number of good and true knights at ER's Round Table. :applause: