Reply #4: Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! PAPER BALLOTS! YE-E-E-E-E-E-ES!!!!

[Peace Patriot]

"...voted 137-to-0 to drop its machines and switch to paper ballots." --YES!*

"...as evidence has mounted that the machines cannot be trusted." --YES!

"...not a single member of the House stood behind the once popular Diebold machines." --YES!

*However, we will not have restored our right to vote, and will not achieve transparent elections, and will not have saved our democracy, until we ban ALL "TRADE SECRET," PROPRIETARY programming in ALL voting machines, including optiscans, and in ALL central tabulators, and have banished private, partisan vendors from our election system.

This is a great victory for democracy, but the struggle for restoring democracy is not over, and we have not achieved transparency, with a mere paper ballot BACK-UP to "TRADE SECRET," PROPRIETARY vote tabulation. Recounts are too scanty--for a system in which millions of votes can be changed at the speed of light, by one hacker, leaving no trace--and serious recounts are too hard to obtain.

And the problem is more than likely in the central tabulators.

And we will also not be a democracy again until there is general understanding of the NON-TRANSPARENT conditions of the 2004 election, and that what we experienced in 2004 was NOT an election--it was a coup!

In 2001, the two biggest crooks in Congress, Tom Delay and Bob Ney, set out to entirely corrupt and destroy our election system, with the $4 billion "Help America Vote Act" boondoggle--and that's what they did. They pushed this bill through Congress with no paper trail requirement, no controls on "trade secret" vote tabulation software, no controls on partisan vendors, no controls on lavish lobbying and "revolving door" employment, no controls on private monopoly ownership of our election system, no controls on secret industry 'testing' of these extremely insecure and hackable electronic voting machines and central tabulators, and underfunded regulation with a Bush-appointed commission.

They thus turned our once public and transparent voting system into a private supermarket, where 'packaging', 'advertising' and hard-sell tactics are the keys to 'success,' not INTEGRITY! Not TRUTHFULNESS! Not HONESTY!

The result was that 80% of the nation's vote in 2004 was 'counted' by two rightwing Bushite corporations, Diebold and ES&S: Diebold, whose CEO Wally O'Dell, was a major Bush fundraiser--a Bush "Pioneer" and campaign chair--who promised in writing to "deliver" Ohio's electoral votes to Bush/Cheney in 2004. And, ES&S, a spinoff of Diebold (similar computer architecture), initially funded by rightwing billionaire Howard Ahmanson, who also gave one million dollars to the extremist 'christian' Chalcedon Foundation (which, among other things, touts the death penalty for homosexuals). Diebold and ES&S have an incestuous relationship--they are run by two brothers, Tod and Bob Urosevich.

These are the people who 'counted' most of our votes under a veil of secrecy!

And, to top this off, the war profiteering corporate news monopolies, acting in concert, through one polling organization (Edison-Mitofsky), shut down the election reporting system, late on election day, 2004, and FALSIFIED their own exit polls (Kerry won) to force their exit poll numbers to 'FIT' the results of Diebold's and ES&S's secret formulae (Bush won), and put those DOCTORED numbers on everybody's TV screens that night--thus denying the American people major evidence of election fraud, and helping to squelch protests and calls for investigation.

Exit polls are used worldwide to verify elections and check for fraud. Not here. Here, they CHANGED the exit polls to FIT the official result!*

They covered up the coup!

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*(In the Ukraine, for instance, people were able to see the two separate figures, exit poll vs. official result, and knew that something was very wrong.)

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Two things to keep in mind for the 2006 elections:

1. The electronic fraud CAN be beaten by big turnout, in some cases. Tell people the truth, and ask them to HELP BEAT THE MACHINES! But we should primarily focus on EVIDENCE-GATHERING in 2006, not just for challenging the results, but for building the case against these privately-run electronic systems, to pursue the vital long term goal of getting rid of them and restoring TRANSPARENCY. See resources, below.

2. INDEPENDENT exit polls are desperately needed in '06. The war profiteering corporate news monopoly exit polls are not to be trusted. They are promising to fiddle the results again, and this time to not let anyone capture the real exit poll numbers (as happened in '04) Pressure the Democratic Party to fund independent exit polls in all Congressional elections! (It's the least they can do for us--after letting the Republicans destroy our right to vote!)

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Some resources for American Revolution II:

Breaking--just announced: www.VoterAction.org is suing the state of California and 18 Calif county registrars on behalf of 25 California voter/plaintiffs, on the illegal Diebold "re-certification".
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x2180496


www.votersunite.org (MythBreakers - easy primer on electronic voting--one of the myths is that HAVA requires electronic voting; it does not.)
www.verfiedvoting.org (great activist site)
www.votetrustusa.org (news of this great movement from around the country)
www.UScountvotes.org (statistical monitoring of '06 and '08 elections)
www.solarbus.org/election/index.shtml (fab compendium of all election info)
www.freepress.org (devoted to election reform)
www.bradblog.com (also great, and devoted to election reform)
www.TruthIsAll.net (analysis of the 2004 election)* :patriot: :applause: :patriot:
Sign the petition (Russ Holt, HR 550, great bill-has 169 sponsors). http://www.rushholt.com/petition.html
www.votepa.us (well-organized local group of citizen activists in Pennsylvania, where important legal issues are at stake, including state's rights over election systems)

www.debrabowen.com (Calif Senator running for Sec of State to reform election system)
www.johnbonifaz.com (running for Massachusetts Sec of State on strong election reform and antiwar platform)

*Some tributes to TruthIsAll, who is very ill:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x417007
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x417231
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x675477

Also of interest:

Bob Koehler (-- four recent election reform initiatives in Ohio, predicted to win by 60/40 votes, flipped over, on election day, into 60/40 LOSSES!--the biggest flipover we've seen yet; the election theft machines and their masters are now dictating election policy!)
www.tmsfeatures.com/tmsfeatures/subcategory.jsp?file=20051124ctnbk-a.txt&catid=1824&code=ctnbk

Bob Koehler's latest: "Take this box and stuff it" (3/16/06)
http://commonwonders.com/archives/col337.htm

Amaryllis (Diebold, ES&S, Sequoia lavish lobbying of election officials - Beverly Hilton, Aug. '05)
www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x380340

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Throw Diebold, ES&S and ALL election theft machines into 'Boston Harbor' NOW!

:think: :patriot: :woohoo: :patriot: :think: