Bushites, having arranged for their buds at Diebold and ES&S to control vote tabulation with "TRADE SECRET," PROPRIETARY programming code, and virtually no audit/recount controls, and had somehow gotten the Dem Party leadership to be utterly silent and acquiescent on Bushites gaining control of the vote count, WOULD the Bushites, in my opinion, then use that opportunity to steal another election?....
...I would have just laughed, and said, "Is the Pope Catholic?" A no-brainer, it seems to me. I knew it then. I know it now.
Yet I was still shocked when it happened. Maybe more shocked by the war profiteering corporate news monopolies FALSIFYING their exit polls to "fit" the results of Diebold's and ES&S's secret formulae (their collusion in the fraud)--and more than shocked--floored!--by the Dems' early concession. But shocked at the simple fact of it: They designed it for fraud, and they of course took advantage of the fraudulent election system that they had put in place with the $4 billion HAVA boondoggle, to commit fraud.
Shocked in the way that I was shocked the other day when Bush said that he'd not only broken the law 30 times, he intended to keep on breaking the law--with no immediate action by Congress to remove him from office. Shocked, even though I know that Diebold and ES&S "selected" a third to half of this Congress, with the rest (sans the 125 or so who voted against the Iraq war resolution, and are still there), having been installed in various corrupt ways, by corporations and war profiteers.
It's hard to take in just how far along the road to fascism we have gone, and that every institution of our democracy has failed us.
We have a narrowing window of opportunity to reverse course, by pressuring state and local officials for election transparency--removal of private corporations from the system, open source code (if it's electronic) with paper ballot backup, a 10% recount/audit and other controls, or return to all paper ballots hand-counted at the precinct level.
There are election reform movements around the country to get this done--with some early successes (in Florida, Calif, NY and NC). It is a very committed and passionate movement. Non-transparent elections are not elections. They are tyranny.
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For an easy to read pamphlet on the perils of electronic voting ("MythBreakers"). (One of the myths is that HAVA mandated electronic voting; it did NOT; citizens and election officials still have a choice!)
www.votersunite.org
For a project for statistical monitoring and challenges of elections in '06 and '08:
www.UScountvotes.org
Russ Holt's bill HR 550 will stop the corporate privatization of our elections in its tracks, and reverse it. It has 169 co-sponsors (mostly Dems). Sign the petition.
http://www.rushholt.com/petition.htmlSee Bob Koehler's article about the recent Ohio election reform initiatives, predicted to win by 60/40, but flipped over into 60/40 LOSSES on election day--the worst flipped vote yet:
http://www.tmsfeatures.com/tmsfeatures/subcategory.jsp?file=20051124ctnbk-a.txt&catid=1824&code=ctnbkFor the recent GAO report on the grave insecurity of our election system in 2004:
access to pdf:
http://www.gao.gov/docsearch/abstract.php?rptno=GAO-05-956text only:
http://www.gao.gov/htext/d05956.htmlFor more info: www.verifiedvoting.org
For analysis of the 2004 election results (and exit polls):
www.TruthIsAll.net
News updates on election fraud/reform:
http://www.solarbus.org/election/index.shtmlFor how these Bushite electronic voting companies are corrupting state/local election officials with lavish lobbying, see this recent example--a week of fun, sun and high end shopping at the Beverly Hilton for election officials from around the country, sponsored by Diebold, ES&S and Sequoia, this August:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x380340------------------------------------------
"Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything."--Josef Stalin