Tomorrow is the day we take back our country

Imagine that you've been watching your favorite professional football team all year, and they make it into the playoffs, and finally into the Super Bowl.

Imagine that the game is close - very close - and as the final seconds run down, your quarterback has the ball in the air to an open receiver, who comes down in the end zone... victory!

But suddenly the unthinkable happens. A referee makes a terrible call and the touchdown is called back. Your team loses the game. On an erroneous technicality.

Now imagine that you are losing your home, your job, you have no health care, your life has gone downhill in a thousand different ways in the past eight years... your kid is off at war and can't come home because he or she keeps getting redeployed over and over and over again. You have had it. You are going to change this country, and so you register to vote and you get in there early and you cast that vote for change.

Now imagine that your vote, and others like it all across the country... magically disappear.

The landslide that the polls all indicate is right around the corner... doesn't happen. All because an IT firm is secretly flipping bits inside touch screen voting machines and undermining our democracy. Right under our noses.

It could happen again.

I have been agonizing over this election for years, and tomorrow is the day... but I don't feel any better tonight than I did two years ago. We are the ones who have everything to lose. Our government -- even and especially the Democratic Party, who should have known better -- has done nothing to fix this rampant problem.

Here are two must-read stories from truthout.org -- because our mainstream media is light years behind on this do or die issue that concerns the foundation of our democracy.

The first, from Greg Palast:

It's November 5 and the nation is in shock. Media blame it on the "Bradley effect": Americans supposedly turned into Klansmen inside the voting booth, and Barack Obama turned up with 6 million votes less than calculated from the exit polls. Florida came in for McCain and so did Indiana. Colorado, despite the Democrats' Rocky Mountain high after the Denver convention, stayed surprisingly Red. New Mexico, a state where Anglos are a minority, went McCain by 300 votes, as did Virginia.

That's the nightmare. Here's the cold reality.

Swing state Colorado. Before this election, two Republican secretaries of state purged 19.4 percent of the entire voter roll. One in five voters. Pfft!

Swing state New Mexico. One in nine voters in this year's Democratic caucus found their names missing from the state-provided voter registries. And not just any voters. County by county, the number of voters disappeared was in direct proportion to the nonwhite population. Gore won the state by 366 votes; Kerry lost it by only 5,900. Despite reassurances that all has been fixed for Tuesday, Democrats lost from the list in February told me they're still "disappeared" from the lists this week.

Swing state Indiana. In this year's primary, ten nuns were turned away from the polls because of the state's new voter ID law. They had drivers' licenses, but being in their 80s and 90s, they'd let their licenses expire. Cute. But what isn't cute is this: 566,000 registered voters in that state don't have the ID required to vote. Most are racial minorities, the very elderly and first-time voters; that is, Obama voters. Twenty-three other states have new, vote-snatching ID requirements.

Swing state Florida. Despite a lawsuit battle waged by the Brennan Center for Justice, the state's Republican apparatchiks are attempting to block the votes of 85,000 new registrants, forcing them to pass through a new "verification" process. Funny thing: verification applies only to those who signed up in voter drives (mostly black), but not to voters registering at motor vehicle offices (mostly white).

And so on through swing states controlled by Republican secretaries of state.

Read the rest here...

And yet another from truthout.org (they are obviously as worried tonight as I am. But then, they have been covering this issue for years.)

Is the Election About to Be Stolen in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Elsewhere?

Last Friday, a federal court judge in Cleveland, Ohio, ordered Michael Connell, an information-technology consultant to the McCain '08 campaign, to give a deposition in a court proceeding. Mr. Connell, whose firm, GovTech Solutions, built Ohio's 2004 election results computer network, was in a position to have knowledge about the alleged manipulation of electronic voting results in that presidential contest (a technique known as "flipping") in order to switch the winner in Ohio from Sen. John Kerry to President Bush. The deposition is scheduled to take place today, November 3, one day before the 2008 general election.

Connell is a former associate of Karl Rove, who is believed by those familiar with the events in question to have engaged in witness intimidation to prevent testimony about what happened in Ohio in 2004. They also believe that IT companies associated with the Republican Party have redeveloped the capacity to manipulate electronic voting results in Tuesday's election, both within Ohio and outside, including Pennsylvania and other key battleground states such as Colorado and New Mexico. One such firm, Triad GSI, is managing voter registration databases in 55 of Ohio's 88 counties and is hosting 25 of those databases.

All this has led to speculation that the McCain campaign's insistence that they can win Pennsylvania, Ohio, and other states, despite being (in some places, significantly) behind in most of the polls, could be prompted by having been informed about planned cyber interference with electronic voting results. The reality is that a successful cyber attack only requires a few skilled IT experts with an in-depth understanding of digital security. Election returns in many states are presently emailed from local databases for statewide consolidation, without even the standard safeguards routinely used by banks and corporations. In other words, voting data can be relatively easily hacked.

Read the rest here...

I noticed a special on the hacking of our elections on a public television station this evening. I didn't want to watch it. I'm trying to get some actual sleep tonight. I flipped through the stations, only to find that 'Recount' was playing on HBO. Stolen elections have finally made it into the public awareness. Apparently I am not the only one with that sick, gnawing feeling in my stomach tonight.

May justice and democracy prevail tomorrow. Be vigilant. Be wary. Pay attention. And don't let anyone bully you out of voting.

As Fredrick Douglass once said -- and I've read this twice today, in two different places, so I know its relevant:

Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.

The great vote grab

I hate reading about our election process in a foreign paper. Here we are, a self-proclaimed super power democracy, and our voting system is now in total disarray.

This story out of the UK comes right out and admits what our strangely pro-government national media refuses to directly address: that the 2004 election was stolen:

Writing in the New Statesman way back in 2004, reflecting on criticisms of the electronic voting systems used in the presidential election that year, Michael Meacher MP pointed out that statisticians, academics and political analysts had highlighted significant voting differences between electoral districts that used paper ballots and those that used electronic systems. These cannot be explained by random variation. The investigators found a much larger variance than expected and in every case it favoured George W Bush over John Kerry. In Wisconsin and Ohio, the discrepancy favoured Bush by 4 per cent, in Pennsylvania by 5 per cent, in Florida and Minnesota by 7 per cent, in North Carolina by 9 per cent and in New Hampshire by a whopping 15 per cent.

Research by the University of Berkeley, California, revealed election irregularities in 2004 in Florida. These irregularities, all of which were associated with electronic voting machines, appear to have awarded between 130,000 to 260,000 additional votes to Bush.

Funny -- everyone in the world knows it happened, and they're all discussing it with great interest. But we don't talk about it. We wave our flags and shout 'we're the greatest democracy on the earth,' without even considering the fact that - without clean elections - we are no longer a democracy at all. The planet is littered with banana republics that have 'elections,' wink wink.

Computer programmer testifies about writing a program to hack the votes:



A few other interesting tidbits in this story. Did you know that we are one of the only democracies that allows private - partisan - corporations to secretly count our votes using their own proprietary software? What the hell? Add to that, the fact that most western democracies have independent election commissions that oversee their entire voting systems and verify results. But of course - we don't.

What the hell kind of democracy is this, anyway?

Most election ballots will be counted or scanned by only four private companies - Sequoia, Diebold, Election Systems & Software (ES&S), and Hart InterCivic. According to Robert F Kennedy Jr. (who has been doing the work Democratic leaders won't do,) three out of the four companies have close ties to the GOP:

Three of the four companies have close ties to the Republican Party. ES&S, in an earlier corporate incarnation, was chaired by Chuck Hagel, who in 1996 became the first Republican elected to the U.S. Senate from Nebraska in twenty-four years - winning a close race in which eighty-five percent of the votes were tallied by his former company. Hart InterCivic ranks among its investors GOP loyalist Tom Hicks, who bought the Texas Rangers from George W. Bush in 1998, making Bush a millionaire fifteen times over. And according to campaign-finance records, Diebold, along with its employees and their families, has contributed at least $300,000 to GOP candidates and party funds since 1998 - including more than $200,000 to the Republican National Committee. In a 2003 fund-raising e-mail, the company's then-CEO Walden O'Dell promised to deliver Ohio's electoral votes to Bush in 2004."

Kennedy exposed all of this well ahead of the 2008 election. But of course, very little was done. Here in Indiana, those voting on election day will have to use these 'black boxes.' Apparently those who vote early can use paper ballots. Is it any wonder we have had record early voting this year?

The people of this country want change. More than even that, we want a return to fair elections -- to actual democracy, not that sham that we've been told is the 'best we can do.' Bullshit. Our ballots were counted for 200 years before these shady electronic devices, and democracy - government of the people - is just too damn important to be opened up to partisan hacking.

It better not happen again. Not this time. The entire world is watching, and everyone knows Obama is far, far ahead in most state polls (even if desperate, GOP-connected pollsters won't admit it.)

Ready to vote?

Apparently the electronic voting machines are not.



This is Jeff Waybright - Jackson County Clerk in West Virginia - demonstrating (well he thought he would be demonstrating) that West Virginia's electronic voting machines will not flip to McCain whenever someone votes either straight Democrat or for Obama, as long as they are correctly calibrated.

What he ended up showing, in stark detail, was that even when 'calibrated' these machines will flip a vote to nearly anyone on the ballot BUT Obama.

For weeks we've been hearing complaints of vote-switching from early voters in West Virgina. Here are a few who went on video to talk about their experience at the polls:





Isn't it funny that votes never seem to jump from Republican... to Democrat? That is some pretty selective mis-calibration.

Lou! You found the forest!

Is Lou FINALLY starting to get it?

It appears he has set aside his fascination for ACORNs, and focused on the veritable forest of nation-wide voting problems.

Lou Dobbs Tonight
Monday, October 20, 2008

Tonight, we continue to examine the state of our voting system, and most importantly, its integrity as voters prepare to flock to the polls in record numbers. A Superior Court judge ordered stepped up security of 10,000 electronic voting machines in New Jersey Friday. The machines have been proven to be hackable in seven minutes. The court also agreed to release a Princeton University professor's report that questions the reliability of the machines. Princeton's Coalition for Peace Action and others have sued to force the state to return to paper balloting. New jersey does not have a paper trail and electronic machines miscounted voted in the primaries.

Here we go again

Are you voting on a touch screen? If you are, you had best make sure the vote that you think you are casting... is actually the vote on the screen before you walk away.

From the Charleston Gazette, in battleground state West Virginia:

At least three early voters in Jackson County had a hard time voting for candidates they want to win.

Virginia Matheney and Calvin Thomas said touch-screen machines in the county clerk's office in Ripley kept switching their votes from Democratic to Republican candidates.

"When I touched the screen for Barack Obama, the check mark moved from his box to the box indicating a vote for John McCain," said Matheney, who lives in Kenna.

When she reported the problem, she said, the poll worker in charge "responded that everything was all right. It was just that the screen was sensitive and I was touching the screen too hard. She instructed me to use only my fingernail."

Even after she began using her fingernail, Matheney said, the problem persisted.

When she tried to vote for candidates running for two open seats on the Supreme Court, the electronic machine canceled her second vote twice.

On her third try, Matheney managed to cast votes for both Menis Ketchum and Margaret Workman, Democratic candidates for the two open seats.

Calvin Thomas, 81, who retired from Kaiser Aluminum in Ravenswood in 1983 and now lives in Ripley, experienced the same problem.

"When I pushed Obama, it jumped to McCain. When I went down to governor's office and punched [Gov. Joe] Manchin, it went to the other dude. When I went to Karen Facemyer [the incumbent Republican state senator], I pushed the Democrat, but it jumped again.

"The rest of them were OK, but the machine sent my votes for those top three offices from the Democrat to the Republican," Thomas said.

Yo Lou (Dobbs)... care to cover this?

Readers and diarists from Daily Kos also said they had experienced these 'glitches' in West Virginia:

THE PROBLEM was that my touch-screen voting machine inaccurately put a green check mark in the McCain/Palin box when I touched my guy's name. I followed the instructions and touched the incorrect check mark to "de-select" it and then used my pinky instead of my index finger to select Obama/Biden. That wasn't the end of my frustration, though.

In my state of WV there is the option of selecting a "Straight Party Ticket." I intended to vote a straight party ticket, but as my wife and I spoke on the way to the municipal building, we wanted the satisfaction of selecting EACH and every Dem. on the ticket. We also wanted to be assured that our vote was correctly recorded for each race. And we especially wanted the final satisfaction of having voted for Barack Obama (see a recent diary here that explains some of our "safety" concerns).

Three times the touch screen mistakenly assigned my preference to the wrong candidate. Now I'm a technologically savvy individual, so it didn't fluster me too much, having read the directions, knowing that I could immediately "un-check" one and select the other, and further knowing that there would be a screen at the end with a summary of my selections, and an opportunity to "Return to the Ballot," before actually casting the "VOTE." Not all voters are as tech savvy as me--in fact few of them are. There was an alert tone that sounded when I touched Obama/Biden, and a bright green check mark appeared in the box (the wrong one, of course, but I could have missed it), and the paper tape that keeps record was printed on and moved. I would imagine that MANY people would move on at that point...I mean, it sounded and "looked" like the right thing happened.

I am also hearing that it is a very bad idea to vote straight Democrat - that is, if you want your vote to actually be counted:

You may have read about this, and Black Box Voting has sent an ELECTION ALERT about this. Here are the details and what to do about it:

THE PROBLEM: "Straight party voting" on voting machines is revealing a bad pattern of miscounting and omitting your vote, especially if you are a Democrat.

Most recently (Oct. 2008), a firm called Automated Election Services was found to have mis-coded the system in heavily Democratic Santa Fe County, New Mexico such that straight party voters would not have the presidential vote counted.

Straight party voting is allowed in 15 states. Basically, it means that you can take a shortcut to actually looking at who you are voting for and instead just select a party preference. Then the voting machine makes your candidate choices, supposedly for the party you requested.

Additional details follow, but first: PROTECT THE COUNT

1) NEVER CHOOSE THE STRAIGHT PARTY VOTE OPTION, because it alerts the computer as to your party preference and allows software code to trigger whatever function the programmer has designed.

2) SEND THIS INFORMATION OUT TO AS MANY PEOPLE AS YOU CAN, blog it, root n' toot it out there to get the word out.

3) ESPECIALLY GET THE WORD OUT TO PEOPLE IN THE FOLLOWING STATES, which have straight party voting options:

- Alabama
- Indiana
- Iowa
- Kentucky
- Michigan
- New Mexico
- North Carolina
- Oklahoma
- Pennsylvania
- Rhode Island
- South Carolina
- Texas
- Utah
- West Virginia
- Wisconsin

Terrific. Sounds like we haven't fixed a damn thing in eight years.

NYT: Scientists hack into electronic voting machines

The Democrats are addressing our voting hell!

From the New York Times:

Scientists’ Tests Hack Into Electronic Voting Machines
in California and Elsewhere

By CHRISTOPHER DREW
Published: July 28, 2007

Computer scientists from California universities have hacked into three electronic voting systems used in California and elsewhere in the nation and found several ways in which vote totals could potentially be altered, according to reports released yesterday by the state.

The reports, the latest to raise questions about electronic voting machines, came to light on a day when House leaders announced in Washington that they had reached an agreement on measures to revamp voting systems and increase their security.

The House bill would require every state to use paper records that would let voters verify that their ballots had been correctly cast and that would be available for recounts.

We need to throw some big support behind this bill. Our votes are our voice.

Critics say the California findings suggest that Congress should press for a quicker shift from the touch screens to optical scanning, in which voters mark paper ballots. Advocates of those systems say that the paper ballots would be less vulnerable to manipulation than the paper trails generated by the touch-screen computers and that they would hold up better for manual recounts.

If you haven't seen this week's episode of 'NOW,' you should watch the story about voter caging. Unbelievable. Actually, nothing is unbelievable these days, they GOP has raised the bar so high.