December 7, 2006 at 16:38:46

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Remember the Pinto or Why Isn't the Performance of Our Voting Machines as Important as the Performance of Our Blenders

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2. For more on how HAVA undermined citizen control over their election system and why HR 550 (the Holt bill) must be opposed as long as it continues to permit machine produced paper, rather than voter produced ballots, and as long as it condones black box voting, see Election Defense Alliance's Stop the Executive Branch from Taking Over our Elections: Amend or End HR 550: click here

3. Quoting from the NIST report found at ft. note 1
4. The NIST report found that DREs, which don't allow a recount of ballots and therefore must rely on their software to verify the count, cannot be secured.
5. "Basically a reinstallation of the entire voting system hardware was the way Britain Williams of the National Association of Election Directors described what he understood was needed in order to try to make e-voting more secure. Not wanting to replace the worthless e-voting machines already out there, the committee just discounted the evidence in the NIST report as well as the existing evidence of the myriad of breakdowns: "The Technical Guidelines Development Committee (TGDC) has considered current threats to voting systems and, at this time, find that security concerns do not warrant replacing deployed voting systems". Contrast this with the list of failures of e-voting machines found at footnote 11.

6.Aside from the Katherine Harris purge list which disenfranchised African American voters, the myriad of aggressive dirty tricks and other crimes undertaken to suppress the democratic vote, "The voting-machine companies bear heavy blame for the 2000 presidential-election disaster. Investigators traced the mistake to Global Election Systems, the firm later acquired by Diebold. Two months after the election, an internal memo from Talbot Iredale, the company's master programmer, blamed the problem on a memory card that had been improperly - and unnecessarily - uploaded. There is always the possibility, Iredale conceded, that the 'second memory card' or 'second upload' came from an unauthorized source. From Robert F. Kennedy Jr. -- Will The Next Election Be Hacked?

7. See for starters,
click here

Court papers filed in Maryland, Wired news, [31] Dec. 17 2003:

At least five convicted felons secured management positions at a manufacturer of electronic voting machines, according to critics demanding more stringent background checks for people responsible for voting machine software.
The programmer Jeffrey Dean wrote and maintained proprietary code used to count hundreds of thousands of votes as senior vice president of Global Election Systems, or GES. Diebold purchased GES in January 2002. According to a public court document released before GES hired him, Dean served time in a Washington State correctional facility for stealing money and tampering with computer files in a scheme that involved a high degree of sophistication and planning in the use and alteration of records in the computerized ... system that defendant maintained for the victim. (23 counts of First Degree Theft, case 89-1-04034-1)

8. http://www.votetrustusa.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1782&Itemid=26

9. See NIST report at footnote 1

10. See NIST report at footnote 1

11. See for a sampling of the poor performance of e-voting machines on election day 2006 http://www.votersunite.org/electionproblems.asp.

12. The NIST report had recommended that paperless DREs be required to have verified paper trails, among other things, to try to make the DREs less susceptible to hacking. The TGDC at first rejected NIST's proposal for paper verification, expressing concerns of cost to local governments who already have these machines, but then modified its recommendation for new machines only.

13. For more on what's wrong with HAVA and why HR 550 (the Holt Bill), which permits Americans' votes to be stolen so long as the paper trail tied to the DRE provides us with the illusion that our vote is more secure, must be amended or opposed, see Nancy Tobi's: Stopping H.R. 550 Because We can't Compromise on Democracy: http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_nancy_to_061118_stopping_h_r__550_be.htm

14. See Bruce O'Dell's, Pull the Plug on E-Voting, parts I and II: www.truthout.org/docs_2006/102606L.shtml, www.truthout.org/docs_2006/102706O.shtml

15. BTW- The people only loss their right to oversee their elections very recently: HAVA became law on October 29, 2002.

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