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A RETURN TO SANITY – WHY WE MUST ELIMINATE COMPUTERIZED CONTROL OF OUR ELECTION SYSTEM:
By andi novick (about the author) Page 3 of 11 page(s)
Global Election Systems was formally purchased by Diebold Inc. in January 2002 and at that time Jeffrey Dean became a paid consultant to Diebold while John Elder took over Diebold's national printing division. Six weeks later Diebold landed the biggest voting-machine order in history: The $54 million conversion of the entire state of Georgia to touch-screen voting on paperless DREs.
CRIME PAYS - AND JUST IN TIME TO REAP THE BILLIONS DOLLAR GIVEAWAY OF THE 2002 HELP AMERICA VOTE ACT
(should really be renamed the Help Corporate America Vote Act)
In 2002 the new computer tally, which had become the 'official' record, delivered Georgia to the Republicans helping to give them the one party dominance they exploited. There were no paper ballots to recount and no attempt to explain how the popular incumbent Democratic Senator, war-hero Max Cleland, was defeated by Saxby Chambliss, who had avoided service in Vietnam with a "medical deferment" and ran ads calling Cleland unpatriotic. The BBC captured Georgia voters' reaction in a headline" "GEORGIA UPSET STUNS DEMOCRATS" and wrote "Mr. Cleland – an army veteran who lost three limbs in a grenade explosion during the Vietnam War – has long been considered 'untouchable' on questions of defense and national security."
Cleland had enjoyed a comfortable 5 point lead going into the election, but somehow lost to Chambliss by 46% to 53% – a remarkable 12 percentage point discrepancy between the opinion poll and the 'official' count. Not much attention was paid to the highly unusual and unexplained swing; nor to the fact that Georgia had become the first state in the country to conduct an entire election exclusively with DREs and that the entire election was run not by the government, but by Diebold.
Nor had there been much attention paid to the fact that the president of Diebold's Election Unit, Bob Urosevich, paid a personal visit to Georgia shortly before the primaries just to distribute a "patch". Later at least two more secret and unauthorized patches were installed on Georgia's purportedly newly certified DREs, just prior to the 2002 election.
Talbot Iredale, one of the original Diebold programmers (mentioned above), had modified the Windows operating system used in Georgia, but no one ever checked what was modified. A single individual had unchecked access to a million votes at once–the biggest security breach in the history of the US electoral system, but no one paid much attention to that either.
The 2002 Congressional Elections or How One Party Took Total Control of All Branches of the Government
The Republicans only needed two seats to take control of the Senate. Between Chuck Hagel's assured victory in Nebraska (where the votes were counted on his machines and the law conveniently forbade a recount, see endnote 7) and Georgia's being taken over by Diebold, the government was literally theirs for the taking. As Hagel's 2002 opponent Charlie Matulka said in response to his defeat, "They can take over our country without firing a shot–just by taking over our election systems".
Georgia is unfortunately far from an isolated incident. In 5 short years since the implementation of HAVA – wherein Americans have been compelled to surrender their remaining rights to public oversight and control of their elections to private, corrupt vendors infected by conflicts of interest, criminal histories and utter lack of accountability – an overwhelming body of evidence has grown which is breathless in its implications. Most of this evidence is unknown by the American public (and its politicians) because mainstream media has censored much of it and distorted the rest.
Not only don't most Americans know about the regular breakdowns of the voting machines, the flipped votes, the secret proprietary software and secret vote counting, the Trojan horse which can be implanted to steal an election and leave no trace, the misplaced and displaced memory cards, faulty chips, etc. they are also ignorant about the likes of those who have invested in this private oligopoly or the fact that no one is really overseeing this brave new American voting system (see subheading later in this article, The Voting Machines We Vote on Have not Been Properly Tested Nor Certified). And because we tend to believe that this level of corruption or incompetence or both would never be tolerated in the United States, it is very difficult for people to accept that the thousands of "glitches" experienced by these voting machines are not random: they tend to favor one party. If the thousands of "glitches" had randomly occurred, one could simply conclude that these machines were just of inferior quality. But if you toss a coin in the air 100 times, the likelihood that it will land on heads 90 times is not random or statistically probable. The evidence of the last few elections took the form of extremely improbable or outright impossible occurrences, a few more examples of which are outlined below.
In the 2002 midterm elections, public opinion polls (Zogby and Harris, for eg. were within a ½ % point margin of error in 2000 [except of course in Florida] and in previous elections) had predicted Democrats winning in numerous key battleground states (Georgia, Minnesota, Colorado). But then unexplained, extraordinary last minute swings resulted in these races going to the Republicans. Remarkably these last minute improbable swings appear to have been concentrated in critical senate races thus sealing Republican control of the Senate.
–In Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone was leading by 5 points when he was killed in a small plane crash just days before the election. Former vice-president Walter Mondale took Wellstone's place and retained the 5 point lead against Republican Norm Coleman (Coleman had a 100% approval rating from the Christian Coalition). When the optical scan counters were done counting the vote, somehow Coleman had beat Mondale by 50 to 47 percent, a statistically remarkable 8 point swing! (The race was counted on OS readers, but Mondale apparently didn't think to ask for a recount)
– In Colorado, a Zogby poll just before the election put Democrat Tom Strickland leading Republican Wayne Allard with a comfortable 5 point lead. Allard (who also happened to have one of those 100% approval ratings from the Christian Coalition) experienced another miracle come from behind victory, winning by 70,000 votes - a seven point swing. (DREs were used in a number of counties, collectively accounting for over 750,000 votes).
The 2004 Presidential Election or How the Incumbent Party Retained Its Stranglehold on All Branches of Government
Both the illegal and quasi-legal efforts to suppress votes by partisan election officials in key states, as well as manipulations of the voting systems, grew with the growing "success" of each election. The disgrace of 2000 and the disaster of 2002 was surpassed by the nightmare of 2004.
Take action -- click here to contact your local newspaper or congress people:
Oppose all DREs. Accept Optical Scanners only with sufficient hand counting protocol.
Click here to see the most recent messages sent to congressional reps and local newspapers
ElectionTransparencyCoalitition.org
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