Here's the beautiful headline from the CA SoS press release:
Secretary of State Debra Bowen Moves to Strengthen Voter Confidence in Election Security Following Top-to-Bottom Review of Voting Systems
Link to: CA Secretary of State Press Release
I read the official document that decertifies Diebold, and my quick and dirty summary of twelve pages is the following...
Whereas, Diebold elections systems are completely vulnerable, insecure, and are "...found to be defective or unacceptable..." and did we mention that they suck! ... "its certification and approval for use in subsequent elections in California is immediately withdrawn, except as specifically provided below."... in situations where we may deploy one untrusted machine per polling place to comply with HAVA requirements and then only after a 100% manual count of ballots cast on that one machine only after properly restrictive security measures are imposed on that inherently flawed and insecure system.
ES&S, Hart InterCivic, and Sequoia voting systems received similar spankings (decertification and recertification under stricter security regimes). These purposefully faulty and insecure voting systems made our most precious Democratic right vulnerable to thievery. We all know that they did it purposefully. Many elections have already been stolen, though most of the proof is either criminally destroyed or it vaporizes in the digital soup when purposefully inadequate audit trails are non-existent or just silently deleted after the damage is already done. These slippery vendors had better not mess with elections in California again, or they will get massive fines and prison time while Debra Bowen is on watch.
See the official California Secretary of State website for more voting information. LINK
No resting after this victory. HR811 still lives. HR811, the Holt bill, has fooled too many good people. It is a trojan horse that gives us only paper-thin security. It tricks the public into false trust in paper voter receipts to secure an election while purposefully insecure and vulnerable electronic vote counting gets enshrined as the official count, without recourse to recounts unless some legally arbitrary threshold is passed by the ghost in the machine tabulator. If HR811 is passed, you can bet the margin of victory of any race decided by evil count software is always outside of the recount threshold.
MoveOn and People for the American Way have gotten the issue wrong and they must be educated quickly on this issue. They have fallen for the VVPAT paper receipt trick, which will make us lose the official count to the puppet masters.
