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Voting Veracity Our Lack of Judgement

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Tim Duff
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Chambliss, who had avoided military service, ran attack ads denouncing Cleland, a Silver Star recipient who had lost three limbs in Vietnam, as a traitor for voting against the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. Well ahead in all the polls, Cleland lost by seven points. In the month leading up to the election, Diebold employees applied a mysterious, uncertified software patch to the 5000 voting machines that Georgia had purchased in May. Diebold employees were told by Diebold CEO Bob Urosevich, a Bush fundraiser, not to talk about it with Georgia county employees.


In 2003 the CEO of Diebold Warren O'Dell, a top fundraiser for George W. Bush brazenly stated that he would promise to "deliver" Ohio's electoral vote to Bush in the 2004 election. In 2004 before the election California banned Diebold's touchscreen system, the Secretary of State calling Diebold "fraudulent" and "despicable," and "deceitful." O'Dell resigned in 2005, just before the filing of a class-action suit that accused Diebold of fraud, insider trading and lack of quality control. In 2009, Diebold got of the election business and sold to ES&S.


In 2004, John Kerry lost the election for president in Ohio. In this important swing state, election monitors were besieged by complaints of GOP organized voter suppression, intimidation and fraud. Thousands of voting machine anomalies were reported, including "patches" that switched votes from Kerry to Bush. Watching over the election was the Republican Ohio Secretary of State, J. Kenneth Blackwell, a partisan fundamentalist Christian, who also served as the co-chair of Ohio's committee to re-elect George Bush.


The major participant in the Ohio vote rigging was GOP computer guru Michael Connell. Connell was the Bush campaigns chief IT strategist. He two Ohio based companies built websites and email systems for the Republican National Committee, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and many of the most powerful figures in the GOP, including Karl Rove, Jen Bush and Jack Abramoff.


In 2004, Connell was hired by Blackwell to design a website that would post Ohio election results to the public. Connell's contract required him to create a "mirror site," that would kick in to display the vote totals if the official Ohio servers were overwhelmed by Election Day voter volume.


For the "mirror site," Connell used SmartTech, a little known company from Chattanooga, Tennessee. SmartTech was a huge Republican partisan, and the company's servers hosted hundreds of high profile Republican websites, and later anti Obama websites.


Four years later, Ohio attorney and former Republican Cliff Arnebeck started to gather evidence to file a racketeering claim against Karl Rove, claiming that Rove had planned the rigging of the 2004 election. Arnebeck identified Connell as a key witness, and the implementor of Rove's criminal activities. Connell eventually admitted that he had used the Tennessee servers, but denied any knowledge of the servers being activated in 2004. In actuality, the SmartTech site was activated at 11:14 p.m. on Election Day. The data being routed to Tennessee was then used by GOP partisans to rig Ohio counties votes to republicans. SmartTech's role was insidious and involved the Republican control of the total vote count. The lack of any documentation available clearly warranted an immediate fraud investigation.


Arnebeck hoped to have Connell testify in open court against Rove. But the potential witness died on December 19, 2008, at age 47, when his single-engine Piper Saratoga, which he was piloting alone, crashed entity's from Washington, D.C., to Ohio. A criminal investigation on the crash was squashed by Ohio Republican partisans.


Late on Election Day John Kerry showed an insurmountable lead in exit polling, and his victory was considered all but certified. Yet, the final vote tallies in thirty states deviated greatly from the exits polls, with discrepancies favoring Bush. The largest discrepancies were concentrated in battleground states, particularly Ohio. In one Ohio precinct, exit polls indicated that Kerry should received 67 percent of the vote, but the certified total gave him only 38 percent. The odds of such an unexpected outcome occurring only as a result of sampling error are 1 in 867,205,553. Lou Harris, the father of modern political polling stated, that the 2004 National Election was, "as dirty an election America has ever seen."


The spread of computerized voting has allowed enormous potential for electronic manipulation and deceit directed by the "black ops" of the Pentagon corporate "cut-outs." The game changing and shocking discovery was that Diebold, one of the primary manufacturers of voting machines had left 40,000 files that made up its Global Election Management System (GEMS) on a publicly accessible website, totally unprotected.


Diebold was never able to explain how it's proprietary tabulation program ended up being exposed. GEMS turned out to be a vote rigging panacea. It could be hacked remotely or on site, using any version of Microsoft Access. Password protection was missing for supervisor functions. Multiple users could gain access to the system after just logging in, but unencrypted audit logs allowed any trace of vote rigging to be wiped away from any record.


The public unmasking of GEMS by an average citizen who was not a programmer served as an alarm bell to the world's leading computer security experts. They now turned their attention to America's most widely used voting systems.


In 2005, the nonpartisan Commission on Federal Election Reform, headed by Jimmy Carter and James Baker, stated unequivocally that the greatest threats to secure voting are insiders that have direct access to the voting machines. They stated that "there was no reason to trust insiders in the election industry or anymore than in other industries."


In September 2011, a team at the U. S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory hacked into one of Diebold's Accuvote touch screen systems. They determined that anyone with an eighth-grade science education can manipulate the outcomes of elections. Their warnings went unheeded, and in the 2012 election the Accuvote-TSX, now manufactured by ES&S, was used in 20 states, by more than 26 million voters. Another system manufactured by Sequoia, was also easily hacked using the same "man in the middle" hack, a tiny wireless component that is inserted between the display screen and the main circuit board, which requires no knowledge about actual voting software. The Sequoia machines were used in 4 states, by nearly 9 million voters in 2012.


The voting machine manufacturers are in total denial of these sophisticated cyber-based attacks on our democracy.


Three voting touch screen machine manufacturers now control 88 percent of the U. S. market. These voting machine companies, ES&S, Dominion Voting Systems and Hart InterCivic, register votes in bar codes that the human eye cannot recognize. Voters end up with print outs that accurately spell out the names of the candidates they picked, but because of a hack, the bar codes don't reflect those choices. The bar codes are not tabulated, so the voters never become aware that their ballots benefited another candidate. The voting machine companies reject these proven facts. Approximately 1 in 5 voters used ballot marking machines in the 2020 elections.

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Tim Duff Social Media Pages: Facebook page url on login Profile not filled in       Twitter page url on login Profile not filled in       Linkedin page url on login Profile not filled in       Instagram page url on login Profile not filled in

I am a retired investment executive. I am a progressive activist and novelist. My novel THE FIND is due to be published this summer by Waterside Productions of California. I am working on my second novel, THE (more...)
 

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