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Writers Campaign for Transparent Vote Counting


Rady Ananda
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For any who missed this collection of articles on NH’s disparity between hand-counted precincts and machine-tabulated precincts, these articles contain a wealth of resource and video links from most of the biggest names in election integrity.  The best and the brightest have written with persuasion, arguing for transparency. 

Rob Kall and Joan Brunwasser of OpEdNews.com organized a writer’s campaign, so most of these articles (except the last few) contain action links that allow you to draft a letter to your local newspaper or to Congress.  OpEdNews will send the letter for you. 

The only way we will have a reliable vote count is if we count the ballots ourselves. EDA is taking the Humboldt County Voter Confidence Committee’s idea and organizing a national list of willing hand counters.  See the “I COUNT” article by Andi Novick and Sally Castleman to sign up. 

As Rob points out, Super Tuesday is just around the corner.  Citizens who face the threat to our democracy wrought by secret vote counting will be those who use these action articles to write their members of Congress, and/or their local newspapers.   Or, they're already organizing their own campaigns for election integrity or justice.

Spread the word.  Maybe one or more of these articles will inspire citizens to stand up for transparent vote counting, a basic tenet of democratic elections.   

~ Rady

Do New Hampshire Vote Count Questions Harbinger Super Tuesday Vote Theft Disaster?

by Rob Kall

We were warned that there could be problems with vote counts, because of e-voting vulnerabilities. The warnings came true. And now, we face a disastrous set of e-vote rigging risks on Super Tuesday.

Before the New Hampshire primaries we were warned:  

By Nancy Tobi: NH: "First in the nation" (with corporate controlled secret vote counting)

By Michael Collins: ALL Diebold ALL the Time - It's the New Hampshire Primary

By Bev Harris: The Cat That Controls New Hampshire Election Programming

 Oh, no, the mainstream/corpsestream media didn’t say a word. The Democratic party didn’t mention it. They’re afraid to dampen voter turnout. But we sure covered it. Thers were headlined stories.

We expected vote count problems.  And lo and behold, when the word came in that there were huge discrepancies between electronic and paper ballot records, we were not surprised. And the corpsestream media failed to cover the story.  Sure, they asked questions, “Why did the pollsters fail?” They even convened special discussions, unfortunately, using the regular pundits. And of course, nothing was mentioned of the data that explained WHY THE POLLS FAILED.  

It didn’t’ take long for the reports to come in and for our writers to report on them. As soon as the first one came in, I decided to jump on this—that it was a major, important story that I knew the mainstream media would pass on, even though, just this past weekend, the NY Times did a major article on it in its magazine.  

I contacted our voting integrity editor, Joan Brunwasser and asked her to put out the word to our team of voting integrity writers and activists.   We put a 12 noon Thursday deadline on the articles. OpEdNews is generally a volunteer site. Writers submit articles they’ve written. They don’t do articles on assignment and they don’t do them with deadlines.

So this is something new. We put the deadline on it because the freshness of the New Hampshire story would quickly be lost in the news cycle.

The word went out and the stories started to come in. Here they are: 

The Surprising Democratic Primary Results in New Hampshire  By Pokey Anderson. The pundits speak for themselves and the NH results. [Live broadcast, evening of January 8, 2008, New Hampshire Public Radio. NHPR comments are notes ... 

Primary Concerns  By Bob Koehler. No one wants to risk spoiling the fun of primary season with downer news about voting machine insecurity. If only red flags were considered patriotic.

Obama-Clinton: Opscan v. Handcount Results  By Bruce O'Dell.   Based on the official results on the New Hampshire Secretary of state web site, there is a remarkable relationship between Obama and Clinton votes, wh...

In the Meantime, in Between Time, Ain’t We Got Fun?  By Michael Green. The New Hampshire Primary is a straightforward fraud in which electronic voting machines were programmed to shift votes away from Barak Obama and add ... 

"Hey Ron Paul, I'm in your primary stealing your votez"  By Amy Demiceli. Not even twenty four hours passed before reports of fraud surfaced in New Hampshire, it began in the town of Sutton. Initially the reports released sa...

Alarms Should Go Off Whenever the Discrepancies Between the "Official" Results and the Polls Can't Be Explained  By Andi Novick. In all other countries we understand that when the "official" results are so different from the polling results, the "official" results must be questi...

Inherent Uncertainty and NH’s Primary Results  By Rady Ananda.   Blogs are bursting over the fact that ALL the major pollsters, including Hillary's and Barack's internal polling, had Obama winning New Hampshire's primary.  We’ll never know because software driven devices invoke inherent uncertainty. 

Criminal Record Of Kenneth Hajjar- New England Voting Machine Firm ExecBy Bev Harris. They program every single voting machine in New Hampshire, Connecticut, almost all of Massachusetts, Vermont, and Maine. But did state officials in fi...

How John Edwards Can (Still) Win the NH Primary By Emily Levy.  Questions about the accuracy of the New Hampshire Democratic Primary election results provide a perfect opportunity for Democratic presidential candid... 

Getting the Framing on Election Polling Right By Mary Howe Kiraly.  Polling,especially exit polling,is a well-recognized science.Computerized voting,on the other hand,is vulnerable to human error,programming error,and ...

New Hampshire Election Fraud By Ron Corvus.  New Hampshire Election Fraud: Hillary LOST the paper ballot count but WON the optical scan ballot count. Obama WON the paper ballot count but LOST the...

99 Ways to Steal Elections: The Story of John Fund and Ron Paul by Melinda Pillsbury-Foster.  We need a Ballot Bomb to pay for a Whistle Blower: $1,000,000.00 will loosen a lot of lips. This way we can make all the Greedy, corporate, pundits, think tanks, and greed candidates cry.

Clinton Tainted Victory In New Hampshire  By Allen L Roland.  Voting irregularities in New Hampshire point not only to the previously discredited Diebold Accuvote optical scan but to the distinct possibility that...

Sign Up To Take Back Our Elections – The "I Count" Corps By Andi Novick and Sally Castleman.  It is time for us to take back control of our elections. Machines have shown themselves to be unreliable and vulnerable to tampering. The unexplainable discrepancies between polling and the official count have only risen in proportion to the use of computers in our elections. 

New Hampshire Vote Results – Are They For Real?  By Jean Hay Bright. Things don't add up in New Hampshire. I cast my vote for a recount.

Can You Spell Deep Trouble?  By James Strait  If you have even the slightest interest in voting integrity.....well, The CITIZENS of New York State are in the tall grass without a lawn mower. All while the bureaucrats twiddle their pudgy little thumbs.

Votergate Redux 2008: A Look At The Exit Polls  By S.Drobny  This is what I wrote in OpEdNews in 11/04 and was picked up by my friend John Zogby. Votergate 2004: We Don't Need Paper to Prove Fraud, But We Do Need Money and Leadership, NOW. 

Fraud US-Style: Fake Videos and Elections  By Stephen Lendman.  More evidence showing official news reports can't be trusted. 

99 Ways To Steal Elections: The Story of John Fund and Ron Paul  By Melinda Pillsbury-Foster. We need a Ballot Bomb to pay for a Whistle Blower: $1,000,000.00 will loosen a lot of lips. This way we can make all the Greedy, corporate, pundits, think tanks, and greed candidates cry. 

(Rob continues:)

Now, the problem is not just with New Hampshire. The terrifying threat is Super Tuesday. With so many states running primaries on February 5th, there is a frightening likelihood, given recent history, that more vote count abuse will take place.  

Maybe there’s a reason the Democrats have failed miserably at passing legislation to make voting safe, verifiable, reliable and trustworthy. Maybe they feel they can use the vulnerabilities of the system to meet their own interests.  It is too late to do serious correction to the problems. But, at the least, congress could pass legislation requiring any voter who chooses to do so to use a paper ballot to vote on.  

At the least, primary candidates, particularly democratic candidates, since the Dems have a history of failing to challenge vote rigging, should declare ahead of time and promise that they will look at vote rigging issues and demand recounts if questions arise.  The risk on February 5th that some vote count corruption will occur is huge.  

What can you do? Tell your federal legislators to do something already. Contact your local daily paper and ask them to cover this issue. It’s a new story, a new angle—potential vote rigging on Super Tuesday!.

Contact your favorite mainstream media—CNN, MSNBC, Faux News, NY Times, USA Today, Washington Post, LA Times, Chicago Tribune, Al Jazeera, the Guardian… and then tell your favorite left wing news publishing sites too—Salon, Huffington Post, Village Voice, Raw Story, Alternet, TalkingPoints memo, The Nation, Counterpunch, Truthout, Think Progress, Buzzflash, SmirkingChimp, TomPaine, InformationClearinghouse.

Tell them to reprint articles, aggregate articles, ask their writers to write articles.  Contact your favorite TV hosts—Keith Olbermann, Bill Moyers, Wolf Blitzer, Jack Caffrey, Bill O’Reilly (not,) Joe Scarborough, Chris Matthews, Tim Russert. Tell them to cover this issue. Ask them why, when they explore what went wrong with the polls in New Hampshire, they failed to talk about e-vote problems, about the one man who has his hand in over 80% of NH vote counts.  

It is shameful that the Dems have failed to pass legislation that protects the trustworthiness of the vote. Time is short. Already, the failure to pass legislation has introduced doubt and mistrust into our primaries. It is time to end this embarassing phase in the history of democracy.  

Tell your legislators, your local media to deal with this firmly and finally, so Americans no longer have to worry about the trustworthiness of the election system.  

Rob Kall

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Rady Ananda 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

In 2004, Rady Ananda joined the growing community of citizen journalists. Initially focused on elections, she investigated the 2004 Ohio election, organizing, training and leading several forays into counties to photograph the 2004 ballots. She officially served at three recounts, including the 2004 recount. She also organized and led the team that audited Franklin County Ohio's 2006 election, proving the number of voter signatures did not match official results. Her work appears in three books.

Her blogs also address religious, gender, sexual and racial equality, as well as environmental issues; and are sprinkled with book and film reviews on various topics. She spent most of her working life as a researcher or investigator for private lawyers, and five years as an editor.

She graduated from The Ohio State University's School of Agriculture in December 2003 with a B.S. in Natural Resources.

All material offered here is the property of Rady Ananda, copyright 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009. Permission is granted to repost, with proper attribution including the original link.

"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." Tell the truth anyway.

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