Please do two things right now to roll back the inappropriate
encroachment of punitive government actions against citizens and
public officials who have made difficult ethical decisions to fight
for your civil rights...
::::::::
Black Box Voting has committed $10,000 to the Stephen Heller Legal
Defense Fund. I have spoken to his wife and to Stephen about this. I
urge those who are in a position to do so to make the most generous
contribution you can.
Please do two things right now to roll back the inappropriate
encroachment of punitive government actions against citizens and
public officials who have made difficult ethical decisions to fight
for your civil rights.
1. First and foremost, please give to the Stephen Heller fund. He was
faced with the ethical dilemma from hell. What do you do when a
presidential primary is just weeks away, and you are assigned a word
processing assignment that has you looking at evidence that the
secretary of state is being lied to by the voting machine company
counting millions of votes? What do you do when those lies explode
into thousands of disenfranchised voters? Nothing?
In times like these, the citizenry depends on honesty and courage like
Stephen Heller has shown. If you want citizens of courage like Heller
successfully threatened and ultimately silenced, do nothing. If you
believe that he went to the front lines for YOUR rights, please give
what you can.
http://www.hellerdefensefund.com
Next
Give to Heller's fund first, because that is the most difficult thing
to do, and the thing that may cause us to procrastinate.
2. And then, please join the important VoteTrustUSA.org initiative to
fight for Ion Sancho. This involves simply clicking a link and sending
an important letter to Florida officials.
Here is the Ion Sancho support link:
http://votetrustusa.org/supportsancho.html- Show quoted text -
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Use this link to go directly to full article and discussion:
http://www.bbvforums.org/cgi-bin/forums/show.cgi?1954/19615
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More options 11:38 pm (1½ hours ago)
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Black Box Voting : Latest Consumer Reports from Black Box Voting: 3-11-06: The Stephen Heller Legal Defense Fund
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Posted by Bev Harris on Saturday, March 11, 2006 - 09:38 pm:
ROBERT C. KOEHLER
For release 3/9/06
WHISTLING DIEBOLD
By Robert C. Koehler
Tribune Media Services
They ain't gonna kiss you just because you're a whistleblower. No
matter that you exposed wrongdoing and struck a blow for fair
elections. The larger good isn't always obvious to the powers that be.
So Steve Heller, a Los Angeles-based actor whose day job is doing
temporary office work, faces three felony charges, all of which are a
stretch: felony access to computer data, commercial burglary and
receiving stolen property. The Los Angeles County District Attorney's
office says he's a thief, an Internet criminal, and that's that. And,
oh yeah, he violated attorney-client confidentiality, and cost a big
law firm a million dollars in lost business.
Serious stuff. And if the DA's office has its way, this is all the
judge and jury will look at: the law in its narrowest sense, as though
ethical issues aren't sometimes murky and enormously complicated.
Indeed, this is the story of a 44-year-old man who had a problem in
practical ethics fall into his lap a little over two years ago, when
he was temping in the word-processing center of Jones Day, a major Los
Angeles law firm. Among the firm's clients was Diebold Election
Systems, the largest manufacturer of electronic voting machines and
voting machine software in the U.S. - and probably the most
controversial.
Diebold machines are notoriously hackable and unreliable, and the
company itself is as secretive as it is politically connected. The
company is in the forefront of the spread of unverifiable ("trust us")
electronic voting across the country, a phenomenon that many computer
experts and fair-election advocates find utterly terrifying.
"In connection with his duties on Jan. 29, 2004, suspect Heller was
given an assignment to work on a Jones Day document regarding Diebold
voting machines," Heller's arrest warrant attests. "After completing
that assignment, suspect Heller, without authorization, accessed and
printed 107 Jones Day documents concerning
their representation of Diebold."
What the arrest warrant leaves out is that, in 2004, Diebold machines
were going to be used in a number of California counties in the March
primary and the November general elections, and the machines'
questionable reliability was in the news a lot. And indeed, Diebold
machines did malfunction in the March elections. But they didn't
malfunction in November because by then they had been decertified by
California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley - thanks in large part to
Heller's actions.
The documents Heller, the temp word processor, happened upon and
subsequently printed out revealed a potential crime in progress.
Here's where the ethics become urgent. He could either ignore what he
saw or, at considerable personal risk and with nothing to gain except
clarity of conscience, take action. He took action.
He gave the documents to election-reform advocates, who got them into
the hands of the media and state officials. Because he did, data
concerning Diebold's use of uncertified software, which was supposed
to remain private, became public knowledge. "In one memo," the Los
Angeles Weekly wrote, "the law firm warned Diebold, before the March
primary, that its use of uncertified vote-counting software in Alameda
County, starting in 2002, violated California election law and broke
its $12.7 million contract."
And election-reform advocate Peter Soby wrote on Huffington Post: "So
in a nutshell, Diebold was defrauding the state government and
taxpayers of California, and disenfranchising the voters of
California. And the documents prove it."
More can be found at:
http://www.hellerlegaldefensefund.com/
Submitter: Joan Brunwasser
Submitters Website: http://www.opednews.com/author/author79.html
Submitters Bio:
Joan Brunwasser is a co-founder of Citizens for Election Reform (CER) which since 2005 existed for the sole purpose of raising the public awareness of the critical need for election reform. Our goal: to restore fair, accurate, transparent, secure elections where votes are cast in private and counted in public. Because the problems with electronic (computerized) voting systems include a lack of transparency and the ability to accurately check and authenticate the vote cast, these systems can alter election results and therefore are simply antithetical to democratic principles and functioning.
Since the pivotal 2004 Presidential election, Joan has come to see the connection between a broken election system, a dysfunctional, corporate media and a total lack of campaign finance reform. This has led her to enlarge the parameters of her writing to include interviews with whistle-blowers and articulate others who give a view quite different from that presented by the mainstream media. She also turns the spotlight on activists and ordinary folks who are striving to make a difference, to clean up and improve their corner of the world. By focusing on these intrepid individuals, she gives hope and inspiration to those who might otherwise be turned off and alienated. She also interviews people in the arts in all their variations - authors, journalists, filmmakers, actors, playwrights, and artists. Why? The bottom line: without art and inspiration, we lose one of the best parts of ourselves. And we're all in this together. If Joan can keep even one of her fellow citizens going another day, she considers her job well done.
When Joan hit one million page views, OEN Managing Editor, Meryl Ann Butler interviewed her, turning interviewer briefly into interviewee. Read the interview here.
While the news is often quite depressing, Joan nevertheless strives to maintain her mantra: "Grab life now in an exuberant embrace!"
Joan has been Election Integrity Editor for OpEdNews since December, 2005. Her articles also appear at Huffington Post, RepublicMedia.TV and Scoop.co.nz.