The paradox of the traditional system is that trust results from accepting the starting point of resolute mutual distrust. By contrast having to accept 'expert' assurances about technology that no one is really in a position to extend, not even the experts, is a recipe for increased distrust in the political process and ever-lower turn-outs.

::::::::

Here is what I have been sending out from aftermath of our Scottish
election: also it is on talkdemocracy
http://www.talkdemocracy.org.uk/talk/viewtopic.php?p=331#331
Feel free to use or ignore

What follows - critiicism, comments welcome - are
A) a short (unused) letter to the Herald and
B) a lengthy background briefing explaining the perspective of the letter.

I write as riots happen in France where the Exit polls have suddenly become
unreliable after the introduction of ES and S software and machnery to count
the votes ... plus ca change?

Please feel free to use either in any way that you see fit, if only as a
background briefing paper.

Right now I feel that most people can't cope with more than a little
questioning of their taken for granted reality, so probably debate about the
Scottish elections will stay within safe channels. But with your help we
could deepen and widen it??

best wishes, Keith Mothersson

Thomas McLaughlin assures us thst 'no one actually tried to steal last
Thursday's ballot' (Letters, May 7) But how do any of us know? If a team of
e-fraudsters had succeeded in shifting one vote in ten from Party X to Party
Y would they have left a calling card out of sheer bravado?

An influential neo-con handbook, Coup d'Etat, by Edward Luttwak, recommends
coups so stealthy that nobody gets upset and has to be shot protesting.

DRS is doubtless honest, but has recently bought Peladon Software, a San
Diego company which had recently bought in imaging software from Diebold,
the firm distrusted beyond all others by the large Voting Integrity movement
in the US.

Many of these e-voting and e-counting companies have boardrooms graced by
former insiders at the CIA or Pentagon, institutions whose commitment to
democracy is hardly beyond question and ones known to have worked on stealth
technologies for 'full spectrum dominance', including in cyber-space.

Mystery breakdowns in the Ohio count are now known to have provided a cover
for the results to have been routed via a secret GOP server to Karl Rove.

Like Jim Sillars I want to live in a country which relies on good old
Scottish scepticism, not faith-based voting. I will readily accept that I
may be being too suspicious if Mr McLaughlin will accept that he may be
being too naive. Neither of us really know yet both of us have a right to be
certain.

The paradox of the traditional system is that trust results from accepting
the starting point of resolute mutual distrust. By contrast having to accept
'expert' assurances about technology that no one is really in a position to
extend, not even the experts, is a recipe for increased distrust in the
political process and ever-lower turn-outs.

Far from e-technology taking us forward, its introduction has been a huge
set-back for Scottish democracy, whether or not anything untoward has been
tried on on this occasion.

Readers who would like to join me in a Campaign for Hand-counted Paper
Ballots are invited to write or phone me on 01738 783677.

Keith Mothersson,
2b Darnhall Cres,
Perth, PH2 0HH

01738 783677
07815 653389

Are we seeing a para-political coup against Scottish democracy?
Some notes on the present moment in Scottish politics , with a special focus
on the introduction of electronic election technology.

'The hostility shown towards Alex Salmond by the Scottish LibDems is almost
pathological. These are parties which agree on almost everything - local
income tax, fiscal powers, nuclear power - and yet the LibDem leadership
seems determined to relinquish any prospect of having these policies
implemented by refusing the Scottish people a say on the constitution.'
Iain MacWhirter in the Sunday Herald, 18 th February 2007.

Many people are talking of a Scottish 'Prague Spring'. They are assuming
that the LibDems will eventually strike a deal with the SNP. I am not so
sure. [Since the first draft of this I hear that the LibDems propose to
allow the SNP to lead a minority administration, but I also hear of the
possibility of Labour challenging its loss of Cunninghame North by only 48
votes.]

In what follows I place the present tense situation or impasse in the light
of broader consideration of para-political phenomena, many of them little
noticed or tabooed to mention or even notice. Although I hope to see a
SNP-led adminstration, I think that the British State is engaged in pulling
out the stops to block this, even to the point where we can almost talk of
an on-going coup against Scottish democracy. (Alternatively the SNP
leadership may be allowed a share in office, not power, only once they have
dropped opposition to Trident, unorthodox plans to raise money by selling
bonds, and anything else which doesn't fit with the neo-liberal consensus.)

At the risk of being howled down by waves of insider-metropolitan derision
for being conspiracy theorists, let us sceptical Scottish natives begin by
recalling the sheer power of secret elites to infiltrate, 'manage' (or else
block) a range of civil society organisations, not least political parties
and lobbying organisations.

At one level we observe that those who wish to lead 'Western democracies'
(plus Nato and many EU bodies) seem to have to attend Bliderberg group
meetings for group approval - or otherwise (
http://www.bilderberg.org/bilder.htm#wand). More directly we recall with
researchers like Robin Ramsay and Stephen Dorril the secret services'
plotting against the Wilson government, their work with the CIA to promote
the Atlantacist and pro-Zionist SDLP which let Thatcher - supported by Airey
Neave and MI5 take over, then break the power of the unions with the aid of
big business and the 'media-intel complex', and finally raise up New
Labour - with Blair himself an MI5 informer/agent of influence, according to
David Shayler
www.indymedia.org.uk/en/regions/westcountry/2005/10/325840.html . [This is
consistent among much else with the coincidence that on first arrival in the
Commons he 'happened' to be allocated a room with Militant MP and fellow
'new boy', Dave Nellist]. (See Ramsay's brilliant little The Rise of New
Labour, 2002, and Dorril and Ramsa's Smear: Wilson and the Secret State,
1991] Now that New Labour has served its purpose for a while, one can see
the hand of history (Bilderberg, etc) moving back to support David Cameron,
at least so long as he drops his 'traditional tory' objections to neo-con
revolutionism abroad.

As for the LibDems I believe that here too a degree of MI5 influence at the
top is the rule rather than the exception. One thinks of the eminently
blackmailable Jeremy Thorpe, whose long-known-about interest in boys and
young men, was eventually exposed by a section of MI5 as a way to destroy
the Lab-Lib pact. [The role of MI5 sponsored boys homes/abuse circles in
Northern Ireland (Kincora), Scotland (Dunblane) and probably Cardiff mirrors
on a smaller scale the systematic role that State- sponsored child abuse has
played in the certain centres of power in the US (and Brussels) . see the
work of Glen Yeadon: http://www.spiritone.com/~gdy52150/littleboys.html .]

After David Steel we saw military intelligence officer Paddy Ashdown's
meteoric rise to leadership, plus the tendency of 'unreliable' contenders
for the leadership to implode, now leaving the field clear for St Andrews
based safe pair of hands Menzies Cambell, a confirmed Atlantacist who has
developed pretending to be critical of the US and Israel (while pulling all
his punches) into an art form. As for the antiwar Left I take it for granted
that MI5 manages to play a role in guiding certain key groupings, promoting
those perspectives with which it can live, and shutting out as beyond the
pale other perspectives, e.g. on false-flag terrorism or on the 'War on
Drugs', where we have seen the price of heroin fell after the West took over
Afghanistan.

Of course there are many other difficulties and shortcomings which confront
all of us who want serious social change, many of which many better be
understood in 'structural' terms, or in terms of institutional, gender,
economic, cultural, social-psychological, psychological and even spiritual
perspectives, rather than - or rather than mainly - the products of
fiendish para-political manipulations by ruling and other secret
fraternities .... . But unless we are alert to the possibility or actuality
of the latter, then we can easily over-explain in other terms ('Scottish
cringe') or misunderstand what is really going on.

This said, although the then male-dominated SSP will surely have had its
fair share of people who tend to see things in dualistic terms, which has
predisposed the left to splits over many years, who can seriously imagine
that MI5 hasn't played some role in possibly entrapping and then exposing
Sheridan, and then stirring things further towards a destructive party
split - which has surely contributed to the 'success' that the Scottish
parliament has now been 'cleansed' of any serious ideological opposition to
neo-liberalism.

However the 'threat' from the left isn't the only threat the British State
has to worry about. The 70's saw a rise of a strong Scottish Nationalist
tide, whose ebbing is surely connected with the association of nationalism
with extremism in the public mind. Again, one doesn't wish to paint out of
the picture the Braveheart syndrome of masculinist nationalism, which
deterred amnd deters many throughtful people, especially women, from
embracing and fashioning the SNP as a internationalist and national, not a
nationalist party. Yet granted this vulnerability was there, we also need to
be aware of the role played by the likes of Major Busby and other agents of
the British State, and the numerous 'liberation armies' they spawned, ever
ready to claim credit for bomb blasts, hoaxes, letter bombs, etc. Of course
they also drew in some naive 'genuine' extremists they were manipulating,
inciting, etc (See Tartan Terrorism and the Anglo-American State by Andrew
Murray Scott and Iain MacLeay, 1990) For a recent parallel we need to
realise that secret services now manipulate and largely create the
phenomenon of 'Islamic' terrorism: see Nafeez Ahmed's brilliant online
article Subverting 'Terrorism': Muslim Problem or Covert Operations
Nighmare? ) .

Both these texts are aware of the determination of the British and 'Western'
(US/Zionist) Powers that Be not to give up power lightly. Thus we get the
phenomenon of false-flag terrorism, e.g. the use of Brigadier Kitson's
pseudo-gangs moving back from Kenya to Northern Ireland (Force
Reconnaissance Unit) and then out again to Basra and Baghdad (Joint Services
Group), all the time being given ideological cover by 'counter-insugency'
'terrorism' experts in the RAND-Corporation-linked Centre for the Study of
Terrorism and Political Violence at St Andrews, as chronicled by Campaign
Against Criminalising Communities http://www.campacc.org.uk/embedded.htm .

Although the SNP leadership is prepared to trim to the needs of business to
get into office (witness, many believe, the convenient dropping of the
popular demand for re-regulation of the buses just prior to receiving half a
million pounds from Brian Souter), Salmond remains too unpredictable,
anti-war and anti-Trident for comfort. In any case nationalism has a
tendency not just to derail class politics but sometimes to stimulate class
and anti-imperialist awareness. Greater Scottish confidence and mental
independence could manifest in dangerous ways, e.g. it might question other
aspects of the British (Anglo-American) State, e.g. the right of central
banks to make (debt-freighted) money 'out of nothing'; or the British
Broadcasting Corporation's slavish endorsement of the absurd 911 nonsense -
even down to actively reporting the 'collapse' of the Salomon Brothers
Building Seven 26 minutes before it was internally blown up and fell at the
speed of air resistance at 5.20!
(http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/february2007/260207building7.htm ; on
the demolitions at the World Trade Centre, see www.911review.com and
www.911scholars.org )

Hence, as Scottish Nationalism appears to be on the rise again, we could
well see the Anglo-American State revive the use of a panoply of tactics -
including false-flag terrorism ascribed to 'extreme nationalists'; attempts
to entrap, blackmail and discredit SNP leaders; concerted economic threats
and announcements by Unionist business leaders, bankers or even (as in the
1980's) the US ambassador, etc. The emergence of well-funded groups like
Scottish Voice on a policy-free pro-Unionist agenda may or may not be laying
down a marker for future interventions - its founder is the son of Col
David Stirling whose GB75 citizen army was recruiting people to help
maintain 'order' in a coup in the seventies. Awareness of the record of the
British State abroad suggests that it often seeks to cling to power in (and
over) a country be means of stirring one ethnic or religious group up
against another. The same applies to ruling parties desperately trying to
hold onto power, e.g. Milosovic in former Yugoslavia. Here we all need to be
aware of the amount of sectarian tinder which still lies around in many
parts of Scotland, with Rangers-supporters increasingly being drawn to
define themselves against the Scottish nationalism of Celtic-supporters. At
times the BNP - which sees itself as being adopted/coming to power via
crises - may also play a role in stirring up opposition to 'separation' and
'republicanism' as well as immigration and 'Islamic terrorism'.

On May 3rd the BNP 'appears to have polled' 25,000 votes, advisedly, for
this brings me to yet another technique which may be deployed to frustrate
Scottish Nationalism, indeed may already have been used, namely electoral
fraud.

Analysis of the US scene shows massive evidence of electoral theft from 1996
(Nebraska) onwards,
not just 2000 but

2002 (Georgia http://www.atlantaprogressivenews.com/news/0091.html , Texas),

2004 Ohio, Florida and many other States, when Kerry won by sevenmillion
votes:
http://www.truthout.org/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi/61/20209
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_michael__060711_the_stolen_election_.htm
http://www.tpmcafe.com/discussiontables/books_table/2006/aug/06/was_the_2004_pre
sidential_election_stolen_by_steven_f_freeman_and_joel_bleifuss

and 2006
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_paul_leh_061111_exit_polls_showing_d.htm
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/november2006/071106votefraud.htm .

One key archive is at http://www.crisispapers.org/topics/election-fraud.htm.
Of course election theft goes back a long way before 2000, e.g. JFK's dad
getting the mafia to fix the voting machines in a key precinct in Chicago).
By electoral theft I do not mean voter fraud, which the Republicans make a
big thing of, but for which there is hardly any evidence. I mean insider
theft by those controlling the elections. Three broad categories of activity
can achieve this, aways camouflaged as accidental phenomena, or claimed to
be random - though when the statisticians of the National Elections Data
Archive get to work on these 'random phenomena' a very clear pro-Republican
bias emerges!
http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/Presidential-Election-2004.pdf

1) Low tech traditional tricks:
As Greg Palast has consistently argued, the Republicans have perfected a
panoply of dirty tricks aimed at 'suppressing' the Democrat vote: e.g.
purging the electoral roll of likely Democrat voters, losing their
registration forms, intimidating poor whites and blacks from turning up,
frustrating them with long queues when they do, or challenging their right
to vote face to face, etc.
http://www.unobserver.com/layout5.php?id=2772&blz=1

'Muddles' in sending out postal votes, such as happened in Scotland, may or
may not be innocent and neutral in their effects, but they have previously
happened in US states with rabidly partisan election administrations. It is
worth remembering that New Labour has forced through huge relaxations in the
rules for obtaining postal votes, despite the widespread electoral fraud
which Labour supporters (predominjantly but not exclusively) have practiced
in Birminghan and many other places, and this despite being warned by the
Electoral Commission and the relevant Westminster committees of just such an
outcome. Over-ready availability of postal votes also breaches our human
right to a guaranteed secret ballot, nor is there any guarantee that one's
vote will make it to the polling station through the postal system, where
unscrupulous elements could intercept votes from certain postboxes or towns.
Steaming envelopes open to inspect their contents is possible, especially
when, as happened in Scotland, the huge numbers of people who applied for
postal votes found that the ballot forms wouldn't easily fit into the
envelopes supplied.

Designed to fail? Hard to say, and this also applies to the polling station
in Edinburgh where because of strangely defective ballot boxes the officials
were taking people's votes and stashing them in plastic bags behind their
tables! One further example on the theme of low-tech ambiguity: When I went
to vote in Craigie school in Perth my eye happened to light on a copy of the
front page of the Sun with a graphic about how voting for indpendence is
like putting one's head in a noose. When I complained that such material
should be lying around quite visible, the man in charge apologised, leaving
me to feel it was probably an accident. However Tricia Marwick, the winning
SNP candidate in traditionally Labour Fife Central, has alleged this was
happening at several polling stations in her constituency, and there is at
least one report of the Noose graphic being pasted to a wall inside the
polling station.

2) Confusing Voters:
Another category of election theft happens through confusing voters so that
their vote doesn't count, or is even given to the wrong candidates, e.g. the
confusing butterfly ballot which saw Jews voting for Buchanan not Gore in
one district of Florida. In this case the Secretary of State for Scotland
was repeatedly warned that combining two different elections (Scottish
Parliamentary and Council) on the one day would be likely to cause
confusion, the more so as it would involve three different electoral systems
(FPTP, Addditional Member top ups on a regional list - both using X's, and
Single Transferrable Vote for Councillors - using numbers). Although in the
past the two sides of the Holyrood ballot had each had their own voting
slip, on this occasion both sides were included on the one larger paper with
the instruction: 'You have two votes' ast the top of the page and only
smaller at the top of each column the words 'Mark one X in this column'.
Faced by a long shopping list of possible parties to vote for in the first
column (regional list), many voters used up both X's before coming to the
Constituency FPTP column. Others used numbers where they should have placed
crosses and vice versa. Altogether between 4 and 5 percent of ballots were
rejected, effectively disenfranchising 80-100,000 Scots and causing
widespread anger, including at the suspicion that different local standards
may sometimes have obtained for accepting or rejecting doubtful papers.
However it is unclear whether any party advantage will have accrued from
this massive problem.

This does not mean that this problem is of no significiance, nor indeed the
problems with postal votes, nor the problem with the failure/'failure' of
counting machinery in seven major counting centres, which had the immediate
effect of leaving exhausted activists feeling disempowered and cheated of
their late night hour of triumph. The possibility exists that the
significance of these hassles may lie precisely as distractions from
realising where the fundamental threat could be coming from.

3) High-tech Electronic swindling:
Outside some black communities, the largest strand of the dynamic Voter
Integrity movement in the US is the one which has focussed on the massive
evidence of electronic vote-theft, whether by compromised voting machines,
compromised counting machines or the transfer of count data via hackable
protocols on the Internet. A vast amount of work has been done on each of
these sub-categories, and increasingly the movement calls for hand-counted
paper ballots
http://www.opednews.com/articles/genera_jgideon_061214_thirty_four_election.htm
because it realises that electronic technology is inherently hard to audit,
when much of the software is 'tested' using other 'software' and nobody
knows which 'expert institutes' are honest and/or competent nor which
further advances in E-swindling may be being dreamed up.
See also
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_rady_ana_070117_annotated_bibliograp.htm
,
which gives synopses of 15 expert reports.

As computer professionals well know, most financial theft isn't wee people
pinching banknotes, it mostly happens by big insiders in big institutions,
and uses high-tech means. Why should things be otherwise with E-election
technology, which has been likened to a licence to print political money. In
her book of the same name, http://www.blackboxvoting.org/book.html, Bev
Harris of Black Box Voting has shown that the multi-billion $$ high-tech
election industry in the States is full of interlinked companies with many
close links to the ruling party, the CIA, the Pentagon, the
military-industrial complex, the mafia and/or fraudsters recruited out of
prison.
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0225-05.htm
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20041129/corn,
http://forums.therandirhodesshow.com/index.php?showtopic=106644
http://www.projectcensored.org/publications/2005/6.html

Take, for example, VoteHere, which led the lobbying post 'hanging chads' for
computerisation of the US election machinery, which sacked its test engineer
for identifying 250 security problems
http://www.whoscounting.net/TheCompanies.htm#VOTE%20HERE , and which was
brought in to help run an e-pilot in Islington in 2001
http://society.guardian.co.uk/internet/story/0,,498781,00.html as the
'technical partner' of Electoral Reform Services, Ltd (which gives around a
million a year to Electoral Reform Society). Harris reveals that Robert
Gates, ex-head of the CIA and now Secretary of Sate for 'Defense' , was on
the board of directors of Votehere.

The Pentagon is known to pursue stealth technologies and full-spectrum
technological dominance, including in space and cyberspace
http://www.whoscounting.net/PentagCIandCyber.htm.
A huge amount of Pentagon and other reasearch is done on a classified basis,
with the fruits of this research often being passed out for loyal
military-industrial crony companies and CIA-fronts to use first, thus giving
them a huge edge on foreign competition and lagging-behind regulatory
regimes. As for the CIA it has overthrown or destabilised scores of
democratically elected governments www.whatreallyhappened.com/ARTICLE3/ .
Sometimes these moves have happened in dramatic memorable fashion, e.g.
Allende under fire in the presidential palace. Other times US or Nato
intervention has happened in a way which only a few noticed at the time,
e.g. forcing the Socialists out of government in Italy in June 1964, see D.
Ganser, Nato's Secret Armies, pp 70 ff.

But just as the best economic fraudsters are the ones we never hear about,
so the best coups and interventions are those which happen so stealthily
that no one realises they/we have lost our freedom. (This indeed is the key
theme of an early Neo-con handbook, Coup d'Etat by Strauss pupil at Chicago
and leading neo-con Edward Luttwak.) The big lie and the noble lie and the
secret move - all these avoid the embarrassment which occurs when the people
get riled up and indignant and have to be fired on. Keep things cool.
Confuse potentially suspicious outsiders with lesser sub-plots, just as a
good stage magician uses his magic wand to divert attention from the main
move being made. Not only do the corporate media stroke the little person's
desire for a quiet life of denial with a steady diet of bread and circuses,
when embarrassing controversies arise the media can be relied upon to
prevent rational debate based on the presentation of evidence on and by
either side (or from many perspectives), but rather to close ranks by
publicly humiliating 'conspiracy theorists' as 'fruitloops' suffering from a
'conspiracist mindset'.

Yet when abuses of trust really are - or may be - occurring, it is blanket
denial not measured suspicion which merits psychological diagnosis. (Wihelm
Reich's The Mass Psychology of Fascism comes to mind; more recently feminist
work on widespread denial when it is precisely the one in authority who is
conducting the abuse; Daniele Ganser's Vital Lies - Simple Truths gives a
compassionate Buddhist-influenced account of the tendency we all share to
steer away from noticing things which could cause our anxiety levels to
rise - we even pre-notice what we know we mustn't see! It is this tendency
which has been relied upon by the people who stole the elections in Comal
County Texas in 2002. Not only did the conspirators type in the same five
figure number as the number of votes supposedly received by three
Republicans, a statistical absurdity, but they felt so confident that they
even chose neo-nazi numbers, 18181 (Adolf Hitler=AH= first and eight letter
of the alphabet).

Nothing so brazen has occurred in Scotland in 2007. Yet 'even' (?) Scottish
Stop the War (as also in England) finds it impossible to take on board the
real implications of an equally brazen impossible phenomenon such as 911
(e.g. three buildings falling evenly through themselves at a speed either
slightly faster than the speed of bodies falling from an equivalent height
through mere air, or only slightly slower; and when steel framed buildings
never fall due to fire but will burn red hot until burn out.)

Even those who skillfully parried Labour attacks on SNP spending promises by
saying that 'after Iraq none of us can believe a word New Labour tells us',
seem implicitly to concede that such US-style electoral corruption couldn't
happen here. But how can we be sure?

Although there are only a handful of 'attack vectors' in traditional
elections (e.g. pre-stuffing ballot boxes if no one is there to check they
are empty when sealed), the number of ways of stealing e-counting and
e-voting are literally unknown. Basically none of us know for certain that
there was or wasn't dirty business going on at the electronic cross roads.
Nor can we be completely sure about all the companies running the
pre-election polls - recall the recent spate of TV phone-in scandals.

In the US concern has been expressed about the independence of polling
companies, some of which may have been used to put out misleading opinion
polls, thus rendering people less suspicious when 'late swings' see
incumbents get back in, or almost get returned (2006, with Lieberman
effectively a Republican, a tied Senate would have Cheney with the casting
vote).

In Ohio in 2004 we now know that when the computers appeared to freeze, the
results continued to be fed to Karl Rove by an electronic back door!
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/04/23/705/

Probably there was nothing fishy going on when seven Scottish counts
experienced similar holdups, resulting in the public being sent home for the
'technicians' and 'computer experts' being left to 'fix the glitches'
overnight. But is 'probably' now good enough? Can we really be as sure as we
used to be able to be sure when we all hung around and watched the paper
ballots being hand-counted in public?

Far from being a 'modern advanced' way of doing elections, E-counting was
not just expensive (at around £9 million, of which more than £4m was spent
onthe machinery). Caetnralised E-counting often went slower than
decentralised citizen-involving counts could have been conducted, even of
multi-stage STV counts. And by its inherently non-transparent nature will do
nothing to restore trust in the political process.

As a candidate I was assured that the software to be used had been
'independently verified'. Eventually I was told that software experts at
Radboud University had verified it. When I checked them out I discovered
that they 'had been invited to tender' for the contract of testing the
software for applying the rules in an STV count.

All fine and dandy, I dare say, but this gives no guarantee that additional
software may not have controlled the registering of votes as the ballot
papers passed through the DRS counting machines, software which, as in the
US, may only be triggered when the real count starts (and may even be able
to rub itself out subsequently).

I was also assured that the ballot images taken and stored in computers
contained no voter ID. All very well, so long as those giving me these
assurances are a) honest (which I do not doubt) and b) at an extremely high
level of professional competence so that they would be able to detect
nano-technological ID barcodes within the Area barcode or the Contest
barcodes, should such stealth technology for citizen profiling have been
invented. (The police declined to take some sample papers for analysis.)

On researching the E-count company I not only discover that Lord Kinnock
(who as EU Commissioner once fired a whistleblower) has been taken on as a
non-executive director on £19,000 a year, but I also learn that DRS has
taken over a private San Diego based firm called Peladon Software, which had
recently bought in some imaging software from Diebold, the company most
closely associated with pro-Republican skullduggery in the public mind.
http://www.opednews.com/maxwrite/link.html?id=26586
http://www.talkdemocracy.org.uk/talk/viewtopic.php?t=118

I will readily concede that I may be being 'paranoid' so long as readers who
find themselves scorning my 'conspiracy theories' admit that they too could
not be sure that they would be able to tell whether the various software
companies and researchers involved are all sufficiently independent, honest
and expert to be able to offer cast-iron guarantees in this crucial aspect
of hard-fought social life, the control of elections, which has been likened
to conferring a license to print political money.

The paradox of voting in the traditional way is that through resolute mutual
suspicion, we have evolved a system in which all can have confidence. By
contrast, with electronic election machinery we are being asked to have
trust where none can exist.
http://www.notablesoftware.com/RMstatement.html
http://www.electronic-vote.org/
http://www.ejfi.org/Voting/Voting-4.htm

('Oh, but the paper ballots are securely stored, so they would never dare to
try it on' it is said. Which in the minds of those conducting many of the
counts, who have sole discretion on ordering a recount and may often have
been impressed by DRS presentations and rehearsals, translates as 'we don't
ever need to check' ... ?)

Far from technology taking us forward, its introduction has been a huge
set-back for Scottish democracy, whether or not anything dodgy has been
tried on on this occasion. Readers who would like to join me in a Campaign
for Hand-counted Paper Ballots are invited to get in touch on 01738 783677,
or at 2b Darnhall Cres, Perth, PH2 0HH (not by e-mail).

Although there are no shortage of bright young suits swarming around the New
Labour regime seeking to be given juicy contracts to run various e-pilots,
the verdict of the computer professionals is that this technology is
inherently non-transparent.
http://lib.store.yahoo.net/lib/realityzone/UFNnewbook04election.mht
This is the ironic verdict of one self-employed computer expert at the
height of his profession:
The programs that the voting vendors actually distribute - as opposed to
the software they may say they distribute - will continue to determine who
takes power after the votes are tallied.

To be fair, of course, although bug reports show voting software testing
is mind-bogglingly lax, all any software testing process can do is find
problems that testers know to look for and report honestly. There are
countless billions of internal states within all but the simplest of
programs. Both practically and theoretically, it is impossible through
testing to determine that any computer system has no flaws - much less, to
rule out the existence of secret backdoor functions to be triggered on a
future date. (This is no science fiction; see
htttp://www.bbvdocs.org/reports/BBVreportIIunredacted.pdf ).

Voting software is software distributed through use of software, vouched
for by other software, that itself vouches for other software. Surely
nothing can possibly go wrong with such a system.

http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_bruce_o__061025_pull_the_plug_on_e_v.htm

In one classic paper Ken Thompson, the recipient of an award from the
Association of Computing Machinery, Reflections on Trusting Trust,
concluded:
The moral is obvious. You can't trust code that you did not totally create
yourself. (Especially code from companies that employ people like me.) No
amount of source-level verification or scrutiny will protect you from using
untrusted code. In demonstrating the possibility of this kind of attack, I
picked on the C compiler. I could have picked on any program-handling
program such as an assembler, a loader, or even hardware microcode. As the
level of program gets lower, these bugs will be harder and harder to detect.
A well installed microcode bug will be almost impossible to detect.
And Howard Strauss, Director of Advanced Computer Applications at Princeton
University says:
"When it comes to computerized elections, there are no safeguards. It's
not a door without locks; it's a house without doors."
Apart from the possibility of e-fraud, Bev Harris and others are known to be
concerned about the possibility of vote-counting machinery being linked into
national databases. In this connection it is interesting that, after the
(entirely predictable) faisco of postal voting in Birmingham and elsewhere,
Tony Blair is known to have promoted ID cards as a solution to problems of
his own making.

For this and many other reasons the introduction of electronic machinery in
Scotland should be seen as part of an overall Statist coup against the
people being carried out also in England and Wales, where more and more
e-pilots are being introduced, and across the world (e.g. massive evidence
of pro-corporate computer fraud in Mexico
http://www.narconews.com/Issue42/article2010.html ). Activist pressure has
recently led to some belated tightening of the line against e-technology in
elections on behalf of the Electoral Reform Society, whose favoured option
of STV is complex to count and hence the Society may well be thought to have
a special responsibility to see that the introduction of its favoured system
is not used as an excuse to foist corporate e-technology on us all. See
http://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/downloads/Electronic%20voting%20POLICY.pdf
where the ERS concludes that 'the use of internet, text message and
telephone voting seriously compromises the security of an election', but
fails to come out against e-counting, nor does it apply its critique to use
of internet, etc in 'private' elections, such as its cash-cow, ERServices
Ltd, makes millions a year from running.

Conclusion:
The coming weeks provides a unique window of opportunity for people in
Scotland to declare our independence from the blue pill matrix 'reality'
where if something (like global frame-ups, or computer-aided coups) isn't
talked about in the posh papers and on the TV news reviews then it can't be
happening. A time to recover our cultural traditions of wary scepticism. Its
time - as they say - to take the red pill and to declare not that we know
that one party definitely was cheated from a more comprehensive victory on
May 3rd, but that we can't know that that didn't happen and that moreover we
are entitled to a country in which we can be sure that any such electoral
swindling doesn not and cannot ever happen.

Alex Salmond must be supported and held to his pledge of a full Independent
Inquiry into the election, not just one conducted internally by the
Electoral Commission, a government appointed 'independent' quango which in
Scotland has prominent ex-Cosla ex-Scottish Labour figures on board, and
which in the UK has consistently worked to implement the broad e-tech
friendly thrust of the New Labour project. All of us who are awakening to a
world outside the Anglo-American bubble must unite to insist that the terms
of reference of the Inquiry must include looking into not just postal votes
and the designs of the ballot papers, but the whole question of electronic
counting machines (not just their 'glitches' and 'delays' , or cost, etc).

Keith Mothersson
Member of ERS (personal capaicity)
keith[dot]mothersson{at]phonecoop[dot]coop
www.keith-mothersson.co.uk
This draft: May 7th, 2007

[PS In Ohio they tried to stave off criticism with random recounts, only
these were weren't random but the 'randomly chosen' ones had been prechosen
and thus were relatively clean. ]

Authors Bio:
Attempting in a UK context to connect the world of 911 truth activism/false-flag terrorism awareness and the Voting integrity community, where I am seeking to alert the Electoral Reform Society to the dangers of the UK 'modernising' its voting mechanism, and awaken the peace movement to the 'Frats', Brotherhoods and 'Men's huts' which threaten our one Earth Motherland.