USA: ELECTRONIC VOTING

blackboxvoting.org: Diebold Internal Memos Admit Voting Machine Flaws

In a preemptive strike to discourage further negative publicity, Diebold Election Systems has demanded that voting activist site BlackBoxVoting.org remove internal memos which admit that Diebold's high tech voting machines are easily susceptible to vote fraud.

Dated Oct. 2001, the memo by Diebold's principal engineer Ken Clark concedes that it is quite simple to do an "end run" around the Diebold GEMS voting software, used in both touch screen and optical scan voting machines, and that this "back door" has already been used in elections. Diebold states that the memos are authentic, but claims copyright protection.


Maxlogan: Voting in America: A Shell Game?

It's a shell game, with money, companies and corporate brands switching in a blur of buyouts and bogus fronts. It's a sinkhole, where mobbed-up operators, paid-off public servants, crazed Christian fascists, CIA shadow-jobbers, war-pimping arms dealers -- and presidential family members -- lie down together in the slime. It's a hacker's dream, with pork-funded, half-finished, secretly programmed computer systems installed without basic security standards by politically partisan private firms, and protected by law from public scrutiny. It's how the United States, the "world's greatest democracy," casts its votes. And it's why George W. Bush will almost certainly be the next president of the United States -- no matter what the people of the United States might want.

The American vote-count is controlled by three major corporate players -- Diebold, ES&S, and Sequoia -- with a fourth, Science Applications International Corporation, coming on strong. These companies -- all of them hardwired into the Bushist Party power grid -- have been given billions of dollars by the Bush Regime to complete a sweeping computerization of voting machines nationwide by the 2004 election. These glitch-riddled systems -- many using "touch-screen" technology that leaves no paper trail at all -- are almost laughably open to manipulation, according to corporate whistleblowers and computer scientists at Stanford, Johns Hopkins and other universities.


Inquierer: US election fraud scandal looms?
Explosive conjectures and evidence

STEALING ELECTIONS is a sordid tradition in the United States, though it's certainly not unknown in some other countries, as well.
From Tammany Hall's machine politics in the 19th century through Mayor Daley's grasp on Chicago elections, right up to Lyndon Johnson's first election and John Kennedy's 1960 cliff-hanger defeat of Richard Nixon, many US elections have been thought to have had "irregularities".

So much so that it's not really certain where "Vote early, and often!" originated, whether in Boston, New York, or Chicago. It is also well known that many lesser US cities had political corruption, including rampant election fraud, at one time or another in their histories.

Now a New Zealand political activist has published suspicions, along with supporting evidence, that electronic voting in the US is being manipulated by right-wing politicians with the connivance of several voting machine manufacturers. The story revolves around some highly volatile conjectures and might be explosive, if fully investigated.

The article is reprinted below with permission, lightly edited merely for formatting, minor typos and a minor fact (G.W. Bush isn't a Jr.).

Here at the INQUIRER, we can't help but notice that the highly, er... accommodating database software that drives these allegedly dodgy and easily tampered electronic voting machines is... Microsoft Access.

And we're trying to decide on a catchy term that ends in "gate".µ