Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org
In Virginia they use a mixture of DRE and Optical-Scan voting machines. They are presently involved in a recount of votes due to a close race for Attorney General. One side was able to convince a three judge panel that it was sufficient to just re-add the computer tapes from the machines and that recounting 500,000 paper ballots was not necessary. This is NOT a recount and the people lost in this court decision. In Ohio an activist and seminary student is on a hunger strike and prayer vigil in front of the Statehouse to protest a regressive bill that is passing through the state legislature and will soon be passed by the governor. This bill will in essence make it virtually impossible for homeless folks to vote, would make it virtually impossible for groups to register large numbers of voters, would eliminate oversight of voting machines, and would cancel our right to challenge election results….
**”Daily Voting News” is meant as a comprehensive listing of reports each day concerning issues related to election and voting news around the country regardless of quality or political slant. Therefore, items listed in “Daily Voting News” may not reflect the opinions of VotersUnite.Org or BradBlog.Com**
Just a thought…will the electronic voting machine scandals somehow be tied into the Duke Cunningham/Wilkes scandals? They are both corporate GOP crony companies funnelling advantages to the GOP. It’s the same thing, when you think about it. And it’s all part of the joining of Corporate America and our government. And the Republican Party is the party for all of this.
2006 and 2008 will be rigged again – gw is going to alot of expense in Iraq with oil and bases and all and will not leave it to chance with fair elections. Those will be rigged and yes, we will probably have another repub prez. I think they are covering there tracks very carefully – no more memos from the Diebold prez about giving the election to brainless. I hate being so pessimistic, but it seems that way. Tell me it ain’t so!!!!
it’s so. 🙁
:angry: We have to keep fighting and letting other sites know. Fair elections and ability to register and have your vote count is THE MOST IMPORTANT ISSUE to stop these monsters.
Winston Churchill said, "Never give up, Never, NEVER, NEVER." and he went through some pretty dark days even after the US was involved in WWII thinking it was lost but even then HE REFUSED TO GIVE UP AND KEPT ON FIGHTING.
Thank you for the links and for keeping us updated on the areas we need to concentrate on and work with to have fair elections in 2006. They – Bilderberg, Bush Crime Family want you to give up, don’t give them the satisfaction of being discouraged, just keep on sending emails and letters to Congress and the media and joining with those who have fought so hard to bring the fraud to our attention and are still fighting. We have to join them!
:O Why I Am Marching to Guantánamo :O
http://www.witnesstorture.org/ By Frida Berrigan, AlterNet. Posted December 10, 2005.
As a U.S. citizen and a Christian, this International Human Rights Day I am marching against torture, and for humanity. Tools
3 COMMENTSs a U.S. citizen and as a Christian, when the prisoners in Guantánamo began their first hunger strike this summer, I was forced to think more seriously about how to say no to torture and yes to humanity. I had to think about the depth of powerlessness and despair as well as the intensity of will and defiance that goes into the decision to starve oneself. It is an act against biology. But refusing to eat is the prisoners’ only way of drawing attention to their predicament. They have no other tools except deepening their own suffering.
Jesus commands that we visit the prisoner and comfort the afflicted, and reminds us that what you do to the least among us, you do to me. I am marching as a person of faith trying to apply these mandates to an ever more violent world.
These fathers and brothers and sons now imprisoned a Guantánamo Bay have been swept up in indiscriminate raids, bound and blindfolded and shipped to an arid military base that is off the map of international law, a wasteland of injustice, a modern heart of darkness. Most of these men have done nothing wrong, nothing illegal. The Bush Administration has denied every fundamental right afforded by international law or American law to allow the inmates to defend themselves. It has even denied charging them with any crime beyond looking the part of the villain in Bush’s war on terrorism.
Why are these men now starving themselves and being savagely force-fed? They are crying out for the world to hear their suffering. We 25 Catholic Workers have committed ourselves to responding to their cry, reaching out human to human, across battle lines, borders, religion and ethnicity to simply say- we hear you and we are with you.
Voting is NOT the earmark of democracy. At least not American democracy. The Bill of Rights (First Ten Amendments) and civil liberties are.
Remember that after the US Constitution was drafted, there was sufficient dissent to filibuster it and in effect veto it. It had voting law in it but it was not near enough.
Why? Major players demanded that the Bill of Rights be added to it.
So when the propaganda machine (link here) cranks up to make a big deal out of voting, remember they did the same thing before Vietnam fell (link here).
Vietnam fell because the people there did not understand enough about Bill of Rights democracy, and only understood vote democracy.
That is why I am not impressed with the "democracy" the admin pretends to want to bring to Iraq. It is vote democracy of the type that was beaten into the Vietnamese people. Democracy that is not heartfelt nor sincere. The type of democracy that an invasion and shock and awe can instill is not American Democracy.
We have to stop the government from spying on Americans (link here) and vote the neoCons out. That is what voting is for.
Are there any fellow bloggers from Ohio who would care to comment on the HB1 and HB3?
Genocide was comitted as a result of this Fraud. SO
If the People ever get the goverment back. Voter fraud
fixing elections and steeling votes must be Turned into
Capital Crimes, Resulting in Public Execution for ALL
Parties and Accessories Involved!
Ot, but it looks like their going to help New Orleans by neglecting the place? read here
Add the situation in Michigan, Detroit especially, to the list of election misdeeds, with the added insult that the MSM-Detroit Free Press–won’t let the voters know whats going on.
In Ann Arbor, MI, we have a very active Voter Protection Committee that is researching and uncovering a number of critical problems with our allegedly clean elections. The committee leaders wrote this letter–below–which the FREEP declined to publish. Hopefully readers here will spread it around:
"NOT SO BENIGN: THE NEGLECT OF ELECTIONS BY TTHE SECRETARY OF STATE
Detroit’s November 8 election problems reflected chronic negligence by the Michigan Secretary of State. Behind all the headlines about bungled votes, hand counts, and recounts, there is another story. It is about ongoing neglect of duty by a Republican statewide office holder, with the result that growing distrust of the election system could suppress future voter turnout in the state’s biggest Democratic stronghold.
When election workers don’t understand the proper way to handle ballots and optical scan memory cards, even taking them home, it is obvious they have not received effective training. When an election might not even be recountable because no one maintained the proper chain of custody of election materials, there is clearly a need for the polling precinct team to have rehearsed these critical procedures ahead of time. When a city election administrator is reported to say that the department had difficulty “getting competent poll workers” for 720 precincts, there is definitely a systemic problem that needs to be addressed. And when anyone in Michigan naively plans to send unencrypted election results over modem connections, we are risking a vote-tampering mess.
These matters are ultimately the responsibility of the Secretary of State. State law mandates this elected official to design and disseminate effective training for election administrators, staff, poll workers, and technicians. The current training offered by the SOS consists of a 59-minute videotape and a set of powerpoint slides. Election workers are certified by attending one training every two years. Even election administrators can receive accreditation by snoozing through a lecture, and filling out an open book test. Imagine you are a new election inspector, arriving at a polling place at 6 a.m., to work a complex 16 hour day with a group of people you may have never met, many of whom are also new, and your only preparation was a lecture with no hands-on practice.
By October of next year, the Secretary of State will have received $78 million in federal funds under the 2002 Help America Vote Act. Congress intended that poll worker education be improved under this grant program. Unfortunately, in the SOS’ 69-page HAVA State Plan, there is exactly one sentence on the subject: “Develop election official and poll worker training initiatives.” No further details are supplied for the use of the $5.8 million budgeted in the plan for “Voter education, election official education, and poll worker training.” In the Plan’s performance measures, there is mention of measuring the recruitment of new election inspectors. Unfortunately, there is nothing anywhere in the Plan that proposes a needs assessment, identifies problems in recruitment, or suggests solutions.
Detroit is by no means the only Michigan jurisdiction with problems in recruiting and training competent election workers. Economic pressures on families have made it much more difficult for even the most civic-minded citizens to skip a work day in order to staff the polls. Retirement-age people are working longer to make ends meet, so the traditional pool of election help is shrinking. Current laws, some just enacted, lock the election system into an obsolete paradigm: elections must take place on a Tuesday and election inspectors can only work in their own county. Increasingly complicated election laws and requirements have driven many experienced election administrators and workers to resign—a rational response when an error-prone process offers mostly opportunity for criticism and public humiliation, while an election well run earns no notice, let alone praise.
It is time that the Secretary of State provided positive leadership in this crisis of election staffing and quality control. It is time to stop neglecting the voters in Detroit and in other Michigan communities, allowing predictable election trouble to take place, and then swooping down with orders and punitive condemnation.
Jan BenDor
June Rusten
Jeff Souza