Unless I'm mistaken, E.S & S. started all this nonsense in 1996. So it's sort of like moving from the frying pan into the fire, isn't it?

Bev Harris is the best person to address the issue.

As we Louisiana musicians say (even here in Nashville...)

Poo-Yah!!!

Pass this stuff around, y'all!

I'm the one person secretly changing thousands of votes in a nan0-second! Oh shit, here comes John Kerry about to crash the White House gates! Gotta go stop him!

One thing is clear: Diebold has stepped in it now and everyone is rearing to take 'em down.

We don't need politicians from anywhere stealing elections.....it doesn't matter WHO.

Now that we know why they lied (committed perjury,) maybe this can also be used to put Cathy Cox and Ken Blackwell under oath. Two hacks who love to steal elections for their corporate cronies.

Doug E.

yep, even the stock analysts are advising to sell Diebold short

via the UnCapitalist Journal, Financial Industry warns off Diebold: Sell it Short!

Man, how do we get the firestorm started around the country? We need a critical mass on this and the fire never seems to catch on, maybe this will do it? Have you ever tried to get election fraud up as a going concern on a blog, get anyone to comment on it? It just passes on to oblivion. Even a nice progressive blog? No body want to achknowledge this it seems....not in MY country!

Not to worry, this will do it because it involves all of Wall Street......and its got enough of a fire started now for everyone to check these machines and hopefully someone to shut down the senate until HR-550 is passed.

Plus more criminal convictions...that's the only way to deal with this big of an election fraud mess. In court, right next to the war in the defense trials since this is like taking down the mafia.

When "Dieb-throught" goes public and starts bringing all his fellow employees down, you'll see it reach critical mass.

Doug E.

Who can do a hack on the ES&S machines? Take 'em down one by one!

BTW, is ES&S a publicly held corporation?

Getting to the wallets of stockholders and Wall Street seems to be a pretty solid way to get the attention of those guys. Turn them against the machines because it'll cost 'em money and then you've got some very strong (if fickle) supporters.

To summarize, for the benefit of the "mainstream media":

1. Dedicated American citizens, with zero help from investigative journalism, have spent the past year, plus, digging through jealously-guarded voting details painstakingly obtained from public and private entities, wearing out shoe leather and/or computer keyboards, being dismissed by anybody who is "anybody," and otherwise doing their damnedest to save their own democracy by investigating the integrity of the nation's electronic voting system. Their thus-far ironclad circumstantial case of unsafe, unsound and corrupted electronic vote-counting, compiled with the benefit of access to, and testing cooperation from, just ONE electronic-voting election jurisdiction, is now ready and waiting for you to cite, pore over, and learn from. You're welcome. And, it's about damn time you showed up.

2. When speaking with election officials in America who have purchased (on 'blind faith') electronic vote-counting hardware and software, remember a few things: The government created some "testing" standards, which this equipment was then alleged to have "passed." It turns out, however, that the testing process itself is basically a complete sham, as the multiple Hursti Hacks in Florida quickly confirmed. Thus America has been sold a bill of goods, by a handful of politically-connected private companies that hide their vote-counting software code behind a trade secret firewall. Said code has never been fully tested in any sort of honest, independent manner, until the Leon County, FL Hursti tests on a Diebold Optical Scan system [see the Harri Hursti Report at blackboxvoting.org]. Do you think that local election officials across the country know all this? NO, they don't. NOR do they know how that fancy software counts their jurisdiction's votes. They "trust" the vendors, to whom their taxpayers are forking over large sums of money for the care and feeding of their election machinery, and for assistance with election-day operations themselves, in many, many places. These public officials don't have much incentive to fess up about their ignorance of both the machinery and, in far too many cases, how to operate that machinery during elections. Enter the ever-helpful vendors to "save the day," if not the democracy. So when these election officials assert that their voting process is "secure" ask them how they know that, and in what ways they can demonstrate that to you. Just a few probing questions will quickly get you a referral to the private vendor's "tech support," in all likelihood.

3. What does HAVA have to do with all this? A great deal. What should Congress be doing right now, in the face of both the recent GAO Report and the latest Hursti Hack? DELAYING HAVA's implementation, until full and independent tests of all makes of electronic vote-counting machinery have been conducted. A looming January 1st HAVA deadline is forcing the hand of many uninformed election officials, and they need relief NOW from this fundamentally, and absolutely, flawed piece of legislation which is costing the federal government millions of dollars. Congress: unless you wish to champion corrupted vote-counts, act now to remedy HAVA's many ills.

You are probably aware that your previous blog post is on Michaelmoore.com this evening.) I posted the following on your previous blog post before I read this one, because I had already read The Miami Herald's article:

Great work, Brad!

Does Florida already have the other democracy-destroying laws already, that Ohio is passing this week? And, does anyone know if there are other states which already have enacted these laws?

Once again, Sancho not Sanchez!

HAVA youself a Merry Little X-mas,

Their going down, baby!!!!

By the way, when is ACVR going to get spinning?

For Can We Count: Excellent summary. I'd add that the politicians who worked on HAVA, in particular my home state Senator Chris Dodd, have made a bad situation worse.

Connecticut is a progressive state that runs clean elections (if only our politicians were as clean!). But when an effort began a year ago to demand paper trails for future elections, just to play it safe, our great progressive Chris Dodd led the fight against it.

The sticky wicket was helping handicapped voters. HAVA was properly concerned with blind people, for example; when new machines became available that served their needs better, the architects of HAVA (including Dodd) applauded. For obvious reasons, a paper trail isn't important to a blind person. Having asked for these improvements (sic), Congress found it awkward to reject the machines...so they pretended the problem didn't exist.

It never occurred to Dodd & Co. (our friend Bob Ney from Ohio also worked on HAVA) that the machines would still be hackable. "HELP AMERICA VOTE" didn't mean "PREVENT FRAUD." When John Kerry told Dodd recently, "You know, there's a problem with these machines," Dodd got angry at him for even suggesting it.

Never underestimate a politician's ego. And never assume he puts the public interest first. HAVA really stands for "HACKABLE AFTER VERIFICATION ATTEMPTS."

We will no doubt hear more from Sancho's story as it appear to exhibit many of the problematic areas that the Government Accountability Office expressed concerns about earlier this year.

http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d05956.pdf

Even as OH sinks further and further into darkness at the hands of corrupt mob-style politicians and faux-Christian Theocrats, this is a beautiful ray of light streaming through the cracks of our dying democracy!

Thank you Brad for your unending dedication to saving us all!!

I wrote a thank you to Mr. Caputo and encouraged him to keep looking in to the truth of electronic tabulators. Also sent him the link to Who's Counting, specifically The Companies and the Technology Chapters.

His email addy is in the article:

mcaputo@herald.com

re: ES&S

Interesting things are happening on a number of fronts. I'm hearing a new urgency in the tone of voice of reporters when they call. They are urging --- URGING the examination of ES&S, of course, because that's often what is in their districts.

We are urging it too, of course.

Never underestimate the power of public pressure in altering the behavior of public officials. The best thing that can happen is the confluence of events --- like that this week --- resignation, stockholder's lawsuit, hack, official dumps system. This is how you get media to the tipping point.

Now we need to hammer, hammer, hammer the media in California. The state of California has not answered the letter from our attorney for the Black Box Voting 19202 request. They are lurching around with some negotiations behind the scenes but to date have retained vendor-centric testing procedures and a requirement for secrecy about results of the tests.

This is an issue the media will also support --- their own right to know what is happening with the testing in California.

The North Carolina legal maneuvering will drop another shoe for media coverage. But make no mistake about it --- we have momentum, achieved by THE CITIZENS THEMSELVES with little help from the executive branch, the legislative branch, the judicial branch, or the media.

Our most immediate opportunity is to feed the media. The media likes: lawsuits (safe to report); statements from public officials (safe to report); books (safe to report) and controversies where their own interest is at stake, like their ability to observe the Calif. testing.

This week, the beastie was born that can move this into Watergate-style media, but it has to be nourished with special anti-allergic formula, fed every few hours, in order to survive.

Let's do it.

The word "hack" seems particularly appropriate. I really don't understand how our country gets run at all, why we're not already West China. The incompetence, the moral sophistry, the hissing pusillanimity at work all across America just keep getting worse, infecting more people, and nothing seems immune anymore. It was making me so crazy fifteen years ago, I had to retire, much to my financial detriment, to have enough time to reconcile my outrage enough to keep positive contributions possible. It's getting so you can't even be retired and have enough time for this work. Not to put any pressure on you, Brad, but

DON'T STOP TILL WE HAVE A BULLETPROOF DEMOCRACY BACK.

I'll keep being a bullhorn for you, asking people to donate. Thank you so much for your hard work.

This is just a fiasco! I am so angry at the horrible things this administration and their business cronies have done to us. Now the slug that sits in the Oval office and thinks he is the rightful president is accused of signing orders in 2002 which allowed unlawful spying on American citizens. Thank you for all of those who have worked so hard on this issue! Really, from down here in the "red" state of Florida, thank you!

The Miami Herald article at www.miami.com/mld/miamih.../news/state/13410061.htm says in paragraph 3:

> After receiving county commission approval Tuesday, Sancho scrapped Diebold's system for one made by Elections Systems and Software, the same provider used by Miami-Dade and Broward counties. The difference between the systems: Sancho's machines use a fill-in-the-blank paper ballot that allows for after-the-fact manual recounts, while Broward and Miami-Dade use ATM-like touchscreens that leave no paper trail.

In other words, Mr. Sancho is replacing optical scan ballots with DREs that have no paper audit trail of any kind. Is this progress?

--Mike Amling

Mike Amling #19, you didn't read the sentence right. Sancho is replacing Diebold optical-scan machines with ES&S optical-scan machines. These new machines might be just as insecure as his old ones (we don't know, because we haven't seen ES&S source code) but he can detect and correct tampering by manually auditing paper ballots. Diebold was trying to take advantage of blind voters to force Leon county to go paperless, but ES&S offered a money-back guarantee that they will have a handicap-accessible all-paper system certified for use in Florida.

See how Fox News tried to spin the story at: Fox News Scary Florida Diebold Voting Clip