It’s easier to rig an electronic voting machine than a Las Vegas slot machine, says University of Pennsylvania visiting professor Steve Freeman…[who] has assembled comparisons that suggest Americans protect their vices more than they guard their rights.
Wow…today’s Washington Post has a nifty illustrated chart today comparing the security and inspection of Las Vegas Slot Machines versus that for Electronic Voting Machines.
(Hat tip to emailer Beth H.!)
Theres something really rotten going on, or I’m just getting too cynical, I mean the news is great, but
is this the lead up to the bombing of Teheran or what ?
Do these assholes think they have enough control now that they don’t have to worry about this stuff ?
Bill Maher was on That fukstik from Florida with the dead interns show on MSNBC last night and they talked about Florida being ripped off in 2000, like it was old news, no biggie. WTF again, I say
Washington Post? Easy to be cynical, but it is a big step forward. If the New York Times climbs on board, I’ll be a true believer that the mainstream media "gets it" at last.
This is HUGE news. All of the mistakes and security issues are finally being recognized as rational!
Savantster: there are plenty of honest politicians who don’t want to fix elections … we believe we can win on the merits, and we don’t want the legitimacy of a victory to be in question!
Thanks Debra Bowen.
I sure hope you can win on merits in CA! They need you. It looks to me like CA is trying to set up a Diebold rig so the Pubs can take even CA. Hang in there, young lady, and give ’em hell…
And you’re right, this is huge news…
peace out,
Bayou
When the history of this era is written, the fact that our mainstream media turned a blind eye to election fraud will be front and center in textbooks.
Future schoolchildren will be asking their teachers how it could have been that The New York Times, supposedly a liberal paper, devoted front-page banner headlines to the rigged Ukraine election, yet censored clear evidence of fraud in our own presidential election the same month. And, how the Times’ public editor (who supposedly represents the interests of readers) refused to answer letters asking, "Why won’t you cover this?" Dead silence.
It’s mind-boggling. After the disgrace of 2000, a stolen election in 2004 was a clear danger. Yet when college professors said the random chance of a 5-1/2% discrepancy between exit polls and tabulated votes was a one-in-969,000 possibility, the media blamed it on "conspiracy theorists."
I think what Savantster’s posting in #1 reflects, Debra, is extreme frustration with both politicians and our public institutions. You’re an exception, clearly. But until the Washington Post printed the comments of Prof. Freeman today, only John Conyers and Barbara Boxer on Capitol Hill, and only Keith Olbermann (erratically) on television, and only the Toledo Blade among newspapers had so much as mentioned the likelihood that George W. Bush stole his second consecutive election. The rest of our "national leaders" and media buried their collective heads in the sands like ostriches, hoping the public would ignore the laws of probabilities and go along with the most corrupt gang of political criminals in American history.
The history is being written as we speak. The names Debra Bowen, Clint Curtis, Ion Soncho, and Steve Freeman were unknown in 2000. So was the name Brad Friedman. Now look. Even the Washington Post has decided to wake up and smell the coffee. We’re winning.
This is great. Yesterday the article in the Florida paper and now the nyPost. This story may be going places since monkeyman is on the ropes..
I sent the Washington Post a letter to the editor (letters@washpost.com) concerning the article:
To: Washington Post
RE: Your article How To Steal an Election
First of all thank you for reporting on a taboo subject. We in the blogosphere have not seen very many articles like this one. Even tho it is a very important subject, there seems to have been a mainstream press black out of coverage.
Secondly, I would point out some hope on one of your comparisons. In your background scrutiny comparison you pointed out that "Citizens have no way of knowing, for example, whether programmers have been convicted of fraud."
However, I think the press is at fault for that. I mean the activists who watch these things closely know about and have documented that in fact the software that counts most of the votes was in fact developed by felons who had been convicted of computer fraud. And hired while in prison:
"An embezzler who specialized in sophisticated alteration of computer records was programming the King County voting system, and is also mentioned specifically in the Diebold memos in connection with programming the new 1.96 version optical-scan software and the touch-screen Windows CE program. Let’s look at some of the features Dean says he programmed for a “ballot on demand” optical scan application:
Jeffrey W. Dean, January 22, 2002 RE: serial numbers on ballots: “The BOD [Ballot on Demand] application that we have been running in King County since 1998 does put serial numbers on the ballots (or stubs) along with a variety of optional data. The application also will optionally connect the ballot serial number to a voter.”
Diebold told The Associated Press that Dean left the company when they took over.4 Actually, Diebold was loaning money to Global Election Systems while Dean was its senior vice president and a director, and after the buyout, Diebold retained Dean as a consultant:
Read the entire chapter at Chapter 14 of the Black Box Voting Publication.
The activists, especially Black Box Voting, have done their job. They have worked tirelessly and with little to zero help from the press.
Your story is a welcome turnaround in reporting the great travesty that has plagued this nation for years now. A plague that really and truly brings the electronic voting machine world into question big time.
Senator Debra Bowen
Thanks for stopping by the blog, and thanks so much for your work and integrity her in California.
B.T. Sacramento
We need to broadcast as much as possible, the pre-election polls…so if there’s any shennanigans, we can point it out immediately. I’ll start by saying right now, Casey has a double-digit lead over Santorum in the polls. In Pa…the state where the exit polls said Kerry won by 9%, but the "final count" (wink wink) Kerry won by 3%…6% votes stolen towards Bush being able to claim the popular vote victory. Bush’s supposed popular victory was also made of up stealing votes from states in which he lost the state, but stole votes anyway.
Remember, 100% of all discrepancies favored one party: the Republicans. Therefore, not random errors.
A slot machine? Hell, it is easier to rig a voting machine than a pro-wrestilng match.
Robert Mills Lockwood, Savantster (#4, #6) —
Point well taken. There is enormous frustration about the overall health of our democracy. But I have many colleagues who want an electoral win to be a true win …
The voting machine issue is tough for several reasons.
It’s not what people want to spend their time thinking about — any more than they want to spend their time thinking about whether the sewer system works, or whether the lights will g on when the switch is pushed.
And people are used to touch screens — I get boarding passes, wedding registry printouts, and (usually) I can get some of my own money from a Diebold ATM!
It’s been critical to pull this apart methodically, and explain it in ways that are easy to understand without knowing how computer code works. I’ll be taking that WaPo graphic with me EVERYWHERE, and I’m going to be educating many people who have never given much thought about how voting machines work — though they do know that they did not like watching Ohio on TV in 2004.
We CAN have election systems that are secure and accurate. And we must!
oops … Robert Lockwood Mills. (at least it was only your name I flipped, not an election!)
"An embezzler who specialized in sophisticated alteration of computer records was programming the King County voting system"
Since we won that election for Govenor based on King County, does that mean he was on our side?
"But I have many colleagues who want an electoral win to be a true win …" (Senator Bowen)
Are any of these colleagues Republicans???
Senator Bowen, do you acknowledge that elections have been stolen on electronic voting machines? Politicians are stopping short of actually saying this out loud. Thanks for posting here, btw…
Why are politicians stopping short of saying that elections have been stolen?
1) They don’t have PROOF. Nobody saw a card inserted into the back of a voting machine. Thousands of votes were flipped, but nobody knows precisely how it was done or by whom.
2) They’re afraid of being called "sore losers."
3) Or "conspiracy theorists."
If a bank president walked into his bank one morning and saw that his safe had been broken into, and the contents were gone, would he say, "We’re out $500,000, but we didn’t see anyone steal it, so I can’t say we were robbed."????
That’s what we’re talking about here. Two consecutive elections have been hijacked. Crooked election machines were the enabling factor, but it takes a crook to pull it off. Blaming the machines is like blaming a blowtorch for rifling a safe.
Crooks. Criminals. Not "political partisans." Until politicians are willing to say this out loud, we’ll be short of where we want to be.
The increasingly certain method for detecting election fraud is going to come from exit poll science:
"Exit polling is a well-developed science, informed by half a century of experience and continually improving methodology"
(link here, page 7, bold added). See also Polling and presidential Election Coverage, Lavrakas, Paul J, and Holley, Jack K., eds., Newbury Park, CA: Sage; pp. 83-99.
It is the number one weapon against fraudulent elections. But as with most fraud, the strength and the weakness in all systems is in the people of the system.
We know that "Edison/Mitofsky samples voters for a nationwide exit poll as well as for each state’s exit poll" (ibid).
We know then, where the attack to establish the coverup will come from. We can expect a major movement to corrupt Edison/Mitofsky from the inside.
Lets take a look around and check them out.