Guest Blogged by John Gideon
Yesterday our friends at OpEdNews.Com featured an article that includes an interview with the former CEO of AccuPoll, a voting machine vendor that recently went bankrupt. In the article by Sean Greene of electionline.org the CEO, Dennis Vadura is quoted as saying:
Now, finally, an industry insider and ‘mover-and-shaker’ has stepped forward to echo what many of us have been saying for the past two or three years. The remaining vendors are doing all they can to prove that Mr. Vadura is right. That fact is borne out by the following two stories:
In Nebraska, home state for Elections Systems and Software (and home of one of the owners of this private corporation, Omaha World-Herald), 69 of 93 counties do not have their paper ballots for early voting even though early voting began on Monday. Nebraska joins Indiana and other states that are not able to conduct elections because ES&S cannot provide the ballots that they are contractually responsible to deliver. In defense of it’s partially owned subsidiary, the World-Herald misinforms it’s readers with this gem:
There is no new type of ballot required by HAVA and there is no standardized form for optical scanners. This is all just hype to cover-up for the failure of ES&S to do its job.
In another indication of a vendor’s failure to meet its contractual duties, the Richmond (IN) Palladium-Item reports that Fidlar Elections, a mid-west representative for Diebold, has failed to deliver paper ballots to 11 Indiana counties that can be read by optical-scanners. The state’s mandated absentee voting (early voting) began on Monday and the bad ballots were not reported until Tuesday so all voters who voted on Monday are now being given an opportunity to vote again, when good ballots are received.
Quality control? Apparently not, after all its just elections. As Mr. Vadura correctly states, “You just have to look at the litany of problems and it points at one thing, bad fundamental design, and not enough checks and balances”.
It would be interesting to contact Vadura for his opinion on the ITAs and the testing and certification process.
I am waiting patiently for Brad to cover Sen. Debra Bowen’s amazing questioning of 2 of the ITAs, in which they dig themselves into deep holes.
BlackBoxVoting.org has the transcripts so readers can see for ythemselves.
The first transcript is dated 3-31-06 ("Bravissima") and the others are 4-3-06, 4-4-06 and 4-5-06. The subsequent discussions on these threads are illuminating.
There is also news out of Utah that Diebold has been changing serial numbers on its machines. Now, why do you think they’d want to do that?! (That’s the story on the same link above, with the date 4-6-06.)
Quite a lot of additional new documents have been posted on these threads at BBV, including voting machine manuals, more Diebold memos, ITA testing reports, and more.
Hopefully Brad will do a write-up on a few of these bombshells before too much time passes.
I guess the double bubble posts happen to everyone
John, yer stuttering, dude.
Catherine A #1
I have visited the site and have parsed thru. I agree that Cal. Senator Bowen has the ability to examine the issues with the technical folk quite well.
I would suggest some form of digest, however, because many folk will not have or take the time to go thru all the dicta.
I think this thread which John has posted is also a good revelation from an insider in the industry.
I can’t beleive what I just saw on C-SPAN. Karl Rove took questions at a meeting of repuplican lawers and almost all of the questions were about voting. They must be getting worried because Karl seemed to be wanting to mount an offense against election fraud being perpetuated by DEMOCRATS. Gee, if we’re the ones stealing elections. HOW COME WE NEVER WIN THEM!
For the last two years a film crew has been criss-crossing America documenting the vote fraud and disenfranchisement of voters on video. The old saying of a "picture is worth a thousand words" is more true applied to their efforts than most. Most of you have seen the videos showing what happened in Ohio, and the video of election workers in Florida trying to prevent Bev Harris from obtaining a trash bag documenting their conspiracy to deprive voters from voting or having their votes count. Such images are powerful.
There is an even more powerful documentary film that needs to be released to the American people as soon as possible. It can be the tipping point in bringing the majority of American voters into the demand for immediate voting reform. It includes video footage of demonstrations, the Harri Hursti "hack" that occurred in Florida last summer, and pictorial documentation of widespread voter disenfranchisement. It is a professionally produced and edited chronicle of the voting protecting movement of the last few yeas. These images will do more to educate the public than all the technical studies or presentations we can make. Testifying before a legislative committee, or even before a microphone for two minutes in Sacramento is important, but 99.9% of the public will never see that. We have to create a political movement that will put political pressure on our elected officials. The window of opportunity is fast closing in stopping the upcoming "trainwreck" of the critical next two elections.
The producers of Votergate (www.votergate.tv) the full length documentary, need an immediate cash infusion to bring this documentary to the American public, sooner, rather than later. I am urging those reading this to go to the website and watch the trailer. Then donate as much as you can to speed the release of this film. Then spread the word to others.
This battle to preserve the right to choose who shall govern us is rapidly moving to the point of critical mass. Once these machines are in place, paid for with our tax dollars, it will be extremely difficult to rid our country of this scourge.
http://www.votergate.tv
Please help as much as you can!
Jody Holder
So many important issues on one thread!
I hope some of the media that like to scan BradBlog will take note.
The frequency and range of problems is not being reported enough. I think the situation is so dire, and the overall story is so big, that most journalists and editors are not up to the task. And that is even without any discussion of the possible implications.
Do you remember that great article that was posted on VelvetRevolution.us by Diane Perlaman, "The Silence of the Scams: Psychological Resistance to Facing Election Fraud"? You can read it here.
The Votergate documentary and similar efforts by others communicate the full range of issues better than any single report or new article could do. Hopefully the major media outlets will wake up before it is too late.
I like to remain optimistic and hopeful, but at the same time, we can not admit that it is already too late.
Too late to have a competent election system based upon competent machines, competent handlers of those machines, and believable results.
It is too late for that. So we need to think about what the body politic, the citizens, do when they have a new style dictatorship that does not look like past dictatorships in terms of how that dictatorship took over, but does look like all other dictatorships in terms of lies, coverups, and feeding at the trough of public money stolen from the citizenry.
warrantless and illegal NSA sureillance MUCH MUCH larger than thought.
All international phone calls and all internet traffic (websites, emails) is continually being filtered:
http://www.wired.com/news/techn...?tw=wn_index_1
Whistleblower account of the NSA operations:
http://www.wired.com/news/techn...?tw=wn_index_2
illegal monitoring has been continuing since 2002 and AT&T is fully complicit in this illegal and warrantless total surveillance by NSA.
If you have any business with AT&T switch all your services away from them to somebody else and explicitly tell them that the reason why you are switching is their complicity in the illegal warrantless NSA surveillance.
The only way to make the madness stop is to take away the thing republican extremists and their surrogates and supporters/cronies love more than liberty,freedom and privacy:MONEY.
Please spread the word on all the blogs you can so as many people as possible learn the truth told in the Wired.com articles and boycott AT&T so much that they start respecting their customers and their values again.
Oh Thanks Swiss – now I feel comfortable. Signed up with 2 year contract for phone and DSL with SBC and 3 months later they were bought by ATT!
"Fidlar Elections, a mid-west representative for Diebold,"
Fidlar Elections! What a perfect name. They must be represented by the law firm of Dewey, Cheetam & Howe.
The claimed issue "…ballot can be read by an optical scanner" being somehow difficult to fulfill, isn’t even a valid technical issue these days.
Off-the-shelf hardware can be purchased and easily programmed to scan a document and interpret the content. It would be a TRIVIAL matter to write a vote tabulation program for an off-the-shelf scanner.
Some of these scanners sell WITH a document feeder, and cost under $100. They might not hold-up for the rigors of multiple elections, but I would bet the cost of replacing a consumer off-the-shelf scanner every now and then would be far less than the costs being paid for contracts to these companies for dedicated/custom mechanisms.
I would be willing to bet that someone or some company has even already written an off-the-shelf program that can read a "ballot-like" document, and based on a template input by the customer, provides a cumulative count of marked "boxes" or "circles" or other area. The only issue becomes one of testing and certification.
I’m in fact having a very difficult time understanding why virtually ALL the hardware involved, including the hardware to assist the disabled, can’t be purchased off-the-shelf and programmed using very simple, OPEN-SOURCE code that can be verified by numerous people.
This isn’t advanced math…it’s counting, and document scanning is now an extremely mature technology with lots of commercial solutions.
Some of the companies having such trouble with the process of delivering accurately acquired and counted votes are the same companies that manufacture the ATM MACHINES we use millions of times every day.
Diebold has made ATMs for decades, and is responsible for the acquisition, counting, and delivery of our money.
Hmmmm.