Holy s**t!! Wonder if the guy is a BradBlog reader?

Any chance of getting in touch with his attorney once he gets one? This would be a good chance to bring out some of what we know about Ohio and Diebold, etc in a public forum - and possibly get it into the court record (and maybe into MSM??) if election fraud is given as his reason for what he did!

Someone once said, "Carry a sign and they'll ignore you - get arrested and you'll get their attention"

Do we dare hope?

Good for him!!! We should smash all of them!!!

I'm going on record, as being "FOR" smashing them!

Grey panthers rock!

What if voters fell over the machines by accident... when they went to vote?
If the machines all got damaged, we'd HAVE to use paper ballots & hand counting.

Just came to psot about this, I see Brad's already on top of it as usual.

Stretch that grin out to the ears and you can see what I look like right now.

Looks like he trashed the restroom too!

Oh, I guess that's actualy the paper trail!

Psot - verb: To post at a blog without proof reading.

Is that a roll of toilet paper on top of the Ohio e-voter machine that guy busted up ? Is this the paper trail we have long been promised ? Is that toilet tissue roll - "Charmin" ? It looks like it may
be that "quilted softness" stuff.

E-Voter Toilet Tissue : Link

Old Turk:

I vote for (or is it with) Northern Double Roll.

I hope they will tell us what pissed him off so!

Probably not.

that machine might have already been busted, but when you pay tens of thousands for the POS, it don't mean you gave somebody else permission to smash it.....you leave that privelege for yourself!

Wish the MSM would come to the understanding that it wasn't the punchcards that made the 2000 election a mess, but the GOP faux-protests over the recount, since that would have cost them the election....had to stop that at all costs

This good be important if the machine didn't record his vote right.

I think throwing tea into Boston Harbor was called disorderly conduct, too.

Why didn't that guy in Ohio use a sledgehammer to bust up and smash that e-vote machine,.. it looks repairable ? They may set it back up and use it again !

link

A true american hero! This is what everyone should do come election day. Organize across the country and smash those machines! Show the world that americans don't accept rigged elections more than 3 times in a row!

Physically destroying a rigged vote is very much a valid form of protest.

The Old turk #11

They'll probably replace the paper roll and sell the machine as new to someplace like Utah. Just ask Bruce Funk.

I had a very bad experience with the electronic voting machines today also. Every time I entered a vote, a picture of a grinning Ken Blackwell would pop up. No matter what I selected, there he was with his mouth open, ready to grab my votes!

I've just seen one of my fantasies come to life.

..."It's unclear what caused the man to become upset."..

The truth.

When I saw this it dawn on my yet another very important reason why paper ballot voting is superior, perhaps the single most important reason though it might not seem like this at first blush.

1) since voters don't have as much access to the machine they have less opportunity (or inclination) to smash the optical scan.

2) Smashing a touch screen would be the nearly ideal way to rig an election.

It's number 2 that really concerns me. We talk a lot about the dangers of rigging machines but the single best way to skew an election is to deliver faulty or inadequate voting machines to polling places likely to have strong demographic patterns. For example, in Ohio, predominantly black districts were backed up with lines the press reported as long as 10 hours and polls not emptying till 4am due to "shortages" of working voting machines (despite there being spares in the warehouses accroding to reports). Likewise in San Diego, when batteries malfunctioned supposedly abut 8000 people were turned away from early morning voting. Imagine if those had been intentional.

clearly these can skew results in large ways.

While these are feasible to manipulate in principle, technically only a limited number of people would have the means to manage that sort of swindle, and moreover there will be suspicions raised.

But imagine instead if you hired 10 "Winos" or people pretending to be enraged street persons to, in a deranged fit smash polling machines at selected precincts. Chances are they can just run away, but even if caught there's not much chance to prove in the way of premeditated conspiracy or even much of a crime. Heck just bring along a sharpened key or exacto-knife and gouge the screen when no one is watching you "vote". It's all to plausible.

Damn that would be a cheap and easy way to skew an election on demand. Not at all unlike certain other dirty tricks we have seen over the years (intimidation outside polling areas, flyers telling people to go the wrong polls, people in espanola being paid to vote certain ways, and things like call-jamming candidates phone banks).

So I consider this a very realistic threat and all the more reason to not use machines prone to this attack.

Note: I'm not in any way advocating this sort of thing even in jest or winkingly. I'm truly making this point at face value--it's a serious danger that is seldom mentioned.

You people should be ashamed of yourselves. I sense glee here!

No disorderly conduct in Utah. I was at a meeting here a couple of weeks ago and they intend to pass legistlation making the destruction of a voting machine into a FELONY.

I got another felony for ya,...

how about skewing the results,...

fraudulently altering the voter tabulations,...

putting so few machines in polling places,...

it takes a working person 10hrs to vote,...

why are these crimes not actionable felonies ?

This country is treading in very dangerous waters

if these election systems and processes are not

cleaned up and run honestly,.. anarchy will not be

only just an imagined concern !

If Democracy is trashed,.. anarchy will prevail.

No one welcomes that disruption.

Exploitation of the election process must stop,..

forthwith. This chicanery has gone on long enough.

For Larry Bergan: Utah? Aren't those the same folks who preach family values yet allow men to have ten wives?

If we can throw tea into Boston Harbor can we not throw Diebold into the street?

Larry #18

They give Diebold, ES&S, and the rest of the wannabe competent electronic voting machine makers money to make junk.

Now in true fashion they want to blame the victims, which is quite popular in politics, and make them FELONS if they make a little voting machine junk.

Blame the Greens ... they did not stop this

RLM - You said:

“For Larry Bergan: Utah? Aren't those the same folks who preach family values yet allow men to have ten wives?”

I don’t know if you’re joking or not, but I’ve lived here all my life and don’t know any polygamists. I quit going to church when I was 16. Did more LSD then LDS (about 50 times). Talk about a non-addicting drug. It’s TERRIFYING and doesn’t even enhance a football game! Think about it though. If there were very many polygamists here, it would be, by far, the most populous state in the nation after 150 years.

Old Turk or anybody else who might know. - Has any poll worker or election official EVER spent a day in jail for election fraud in the US. No wonder they’re so audacious. Blackwell gets a governorship in exchange for election fraud and it’s all played out in broad daylight. If you even raise your eyebrow at an election official they accuse you of not being civil.

The terrorists and felons of today aren’t terrorists and felons by any dictionary definition. They’re environmentalists, immigrants, protestors, professors, homeless, potheads, etc.. Any political opposition to the corporations and the war profiteers! I’m just an optician and a computer programmer, but I’m not blind! After all I have Al Gore’s internet, so far!

By the way, right now, I’m the cleanest person in Utah, I don’t even do asprin!

Larry Bergan,

re: RLM's comment, this map might explain it: LDS

Thanks for being a good progressive, non-insane voice in Utah.

My, my, you folks are seriously sad. It is really sad to see you all whining and whining about some machine the Republicans have devised to rig every election for the next century. Here Mr. Greybeard has shown you how to combat the evil conservatives and all you can do is whine about how you wish it had been you. Well get your lazy unemployable selves out of your dark and dank basements (first removing your tin-foil hats) and take your sledge-hammer down to your local polling point and take action.

Kenyon Satek Kinikini,

Instead of throwing a tantrum, why not discuss electronic voting, and what we can do to stop it before the general elections? These machines are unreliable, easily hackable, overpriced, and workers are undertrained to service them. If a mere battery fails it can wipe out an entire election's results. Most of the machines do not meet standards for handicap access.

What can you do? Contact your elections director Michael Cragun, or deputy director of elections Stephen MacDonald, at (801) 538-1041. Lead them to blackboxvoting.org or here, tell them about the Hursti hack, request financial documents on how much those junk machines cost the state.

Might be a bit more productive than writing unhinged rants here.

please don't send me a virus, I'm in the middle of finals.

Unhinged rants seem to be the order of the day here, but that is beside the point.

I am simply puzzled by the apparent technophobia demonstrated by most posters here, (and yet you have the technical accumen to track me down). Where are the cold hard facts surrounding the fallability of the electronic voting machines? I admit, I've only looked at a couple of sites, but they didn't offer anything I thought was concrete (photos of blue screens and other little boxes which, since I'm not the techno-saavy person BVAC is, meant little to me). Perhaps this is the root of my skepticism. I simply do not know enough about computer systems to understand their vulnerablities. Still, we turn cold hard cash into digital fortunes and entrust them with ___Bank, we run our municipal infrastructures through digital management, and heaven forbid legal precedent ever go back to paper and ink. I am sure there are obstacles to overcome, but clinging tenaciously to old punch cards does not seem to be the answer. If that emotional response of fear towards change is the correct response we ought to regress towards "Make your mark here, and write in your vote. Now step over here and dip your thumb in this ink well. Good, bye-bye." Running from the future only keeps you mired in the past.

ps. BVAC, please send me an e-mail and explain the ins and outs of maintaining a little privacy on the internet. I bet you could even get my SS#.

Kenyon K.

I am too busy right now to give you a primer on e-voting, so it will have to wait awhile. Check back here.

In short: I am not a luddite, but current e-voting machines are dangerously unreliable for no good reason. The firms that sell them are pretty close to criminally negligent. Turning cold hard cash into digital bits works because there is always a hard copy, and receipts. When you use an ATM you receive money, and a receipt saying how much you took. E-voting does not work on this model - there is no adequate feedback. I'll get into it deeper later.

As for internet privacy, these are the times we live in. An increasingly open society where information is at everyones fingertips. Getting a SS# would require social engineering outside of the law, which I will not do.

I'm not a Democrat and I'm not a Republican (didn't vote for Kerry or Bush). The politics here though seem to be decidedly on one side of the aisle. If Senator Kerry had won the election would there be this much debate? I am progressive in the sense that I think we, as a social order, ought to progress. In that mode of thought I think electronic voting is progress and reliance on "dangling chad" is stagnancy.

BVAC- I would welcome any information you may be able to send me when time allows. I am not well informed on this issue (didn't even realize it was an issue until I was web browsing for terrorists and wound up at bradblog.com) but if there really is something "rotten in Denmark" people need to get involved regardless of political affiliation. Who knows it could be you next time.

For Ken K.: Senator Kerry did win the election.

Larry, there have been two articles in the New York Times (not the Salt Lake paper) already this year about men in Utah who had failed to support all their wives and were being brought up on charges for it.

The issue wasn't polygamy (apparently that's OK), it was failure to support the kids. The odd thing about both cases was that the girls (several were teenagers) said the men were wonderful husbands.

Not kidding. I think both cases were in the southern part of the state.

Perhaps waving rare earth magnets over them would damage them--which could be easily concealed in the palm or on a ring--or attach or adhere the magnets to the bottom of the touch screen voting device..

You need REALLY powerful magnets to screw up hard drives or magnetic media, because the magnetic field has a cubic dropoff, but I bet those magnets would fuck up the screen a bit.

RLM - Yes, it’s true, there are polygamists here, and the reason you’re hearing more about them lately is because the officials around here are starting to crack down on it. Believe me, most of the people here are extremely mad about the fact that we might be paying to take care of some guy’s huge family! Like I said, if it was a common problem, Utah would have as many people as China after 150 years of exponentially expanding populations.

The red/blue maps of the nation showed that most of the blue was in the big cities. It’s not too different here. Salt Lake City has a progressive mayor (Rocky Anderson), who had an anti-Bush rally when he was here recently and the inner city is actually quite progessive. I know, the state made a fool of itself in the 2004 election. That’s why I’m especially interested in KNOWING it wasn’t rigged. The election officials actions concerning Diebold make me very suspicious!

Congrats to the man who truly hacked two of these evil machines.

This is not just happening in the US folks. Its always a right wing party doing it

In Ireland the right wing government spent big bucks buying enough paper-less e-voting machines for the whole country but were forced to mothball them because the public went nuts. The Irish though did have the media to get the word out.

Australia have a right wing government that has passed laws which will allow them to introduce these machines. They will have no paper trail but are claiming they will be safe as the source code will be public. But what about that recent demonstration of hacking where there was no trace left in the source code. Suspicious that they will not have a paper trail.

They already have a few machines (75) but what's a bet they put them in the swing states or hotley contested areas like the Republicans did. Great insurance in a tight election. Then keep introducing more and more in the next term as complete control over election results.

So if your thinking of emigrating hold your breath because its starting to happen everywhere the right wing manage to gain power.

Here's a quote of an email response I sent to Vermonters for Voting Integrity (cc: Vermont Secretary of State, Deb Markowitz). My correspondent then replied with a link to this page. Funny how some minds work alike. The "Ethan" reference is to Ethan Allen, father of the Vermont Republic and Revolutionary War hero, whose spirit is still with us.

"Smash the damn vote-stealing machines. Better to go to jail for democracy than to sleep-walk our way into tyranny. Where is the Diebold optical scanner kept? In a room at the Statehouse? Which one? Bring sledge hammers. Maybe the news will finally pick it up, and people will pay attention.
I wrote a very nice email to Deb Markowitz and did not get a response. Maybe participatory government is more about action than obedience. What do you think, Ethan? Long live the Republic of Vermont!"

Tea party, anyone?