John/Brad-

The Fred Grimm opinion piece in the Miami Herald was great but, unfortunately, gave far too much credit regarding California being any kind of savior in the fight against the corruption of our vote by these voting companies and their political supporters. I just e-mailed the following to him:

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Mr. Grimm-

Thanks for your excellent article and for being one of the few journalists who seems to get the threat to our democracy that these voting machines and companies represent. We really need to shout it from the mountaintops!

Being from California, I only wish that this state was really taking the lead in protecting the voters as your article suggests. Arnold Schwartzenegger, our only statewide, "elected" Republican representative (elected in a special election to expell and replace Gray Davis who was greatly victimized by the multibillion dollar Enron-lead scamming of the state's electricity market) chose Bruce McPherson to replace elected Democratic Secretary of State Kevin Shelley when he was forced to resign. McPherson has done everything he can to get these hackable voting machines/companies into California, the nation's "largest voting market", especially including Diebold, which Shelley had decertified after the company was found guilty of scheming and lying about their machines. The only thing that slowed McPherson's efforts to shove these machines down our throats was "the hack" of Diebold's crappy machines that Ion Sancho (a real hero of democracy) allowed to take place. That hack revealed that "an entire election could have its results flipped by a hacker exploiting the machines "interpreted code" — without a trace being left behind" (see BradBlog: https://bradblog.com/?p=2441). Not only was that "a huge embarrassment to the Secretary of State's office", as you indicate it was in Florida. It was also a bit embarrassing for the Calif. Sec. of State as well. Unfortunately, not embarrassing enough for him to resist recertifying Diebold's machines, even after the "panel of computer science experts" (which you refer to), assembled by McPherson to study the issue, produced a brutal report that "found 16 software bugs that could cede 'complete control' of the system to hackers who might then 'change vote totals, modify reports, change the names of candidates, change the races being voted on,' and even crash the machines, bringing an election to a halt. Hackers wouldn't need to know passwords or cryptographic keys, or have access to any other part of the system, to do their dirty work. Voters, candidates and election monitors wouldn't necessarily know they'd been rooked." (quote from Michael Hiltzik's column in the LA Times Business Section on 2/23/06). McPherson chose to stealthily announce the recertification of these machines at 5pm of the Friday heading into the three day President's Day Holiday Weekend!

Unfortunately, what all of this says is that you should probably look somewhere besides California to "worry about the damn voters" and lead us out of this voting machine nightmare. At least as long as people like McPherson hold sway.

Sincerely,
me

Steve #1

Well said ...

There may be nothing left to vote on by the time the machines are thrown out and hand counts return.

... As Fascism marches on, the masses and the press sleep

Anybody like KOS, I think he is a Corporate sellout
If you make it big Brad, don't get like him
link

Heres a link that shows how to get around the Long Shoremen and truckers of the US, This shows an outfit with the use of our tax money, bypassing our West coast ports through Mexico by building a private super highway through the US,into Canada, So Illegals can transport stuff from China to Wal-Mart duty free
link

OOps, correct link for my #5
link
and the page I linked to is pretty proud of it