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Diebold - The face of modern ballot tampering
by Faun Otter
You can't vote them out if....
You never voted them in.
The lack of any exit polling on November 5 has
been oddly ignored by the media. Those pesky tracking polls
leading up to the elections have been explained
away by a 'late surge to the Republicans' caused by.... hmmmm,
how about sun spot activity? With no exit polls,
there was no other feedback to conflict with the "official" results,
this allowed the Diebold touch screen machines
to change the way election fraud is carried out.
Previously, election cheating was a complex matter
of ballot tampering combined with sample skewing.
That is to say, you screwed up ballots for your
opponent with under or over votes, made sure that people likely to
vote against you wouldn't even get that chance
(the program of voter disenfranchisement in Florida) and padded
your own vote total with such things as falsified
absentee ballots.
In the much more high tech world of Diebold electronics
we are seeing a wonderfully efficient vote rigging system,
the long proposed 'black box' technology. Imagine
a black box in which you cannot see the workings. The only things
you can discern are an input and an output; in
this case votes go in and collated totals come out. There is no paper
record of each individual vote cast to enable
any cross check of the collated output. The only information you can
know for sure is the total number of votes cast
on the machine. Each vote is stripped of any information as to who
cast that ballot to guarantee anonymity for the
voters. You now have a system in which you have no way to check
vote recording, vote collation and transmission
of the collated totals out of the black box.
The perfect crime?
Not quite.
Let me suggest an experiment. We take two 'markets'
with similar socioeconomic mixtures and a well
established record of moving in the same political
direction. We provide them with candidates from party
X and party Y. We then expose them to similar
news stories, we spill TV and radio ads over between the
markets to make the effects less 'local' and
give them identical weather on election day. The differences
between the markets are 1. the candidates and
2. the method of casting and counting the votes.
We then take a series of tracking polls on the
gap between the candidates leading up to election day.
If we express the tracking poll data as the relative
preference for the candidates (12 point lead by X, down one
point from last week etc.), any substantial discrepancy
between the forecast and actual election outcomes should
arise from major news changes, the weather effects
on turn out or a a social tendency to misrepresent voting intent.
Since both groups get the same news, the same
weather and have the same social tendencies, any difference
between tracking poll and actual poll data should
be in the same direction and of a similar magnitude.
Sooooo...... how come the South Carolina elections
had the Democrats doing much better than the tracking
poll data showed and the Georgia elections, in
an area with the same weather, same news and same social values,
had a massive swing in a single day after the
last tracking poll, in the opposite direction?
Could it be the Diebold touch screen machines
in use across the entire state of Georgia but not used at all in SC?
Of course, such a perfect method of mischief has been attempted before,
http://www.votescam.com/frame.html
-- Go to the link marked "Chapters" and read
all about it.
Watch how few lines pass before the names Bush
and Sununu come up.
You can trim the wheels in mechanical voting machines
but that is easier to spot than a computer program set
up to be date sensitive so it causes only to
'misfunction' on November 5. The current problem with virtual ballot
tampering was apparent as long ago as 1989.
Jonathan Vankin made this warning in "Metro: Silicon Valley's
Weekly Newspaper," of Sept. 28, 1989
"A single, Berkeley- based firm manufactures the
software used in the machines that compile more than
two-thirds of the nation's electronically-counted
votes. Analysts describe the software as "spaghetti code,"
tangled strands of instructions indecipherable
to outsiders. The experts say the code could be manipulated
without detection. In fact, that may have happened
already."
http://www.conspire.com/vote-fraud.html
After systematic punch card fraud was revealed
in the 2000 election, touch screens were proposed as a
panacea and have been rapidly adopted against
the warning of experts,
"Critics warn local election officials could be
trading one set of problems for another potentially as
bad, or worse, than last year's election debacle.
They vigorously argue that fully electronic systems
pose data-security problems and lack a paper
trail. "There's no way to independently verify that the
voter's ballot as cast was actually the ballot
being recorded by the machine,'' said Rebecca Mercuri, a
computer scientist and visiting lecturer at Bryn
Mawr College in Pennsylvania."
http://www.kioskcom.com/article_detail.php?ident=1021
It would be interesting to impound a few machines
from the heaviest leaning Democratic areas in Georgia and
reset the date in the machine to November 5,
2002. A hand counted series of inputs could be made to the
machines. Note to James Baker: hand counting
is the gold standard against which we check machine counting
efficiency. An input of 500 or so 'dummy' votes
could then be tabulated and the outcome checked against the
inputs. Of course, you could just check
the software code. Except for one problem; the company refuses to
let anyone see their code on the grounds that
is a trade secret.
Oddly enough, Diebold aren't the only Republican partisans who "helped" select our candidates for office yesterday:
"According to his press office, in 1995 Chuck
Hagel resigned as CEO of American Information Systems (AIS),
the voting machine company that counted the votes
in his first Senatorial election in 1996. In January 1996
Hagel resigned as president of McCarthy &
Company, part of the McCarthy Group that are one of the current
owners of Election Systems and Software (ES&S),
which itself resulted from the merger of AIS and Business
Records Corporation. According to publicist/writer
Bev Harris, Hagel is still an investor in the McCarthy
Group. ES&S is now the largest voting machine
company in America. One of its largest owners is the
ultra-conservative Omaha World-Herald Company."
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Articles/Landes_Ambush.htm
For more background reading on who gets to play with your ballot, see:
http://www.talion.com/election-machines.html
Who are Diebold?
The corporate officers are as thick as thieves
with the Republican hard right religious nut division.
For those who have been lucky enough to forget,
Senator Faircloth was the protege of Jesse Helms in NC.
It looks like the board and the directors were
all putting up money for a Faircloth victory when Edwards
took that senate seat. I wonder if they conspired
to put things right.....?
Board of Directors
Louis V. Bockius III (2,4,5)
6/28/00 $15,000.00
REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE - RNC
11/3/00 $10,000.00
REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE - RNC
10/9/97 $1,000.00
VOINOVICH FOR SENATE COMMITTEE
10/9/97 $1,000.00
VOINOVICH FOR SENATE COMMITTEE
Christopher M. Connor
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, The
Sherwin-Williams Company
5/22/00 $1,000.00
VOINOVICH FOR SENATE COMMITTEE
3/30/00 $1,000.00
DEWINE FOR US SENATE
Gale S. Fitzgerald (2, 6)
President and Chief Executive Officer , QP Group,
Inc.
7/12/00 $500.00
NEW YORK REPUBLICAN FEDERAL CAMPAIGN COMMITTEE
10/12/98 $200.00
FRIENDS OF JOHN LAFALCE
10/18/99 $1,000.00
BUSH FOR PRESIDENT INC
Donald R. Gant (1,3,5)
Senior Director, The Goldman Sachs Group, L.P.
L. Lindsey Halstead (2,3,6)
Retired Chairman of the Board, Ford of Europe
12/22/98 $500.00
RNC REPUBLICAN NATIONAL STATE ELECTIONS COMMITTEE
1/23/97 $500.00
REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE - RNC
5/27/97 $200.00
REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE - RNC
10/31/97 $500.00
REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE - RNC
12/28/99 $500.00
REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE - RNC
3/7/01 $300.00
REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE
6/12/01 $200.00
REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE
11/27/01 $200.00
REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE
1/24/02 $500.00
REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE
Phillip B. Lassiter (1,3,6)
Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer,
Ambac Financial Group, Inc.
4/16/98 $250.00
NATIONAL REPUBLICAN CONGRESSIONAL COMMITTEE
CONTRIBUTIONS
9/21/98 $250.00
NATIONAL REPUBLICAN CONGRESSIONAL COMMITTEE
CONTRIBUTIONS
John N. Lauer (1,4,5)
Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer,
Oglebay Norton Co.
10/10/00 $1,000.00
DEWINE FOR US SENATE
8/23/00 $250.00
REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE - RNC
3/17/97 $1,000.00
VOINOVICH FOR SENATE COMMITTEE
Walden W. O'Dell
Chairman of the Board, President and Chief Executive
Officer, Diebold
2/14/01 $2,015.00
RNC REPUBLICAN NATIONAL STATE ELECTIONS COMMITTEE
12/17/97 $1,000.00
VOINOVICH FOR SENATE COMMITTEE
1/30/01 $3,950.00
RNC REPUBLICAN NATIONAL STATE ELECTIONS COMMITTEE
8/16/01 $500.00
VOINOVICH FOR SENATE COMMITTEE
12/17/97 $1,000.00
VOINOVICH FOR SENATE COMMITTEE
6/30/00 $1,000.00
DEWINE FOR US SENATE
Eric J. Roorda
Former Chairman, Procomp Amazonia Industria Eletronica,
S.A.
W.R. Timken Jr. (2,3,4)
Chairman , The Timken Company
6/23/00 $50,000.00
RNC REPUBLICAN NATIONAL STATE ELECTIONS COMMITTEE
6/8/01 $100,000.00
2001 PRESIDENT'S DINNER - NON-FEDERAL TRUST
3/14/01 $10,000.00
RNC REPUBLICAN NATIONAL STATE ELECTIONS COMMITTEE
8/19/99 $15,000.00
RNC REPUBLICAN NATIONAL STATE ELECTIONS COMMITTEE
11/3/00 $15,000.00
RNC REPUBLICAN NATIONAL STATE ELECTIONS COMMITTEE
2/22/02 $1,000.00
RELY ON YOUR BELIEFS FUND
6/12/02 $1,000.00
OHIO'S REPUBLICAN SALUTE
Corporate Officers
Walden W. O'Dell
Chairman of the Board, President and Chief Executive
Officer, Diebold (See above)
Wesley B. Vance
Chief Operating Officer
8/16/01 $500.00
VOINOVICH FOR SENATE COMMITTEE
Michael J. Hillock
President, Diebold International
11/18/97 $500.00
FAIRCLOTH FOR SENATE COMMITTEE 1998
David Bucci
Senior Vice President, Customer Solutions Group
11/18/97 $500.00
FAIRCLOTH FOR SENATE COMMITTEE 1998
James L.M. Chen
Vice President and Managing Director, Asia-Pacific
Warren W. Dettinger
Vice President, General Counsel and Assistant
Secretary
11/18/97 $300.00
FAIRCLOTH FOR SENATE COMMITTEE 1998
1/30/97 $250.00
DEWINE FOR U S SENATE (2000)
Donald E. Eagon, Jr.
Vice President, Global Communications & Investor
Relations
11/18/97 $300.00
FAIRCLOTH FOR SENATE COMMITTEE 1998
Charee Francis-Vogelsang
Vice President and Secretary
Larry D. Ingram
Vice President, Procurement and Services
1/30/97 $250.00
DEWINE FOR U S SENATE (2000)
11/18/97 $300.00
FAIRCLOTH FOR SENATE COMMITTEE 1998
Dennis M. Moriarty
Vice President, Customer Business Solutions
11/18/97 $300.00
FAIRCLOTH FOR SENATE COMMITTEE 1998
Anthony J. Rusciano
Vice President, National Accounts
11/18/97 $300.00
FAIRCLOTH FOR SENATE COMMITTEE 1998
--- Hey Tony! Listing yourself as "retired" and
using
your vacation home address to avoid campaign
donation
limits is a tad naughty don't you think?
Charles B. Scheurer
Vice President, Corporate Human Resources
11/18/97 $300.00
FAIRCLOTH FOR SENATE COMMITTEE 1998
Ernesto R. Unanue
Vice President and Managing Director, Latin America
Robert J. Warren
Vice President and Treasurer
11/18/97 $300.00
FAIRCLOTH FOR SENATE COMMITTEE 1998
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