Bev Harris of Black Box Voting reports….

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld will resign, reportedly to be replaced by former CIA director Robert Gates.

Gates was on the board of directors of VoteHere, a strange little company that was the biggest elections industry lobbyist for the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). VoteHere spent more money than ES&S, Diebold, and Sequoia combined to help ram HAVA through. And HAVA, of course, was a bill sponsored by by convicted Abramoff pal Bob Ney and K-street lobbyist buddy Steny Hoyer. HAVA put electronic voting on steroids.

You can find copies of the VoteHere lobbying forms here:
http://sopr.senate.gov/cgi-win/m_opr_viewer.exe?DoFn=0

I can’t get them to save to pdf, perhaps you can. Enter search terms in both “registrant” and “client” fields and put in terms “Rhoads” “Livingston” and “Votehere” (one at a time.). Then look at the gravy train while it was in the process of derailing American democracy.

I first became acquainted with VoteHere when I met a source, Dan Spillane, who is the wonderful guy that identified the Diebold source code modules for me after I found the Diebold files. He is the person who introduced me, and subsequently everyone else, to the odd role of The Election Center and R. Doug Lewis in the elections industry.

Spillane also filled me in on The Livingston Group, VoteHere lobbyists, run by Bob Livingston — the fellow that Hustler publisher Larry Flynt outed during the Bill Clinton blow job days. Larry Flynt offered a million dollars to anyone who could locate a Republican congressman committing adultery, and out popped peccadilloes by Livingston.

Livingston couldn’t live that one down, so he resigned his post as House Speaker-Elect and became a lobbyist — but that’s not all! He also launched a group called “Center for Democracy” which was going to “monitor elections.” This group also featured several good old boys from the tobacco industry and some mining companies.

Former VoteHere test engineer Dan Spillane was looking into all this because he had been fired after he questioned the certification process on a touch-screen system in which he had identified 250 flaws. It was way back in November 2002 that Spillane told me, “The voting machine industry is a house of cards. And the certification and testing process is the bottom card in the house of cards.”

BUT DON’T RUN OUT OF THE ROOM TO TAKE A SHOWER YET. There’s more.

VoteHere was a company shilling cryptographic solutions and filled with NSA types (another director was Admiral Bill Owens, another crony of Rummy, Perle and Wolfowitz). For some reason this company claims it was unable to prevent itself from being hacked. In this alleged hack, VoteHere claims that someone stole their source code. Said source code was offered to me in October 2003, an obvious attempt at entrapment which I refused.

Nevertheless, VoteHere claimed to the media that its master security experts had supposedly “tracked” the hacker and had identified the hacker as an activist in the election reform community.

For some reason, it was decided that I should be investigated in connection with this “hack” of VoteHere — nevermind that I can’t remember how to change the password on my own laptop. Therefore I was interviewed by the Secret Service several times about this. Curiously, they never seemed to ask any questions about VoteHere, only my role in finding the Diebold files and publishing the Diebold memos.

This nonsense eventually culminated in a gag order and a letter from the U.S. Attorney to appear in front of a federal grand jury with information on all the visitors to the Black Box Voting Web site. (As if they couldn’t get that in less dramatic ways in post-Patriot Act America). Attorney Lowell Finley (now with http://www.VoterAction.org ) went to bat for me on this. A reporter named George Howland from the Seattle Weekly also got wind of it. When it hit the press, and with Lowell Finley’s help, their harassment of me stopped.

VoteHere never sold any voting machines that I can find, but apparently did set up some deals to embed its cryptography into some voting systems. We found memos in the Diebold trash about VoteHere’s crypto-crap, and Maryland Director of Elections Linda Lamone shows up in VoteHere-related letters. Sequoia Voting Systems signed an agreement with VoteHere, but its not clear to me whether they ever did anything about it.

Robert Gates stepped away from VoteHere shortly before he showed up in Chapter 8 of my book, Black Box Voting, in a short bit about the VoteHere company history. You can read that here: http://www.blackboxvoting.org/bbv_chapter-8.pdf

I don’t know about you, but I’d rather use a paper, pencil, and count by hand at the polling place than have former CIA director Robert Gates fooling around with my vote.

But that’s just me.

- Bev Harris
Founder, Black Box Voting

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Jason Leopold also reports on Gates’ history here….

“Robert Gates, the former director of the CIA during the presidency of George H.W. Bush, and who was tapped Tuesday by the president to replace Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense, is part of Texas’s good ol’ boy network. He may be best known for playing a role in arming Iraq’s former dictator Saddam Hussein with American made weapons in the country’s war against Iran in the 1980s.”

Read The Full Article

Warning - I am sharing my “sacred” vote with all of you.

I voted “absentee” , since we’re heading to Toronto Sunday. There were about a dozen Diebold DRE machines set up at the infamous Greene County BOE office, and all of them occupied. A continuous flow of people were heading into the building to vote early as well. Patricia and I filled out absentee voting request applications and were “required” to show drivers licenses. She asked for a paper ballot, and was told she could not vote with one, only provisional ballots were paper (for those registering onsite at the time of voting).

Patricia voted first, and reported nothing funny. I paid very close attention to what the Diebold touchscreen DRE machines were doing. I voted a fairly conventional Democratic ticket [as is evidenced from the photos taken of the vote]. However, I voted for the Green Party candidate for Governor, Bob Fitrakis. I expect Strickland to win the Governor’s office, unless Blackwell has totally rigged it. And I know and admire Bob Fitrakis, who has fought election fraud since the 2004 election debacle. And I believe in the stand he is taking for a real democracy. You will see in the photos I took that when the summary page displayed, the system switched my vote to the Strickland/Fisher ticket. I had to look twice, because I could not believe it was happening to ME, a vigilante with a camera in hand, expecting to catch the bastards red-handed. To correct this, I had to Back button 14 screens to the first page and re-vote for Bob. The Summary, and “Print” feature both - apparently - recorded it correctly this time.

And then, handing back the keycard ballot, who knows what was actually recorded in its memory? There is absolutely no accounting possible at any point in the electronic process, and there is no chain of custody to be maintained or breached. It is all digital, there is nothing to recount.

I have worked in the computer products industry for 20 years, and this is NOT a “glitch” as the media will happily report. These are truly systematic programs. A glitch is when the screen freezes up, or displays incorrect characters or garbage. Something random. Switching your selection from one item to another item is systematic, and programmed. We should never, ever trust the results of these machines, regardless of who wins.

Let me know where else I might post these findings. I know there was a national e-voting problem site set up, and I (of all activists) cannot find that site now. It was a place to post photos and stories of good voting gone bad in 2006.

- Posted by Peter J. for USTV Media (Email Peter Here)

I found this interesting. I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised that Diebold thinks they should have the power to control those who disagree with them. I guess they forgot that the dictatorship they are promoting is not yet fully installed. This is a case of counting their chickens before they are hatched - but of course Diebold are experts at counting things that aren’t there.

“We stand by the film,” said Jeff Cusson, a spokesman for HBO, which is a unit of Time Warner Inc.

“We have no intention of withdrawing it from our schedule. It appears that the film Diebold is responding to is not the film HBO is airing.”

David Bear, a spokesman for Diebold, said the company bought another firm, Global Elections, in 2002 that served about 8 percent of balloting in 2000, including voters in Florida. The company, which hasn’t seen the film, based its complaints on material from the HBO Web site, Bear said.

This is Diebold’s second recent defense of its system. On Sept. 26, Byrd wrote to Jann Wenner, editor and publisher of Rolling Stone, saying a story written by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., “Will the Next Election Be Hacked?” was “error-riddled” and that readers “deserve a better researched and reported article.”

The HBO documentary is based on the work of Bev Harris, the Renton woman who founded BlackBoxVoting.org, which monitors election accuracy. In 2004 the attorney general of California took up a whistle-blower claim filed by Harris against Diebold and settled with the company for $2.6 million in
December.

What is really worth noting is how Diebold is complaining about a film they admit to have never even seen.

Read the complete Bloomberg News article Here

- Ed Lacy, USTV Media

What more proof do we need we have sold our democratic right to the electoral process down to the commercial hucksters, corporate frauds and plutocratic oligarchs that may be directly involved in wanting this to be this way. The brazenly obvious problems inherent in these systems is way too pronounced to be ignored out of simple lack of information or bureaucratic inertia. Interests involved are determined that these be used regardless.

The researchers obtained the machine, a Diebold AccuVote-TS, from a private party in May. They spent the summer analyzing the machine and developing the vote-stealing demonstration.

“We found that the machine is vulnerable to a number of extremely serious attacks that undermine the accuracy and credibility of the vote counts it produces,” wrote Felten and his co-authors, graduate students Ariel Feldman and Alex Halderman.

In a 10-minute video on their Web site, the researchers demonstrate how the vote-stealing software works. The video shows the software sabotaging a mock presidential election between George Washington and Benedict Arnold. Arnold is reported as the winner even though Washington gets more votes. (The video is edited from a longer continuously shot video; the long single-shot version will be available for downloading from the center’s site as well.)

The researchers also demonstrate how the machines “are susceptible to computer viruses that can spread themselves automatically and invisibly from machine to machine during normal pre- and post-election activity.”

Read the full report Here, which also contains links for articles on a Princeton prof hacking an electronic voting machine, along with online video demonstrations of this crime against democracy.

Computer programmer Clinton Eugene Curtis testifies under oath before the U.S. House Judiciary Members in Ohio back in 2004 (video here). Stephen Pizzo writes:

If you can watch this entire video, and still use an electronic voting machine, you deserve the government you get. If your state or district has decided to use electronic voting machines this November demand an absentee ballot today. Watch this video. Then join those of us who have decided that since paper was good enough for our constitution, it’s good enough for our vote too.

Oh, and when you’re done watching the whole video… pass it along. November is only a a few weeks off and the last thing Republicans want to see is either house returned to Democratic control. Because if that happens, hearings happen. And if hearings happen… well, who knows - someone(s) could go to jail. So, demand a paper ballot or an absentee ballot in Nov. and leave the cheaters with a pocket full of worthless Diebold electrons.

Watch The Video

If you haven’t been paying attention (which isn’t surprising considering the almost total lack of coverage of this), the recent special House seat election in San Diego has been hijacked and usurped by decree from Dennis Hastert.

This action shows that your vote does not count - anywhere. If they (in this case and most cases Republicans) want to take your vote, they will.

In the simplest of terms, this is a new low for America. Yes, I know, it seems like we’ve bottomed out thousands of times already in recent years. I have to account for the paradigm shift this news has brought me. Consider, for the past two and a half years I’ve been writing and saying to all who can read and hear that there is no basis for confidence in the reported results of American elections. In a quote featured on the back cover of my book, “We Do Not Consent”, Lehto says the “no basis for confidence…formulation approaches scientific certainty.” When votes are counted in secret, the conditions of the election guarantee inconclusive outcomes that will not meet unanimous public acceptance.

It is a pathetic state of affairs when this crisis information gets more coverage in New Zealand than our own nation.

San Diego Superior Court Judge Yuri Hofmann rendered his decision in the election challenge in California’s 50th Congressional District. He dismissed the request for a recount and for discovery of the facts of the Busby-Bilbray election stating specifically that “Once the House asserts exclusive jurisdiction and selects a candidate, the court no longer has jurisdiction” (emphasis added). The judge argued that the June 13 swearing in alone was sufficient to establish Bilbray’s “election.” The event had the power to take away any and all citizen rights and immediately rescind authority over their own elections.

“If they can do that, they can do anything. Why even have an election? They could just swear in whoever they want because the election need not be final.”
- Paul Lehto, Attorney for Plaintiffs Aug. 25, 2006

Read these excellent overviews on this disturbing story Here and another Here.

Read more on this court decision and Attorney Paul Lehto’s comments on Brad Blog

We can’t say we didn’t see it coming…

Problems with elections in Ohio’s most populous county are so severe that it’s unlikely they can be completely fixed by November, or even by the 2008 presidential election, a report commissioned by Cuyahoga County and released Tuesday says.

Read The Full Article Here

The Stain of Cunningham Is the Stain of Secrecy, Now On Our Elections
By Paul R Lehto
For The San Diego Union-Tribune
August 4th, 2006

As one of the attorneys (along with Ken Simpkins) investigating the June 6 Busby/Bilbray election in California’s 50th Congressional District, it’s interesting to see such clear parallels between the criminal convictions of Congressman Cunningham and the issues regarding electronic voting. The problems with both grow out of secrecy, because secrecy makes impossible the checks and balances our system relies on.

On July 24, 2006, an independent investigation found that imprisoned former Cong. “Duke” Cunningham specifically took advantage of the secrecy surrounding the House Intelligence Committee panel to slip in items that would benefit him and his associates. “The lack of oversight” of the Intelligence committee’s secret processes is the secrecy that enabled $2.4 million in bribes. http://tinyurl.com/n3ecp

Secrecy creates and allows unaccountable government. Whether you call what’s missing in overly secret government “transparency” or “safeguards”, our system of government is not designed to work on trust, it’s designed to work on checks and balances — a form of distrust and of “power checking power.”

When checks and balances are incomplete like in the San Diego Registrar’s office, systems are riddled with loopholes and opaqueness. These holes in checks and balances are papered over by setting high prices to obtain basic information about elections (like charging $150,000 for a recount, and 30 cents/page for copies) and by stonewalling records requests.

Today, secret and invisible computerized vote processing renders ballots into invisible electrons the voters can never see, and then counted secretly and unaccountably on corporate hard drives using processes that are claimed as proprietary, confidential or “trade secret.” Totals just pop out of these secret vote processors; we’re required to take them on faith.

Given this invisibility, the simple reason that computers are so dangerous in the context of elections is that computers do precisely as they are told to do, without any regard for law, morality or ethics, or fear of going to jail.

This fact reveals the folly of the government’s talking points about the testing and certification they sometimes do. The ONLY thing that matters is what the computers were asked to do under Election conditions and on Election Day. Because voting computers can store commands for later execution, voting machine “sleepovers” multiply risk exponentially. In any event, it takes only two minutes by a single person on a single machine to tell a voting computer to alter an entire election even on a non-networked computer, allowing a single person to cheat on levels never before possible. www.nosleepovers.org

This inappropriate faith required for electronic results flies in the face of anomalous June 6 canvassing returns, where voter turnouts in many absentee precincts are thousands of percent higher than the number of registered voters for those precincts. After we stated this on the radio, the ROV’s website went down, and it came back up without the conveniently formatted 288 page official canvass report showing those impossible absentee precinct results, but readers can still find it at www.electionfraudnews.com. No matter what, the number of voters is not being reconciled with the number of votes for both polling place and absentee voters - a critical check and balance against ballot box stuffing.

San Diego County changes as planned to 100% touchscreens this fall, which makes the secrecy total. At that point, voters won’t get to see their votes recorded, much less counted properly. Because it’s not a solution to have the government determine its own power and money via secret elections, the only solution is to open up the process to complete transparency, using sunlight as disinfectant.

The only way we can lose something as precious and popular as Lincoln’s government “of the people, by the people and for the people” is by letting checks and balances be falsely redefined as “sore loser.” As voters, we’re all either winners or losers in every political race. Winners can’t sue themselves, so if losers are shamed into not challenging, democracy is left without defenders. The numerous groups already defending democracy would love your support. www.velvetrevolution.us

Secret vote counting, shuttled in undemocratically without debate, is a form of absolute power. It’s quickly asserting control of our elections nationwide, and it is too late to safely put checks and balances in place when the tyrants are fully in power, re-electing themselves electronically. Soon, the stain made possible by secrecy with Cunningham will set in as the stain on democracy.

Ask yourself: “O Say Does That Star-Spangled Banner Yet Wave, O’er The Land of the Free, and the Home of the Brave?” A land of free and brave citizens will never allow their elections to disappear behind walls of secrecy and unaccountability, stripped of public oversight. When both soldiers and civil rights activists over the years have chosen democracy over life itself, can we just let a real, verifiable democracy slip away on our watch?

This must be done. Not because people have an inability to ‘get over it’ or ‘move on’ with life, but because where the heck are we ‘moving on’ to? Or is this something that is indeed ‘over’, if we don’t fully come to accounts with why these statistical improbabilities took place, and why the results of these past elections were so egregiously skewered.

We’ve all heard the story. Nov. 2, 2004, was shaping up as a day of celebration for Democrats. The exit polls were predicting a victory for Senator John Kerry. Many Americans, including most political observers, sat down to watch the evening television coverage convinced that Kerry would be the next president.

But the counts that were being reported on TV bore little resemblance to the exit poll projections. In key state after state, tallies differed significantly from the projections. In every case, that shift favored President George W. Bush. Nationwide, exit polls projected a 51 to 48 percent Kerry victory, the mirror image of Bush’s 51 to 48 percent win. But the exit poll discrepancy is not the only cause for concern.

Read the complete report, along with Zachary Goldfarb’s report for The Washington Post on how people have shown that an entire election could be thrown by a single person.

USA Today also does an expose here on the vulnerabilities of e-voting machines.

More disturbing news from one of the world’s preeminent investigative journalists Greg Palast, whose work is often featured on USTV. Palast was the journalist working for the BBC who broke the story of the illegal voter purges in Florida executed by the Katherine Harris and the Jeb Bush administration, which tipped the balance in favor of George W. Bush for Florida and thus the presidency.

The Republican National Committee has a special offer for African-American soldiers: Go to Baghdad, lose your vote.

A confidential campaign directed by GOP party chiefs in October 2004 sought to challenge the ballots of tens of thousands of voters in the last presidential election, virtually all of them cast by residents of Black-majority precincts.

Files from the secret vote-blocking campaign were obtained by BBC Television Newsnight, London. They were attached to emails accidentally sent by Republican operatives to a non-party website.

One group of voters wrongly identified by the Republicans as registering to vote from false addresses: servicemen and women sent overseas.

Here’s how the scheme worked: The RNC mailed these voters letters in envelopes marked, “Do not forward”, to be returned to the sender. These letters were mailed to servicemen and women, some stationed overseas, to their US home addresses. The letters then returned to the Bush-Cheney campaign as “undeliverable.”

The lists of soldiers of “undeliverable” letters were transmitted from state headquarters, in this case Florida, to the RNC in Washington. The party could then challenge the voters’ registration and thereby prevent their absentee ballot being counted.

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The BBC obtained several dozen confidential emails sent by the Republican’s national Research Director and Deputy Communications chief, Tim Griffin to GOP Florida campaign chairman Brett Doster and other party leaders. Attached were spreadsheets marked, “Caging.xls.” Each of these contained several hundred to a few thousand voters and their addresses.

A check of the demographics of the addresses on the “caging lists,” as the GOP leaders called them indicated that most were in African-American majority zip codes.

Ion Sanco, the non-partisan elections supervisor of Leon County (Tallahassee) when shown the lists by this reporter said: “The only thing I can think of - African American voters listed like this - these might be individuals that will be challenged if they attempted to vote on Election Day.”

These GOP caging lists were obtained by the same BBC team that first exposed the wrongful purge of African-American “felon” voters in 2000 by then-Secretary of State Katherine Harris. Eliminating the voting rights of those voters — 94,000 were targeted — likely caused Al Gore’s defeat in that race.

Go Here for the rest of this important report, including copies of the GOP scrub sheets and transcripts of his interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! regarding this report and his latest book “Armed Madhouse”.