This is an amazing blog entry submitted to The Brad Blog by Stephen Heller, the man who helped expose Diebold fraudulently peddling knowingly defective and inadequate (to be charitable) electronic voting devices to states around the country. Though this man is held to account for his public service and made a felon for exposing felonies committed by this corporation, he responds with this must read tour de force of an argument/accusation against all the criminals currently running free thanks to the patronage of the GOP.

In brief, I became known to some as the “Diebold Whistleblower” when, in January of 2004, I stole and exposed legal documents [PDF] proving that Diebold Election Systems, Inc. was using and planned to continue using illegal, uncertified software in their California voting machines. (By the way, Diebold recently changed its name to Premier Election Solutions, but don’t let that fool you; it’s still the same bunch of idiots)…..

The punishment for my crime has nearly bankrupted my wife and me, while Lewis “Scooter” lied to a grand jury and was convicted of obstruction of justice and perjury and gets to walk away from his crime without a scratch because, like so many others, IOKIYAR…

Read The Complete Post

This video, “More Dead Cause of Ohio”, is based on a Neil Young song, making the quite logical ties to the theft of the election in Ohio in 2004 with the ever-increasing casualty rates amongst US service personnel. It includes scenes from the new David Earnhardt movie “Uncounted”. Earnhardt is a supporter of The Ohio Election Justice Campaign, who recommend the movie.

See the video Here

An update on the e-voting election fraud issue from Dr. Bob Fitrakis, whom has been a bulldog on this from the start. He ranks as one of the most informed and knowledgeable individuals in America regarding the highly dubious history of electronic voting (and who has appeared on UnCommon Sense TV discussing this very topic, in which we predicted what would happen in Ohio and elsewhere if the flagrantly problematic issues of e-voting were not addressed. Events which, though warned about, sadly came to pass).

Did the most powerful Republicans in America have the computer capacity, software skills and electronic infrastructure in place on Election Night 2004 to tamper with the Ohio results to ensure George W. Bush’s re-election?

The answer appears to be yes. There is more than ample documentation to show that on Election Night 2004, Ohio’s “official” Secretary of State website - which gave the world the presidential election results - was redirected from an Ohio government server to a group of servers that contain scores of Republican web sites, including the secret White House e-mail accounts that have emerged in the scandal surrounding Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’s firing of eight federal prosecutors.

Read The Full Report

Defining the vote outcome probabilities of wrong-precinct voting has revealed, in a sample of 166,953 votes (1 of every 34 Ohio votes), the Kerry-Bush margin changes 6.15% when the population is sorted by probable outcomes of wrong-precinct voting.

The Kerry to Bush 6.15% vote-switch differential is seen when the large sample is sorted by probability a Kerry wrong-precinct vote counts for Bush. When the same large voter sample is sorted by the probability Kerry votes count for third-party candidates, Kerry votes are instead equal in both subsets.

Read the revised article with graphs of new findings:

The 2004 Ohio Presidential Election: Cuyahoga County Analysis
How Kerry Votes Were Switched to Bush Votes
http://jqjacobs.net/politics/ohio.html

PowerPoint Version…
http://jqjacobs.net/politics/vote_switching.ppt

- Posted by JQ

Pointing out the obvious of what many have known since the advent of the use of electronic voting machines…

Paperless electronic voting machines used throughout the Washington region and much of the country “cannot be made secure,” according to draft recommendations issued this week by a federal agency that advises the US Election Assistance Commission.

The assessment by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, one of the government’s premier research centers, is the most sweeping condemnation of such voting systems by a federal agency.

There were already many reputable folks trying to tell them this for the past four years (who were mostly ignored, disregarded or worse, disparaged and smeared as ‘luddites’ or ‘conspiracy nuts’). That said, I’m glad they did come to this conclusion and not allow their agency to be used as yet another bucket of whitewash for the cabal of cronies pushing this highly expensive junk onto the American political system.

Read The Article

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

—————————–

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