Sat, 11/08/2008: 2008 Presidential Turnout Flat How Did That Happen?
Sat, 11/08/2008: Voting-machine firm sued for GPL violations Diebold subsidiary PES allegedly used a GPL-licensed copy of the Ghostscript Postscript interpreter in its optical-scan voting machines, without abiding by the license's terms. If Artifex's allegations prove correct, then it will further demonstrate the broad scope of Diebold's technical incompetence and irresponsible business practices. The more you look at it, the more fish you smell.
Sat, 10/18/2008: 2008 Presidential Elections Hacked (Yet)??? Most democracies hold their elections on the weekend. Why not us? The garbage about "market day" is an anachronism. ACORN is required by law to turn in every voter registration they gather, after flagging the ones that are dubious. The election boards are the ones who decide which voters are eligible, and THEY supervise the voting process. If there is voter fraud (and statistics show there are just a handful, nationwide!) it's because of the election boards, not the registration volunteers -- after all they merely present the applications! What we should be concerned about is ELECTION FRAUD, the mass disenfranchisement of whole classes of voters, via restrictive rules, arbitrary deadlines, and computer equipment shenanigans. Those result in large numbers of votes NOT being counted. We should do what most democracies do -- vote on paper in sealed boxes, opened and counted in front of local multiparty citizens, and the results transmitted in a verifiable way every step of the way. We don't have to go very far to see how it's done -- CANADA. They just voted last Tuesday, and not a peep of "voter fraud" or "election fraud" there.
2006 Congressional Elections Hacked The numbers tell us there absolutely was hacking going on. Anyone who has ever wondered what is really in a hot dog should be aware that the machines are designed, programmed, deployed, and serviced by avowedly partisan vendors, and can easily be set up to generate entirely false counts with no one the wiser, least of all the voters. There has been a rush by some to celebrate 2006 as a fair election, but a Democratic victory does not equate with a fair election. It's wishful thinking at best to believe that the danger of massive election rigging is somehow past
Was the 2004 Election Stolen?, by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. The president's party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004 Why erect those kinds of hurdles unless you're afraid of voters? Bush et al. shout of "terrorism" not because they think it will win votes. They don't care whether people vote for them or not. Rather, they've been hammering at "terrorism" in the hope that it will fly as a convincing reason why the GOP retained its grip on Congress, even though the party has no mass support. The strategy reflects, in part, on the immense credulity (and, to some extent, complicity) of the political establishment, which cannot, will not, does not want to see that this regime has never even been elected.	7/03/2006 -- HOW TO HACK A DIEBOLD VOTING MACHINE HOWTO Rather than securing U.S. elections via scientificaly-conducted independent audits, open source secure voting systems with voter verified paper ballots, professionally-designed security measures designed by independent security experts, and detailed election data monitoring -- there may be a free-for-all vote-rigging frenzy to see who will be sworn into office. 5/23/2006 -- 4 STEPS TO HOW THE GOP STOLE THE '04 ELECTION (and will repeat again)
	GAO REPORT CONFIRMS CONCERNS ABOUT SECURITY OF ELECTRONIC VOTING MACHINES Concerns about electronic voting machines have been realized and have caused problems with recent elections, resulting in the loss and miscount of votes.
U.S. House of Representatives N E W S R E L E A S E For Immediate Release: October 21, 2005 Davis, Waxman, Sensenbrenner, Conyers, Boehlert, and Gordon React To GAO Report on Security Problems With Electronic Voting Systems (alternate links here  and  here to GAO report.)
John Conyer's blog
ElectionArchive.org The 2004 Presidential Election: Exit Poll Error or Vote Miscount? Estimates of the probabilities that exit poll non-responders split in a way that would generate the reported Kerry election results in Ohio given the exit poll results show that a full 24 (out of 49) precincts had reported Kerry election results that had a chance of less than 5% of occurring. Only 4 precincts gave Bush election share results that had only a 5% chance of occurring. (That is, the conditions for the exit poll error -- the voter reporting bias in favor of Kerry -- necessary to explain why Bush won despite what the exit polls said, are extremely unlikely.) A cloud of suspicion is cast on the 2004 presidential election results because the possibility that a "vote miscounts" explanation is required to generate the reported exit poll discrepancies is still open. It is a matter of the utmost national importance that detailed precinct level exit polling and election data that would allow for investigation by independent analysts be publicly released.
Diebold in Trouble

Steal This Vote: The US electoral system is deeply dysfunctional, and always has been...
Both the Republicans and the Democrats over the past century have shown more interest in preserving than reforming a system that does not involve all of the voters.

...if you have a political culture that's not interested in promoting the integrity of the system, then it doesn't matter what forms you have; there'll always be the possibility that somebody's going to mess around with the system. You have to change the political culture, and how you do that, well -- that's a tough one.

If some of its key publications are any indicator, much of the American left seems unable to face the reality that the election of 2004 was stolen. So in all likelihood, unless something radical is done, 2008 will be too.

Cobb/LaMarche Really Making Every Vote Count

"Florida 2000 was so bizarre, so surreal, and, for a large number of Americans, so patently illegitimate that they can't imagine the likes of it ever happening again."
The October, 2004 Vanity Fair article, The Path To Florida

So Bush Did Steal the White House, By Robert Parry, November 22, 2001

Bush lost not only the national popular vote by more than a half million ballots, but he would have lost the key state of Florida and thus the presidency, if Florida's authorities had been allowed to count the votes that met the state's legal requirement of demonstrating the clear intent of the voter.

A local report of VOTER INTIMIDATION

Vote Fraud Summary

The part of the American electorate that is outraged by Bush's actions over the past five years must get engaged in the political process and show both consistency and toughness. If the nation's future is indeed at stake, then the intensity of the political participation must match the importance of the goals.

The battle of Ohio rages on, machine by machine and hearing by hearing. Because the recount process has been so severely tainted, the call for a revote is growing.

This is the second presidential election in a row in which Republicans have succeeded in suppressing the vote, Conyers said, and he wants to ensure that the system is changed so that it won't happen again.

Everyone is beginning to reexamine the appropriateness of the Electoral College. We realize that provisional balloting needs to be streamlined and simplified. We know that there should be paper trails in computers. We're beginning to wonder if we haven't privatized the electoral system so that the computer tabulators can do more and know more than the electoral commissions of the counties themselves.

Vote Fraud, The Recount

I've been a skeptic of the "Kerry really won the election" argument since back on 2 November....But what I heard today was irrefutable evidence of massive voter suppression on a scale that I never even knew was possible.

The view from the end of the witness table at the Conyers hearing, DailyKos, by DC Pol Sci

Serious consideration of the possibility that George Bush may, for the second time, have acquired his office through fraud and manipulation, has been effectively banished from the mainstream media. The issue has been kept alive by the progressive internet and, occasionally, the foreign press. When, in rare instances, the charge of election fraud is mentioned by the media, it is routinely dismissed with contempt and ridicule.

By Ernest Patridge, The Crisis Papers

Systematic fraud or mistabulation is a premature conclusion, but the election's unexplained exit poll discrepancies make it an unavoidable hypothesis, one that is the responsibility of the media, academia, polling agencies, and the public to investigate.

Steven F. Freeman, U. of Penn

Zogby pollster Colin Shea, after thoroughly testing the discrepancies between total registration, turnout, party registration and the official tallies in Florida and Ohio, concluded, "The facts defy all logical explanations save one: massive and systematic voter fraud. We cannot accept the result of the 2004 presidential election as legitimate until these discrepancies are rigorously and completely explained. Until then, George Bush's shameful legacy will have been that of seizing power through two illegitimate elections conducted on his brother's watch, and engineering a fundamental corruption at the heart of the greatest democracy the world has known."

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