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Announcement :: Arts |
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SLAUGHTER OF IRAQI BABIES SHALL NOT BE THWARTED BY FRAIDY CAT EURO-FAGGOTS! |
Current rating: -4 |
by State of The pResident posted by DAN Disinfo
(No verified email address) |
30 Jan 2003
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I am here to assure to all citizens of the United States that no matter what, our righteous slaughter of innocent Iraqi women and babies will NOT be thwarted by a gaggle of fraidy cat Euro-faggots from Germany and France. No sir, we will not fear them - and not just because we can't understand that stupid gibberish of theirs they insist on talking instead of regular English. No, we will not fear them because they are pussy has-been countries, that even together couldn't hog-tie a longhorn in half the time I could solo - even with one nut tied behind my ass cheek. |
PRESIDENT REASSURES U.S.: "OUR RIGHTEOUS SLAUGHTER OF IRAQI BABIES SHALL NOT BE THWARTED BY FRAIDY CAT EURO-FAGGOTS!"
Statement by the President
THE PRESIDENT: Good afternoon. Please be seated. This is going to be quick – I want to get back to that freshly-cracked box of Slim-Jims in the war room.
This morning, I looked on in utter disgust as FOX NEWS reported that a majority of Americans have traitorously informed pollsters that not only do they doubt my ability to handle America's foreigner policy with alien nations, but that they also think I'm moving too fast to send legions of the expendable darkies in our military to die gruesomely while exacting my completely non-personal vengeance on Saddam Hussein.
Of course, I knew immediately that something was terribly wrong. Real Americans would never allow themselves to forget that I became twice as intelligent and competent the moment planes started slamming into buildings on 9/11/2001. They would never forget how I was instantly transformed from a non-elected colossal joke into a throbbing pillar of Presidential talent incapable of making mistakes. No, they would never do any of these things... unless some external force was influencing them and turning them against me.
Confident in that knowledge, I was hardly surprised to learn several hours later that both Germany and France have grown increasingly vocal in their cowardly opposition to my oil-fueled megalomaniacal whims of daddy's-boy fancy. Yes, unlike the snaggletoothed limeys who do whatever the hell I say, Germany and France seem intent on attempting to flex whatever passes for muscle on those scrawny, pathetic arms of theirs. Yes, if you can believe it, they actually want me to DELAY giving my approval ratings a fat boost by turning a bunch of worthless Arabiacs into Allah-flavored Pop-Tarts. Hell, everything these people do is like a rerun of one of their goddamned queer art movies, and I'm not interested in watching it - especially not the same week Disney's got Flipper in heavy rotation.
And that's why today, I am here to assure to all citizens of the United States that no matter what, our righteous slaughter of innocent Iraqi women and babies will NOT be thwarted by a gaggle of fraidy cat Euro-faggots from Germany and France. No sir, we will not fear them - and not just because we can't understand that stupid gibberish of theirs they insist on talking instead of regular English. No, we will not fear them because they are pussy has-been countries, that even together couldn't hog-tie a longhorn in half the time I could solo - even with one nut tied behind my ass cheek.
In closing, I hereby command all Americans who both love their country and hate Germany and France to PROVE IT by purchasing and proudly wearing all manner of fine "Europe is for HOMOS" gear from the official WHITEHOUSE.ORG gift boutique. By demonstrating our solidarity thusly, it will make our victory over the smoldering ruins of yet another impoverished little country that much more glorious!
And then we shall revel in our collective magnificence, and vote together overwhelmingly to re-elect yours truly for another four years of gutting the environment, stocking the courts with anti-civil-liberties right-wingers, and lining the pockets of my billionaire cronies!
(Applause.)
Thank you. That is all.
www.whitehouse.org/news/2003/012103.asp
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Comments
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Lool At The Monkey!!! |
by PoStEr AKA DAN Disinfo
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 6
30 Jan 2003
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!@@#@! |
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Re: SLAUGHTER OF IRAQI BABIES SHALL NOT BE THWARTED BY FRAIDY CAT EURO-FAGGOTS! |
by jenniFur Riot
jennifurriot (nospam) yahoo.com (unverified) |
Current rating: -1
30 Jan 2003
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fuck you and your homophobic rhetoric |
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CAN THE VOTING MACHINES BE TRUSTED? |
by aRAWCK AKA DAN Disinfo
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 3
31 Jan 2003
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On May 23, 1997, Victor Baird, who resigned Monday as director of the Senate Ethics Committee, sent a letter to Sen. Charles Hagel requesting “additional, clarifying information” for the personal financial disclosure report that all lawmakers are required to file annually.
Among other matters, Baird asked the Nebraska Republican to identify and estimate the value of the assets of the McCarthy Group Inc., a private merchant banking company based in Omaha, with which Hagel had a special relationship.
Hagel had reported a financial stake worth $1 million to $5 million in the privately held firm. But he did not report the company’s underlying assets, choosing instead to cite his holdings as an “excepted investment fund,” and therefore exempt from detailed disclosure rules.
Questioned by The Hill, several disclosure law experts said financial institutions set up in the same fashion as the McCarthy Group Inc. do not appear to meet the definition of an “excepted investment fund,” — at least as the committee had defined the category until Monday.
Hagel has not been accused of any legal or ethical violation and his staff denies that there has been any wrongdoing.
William Canfield, a former Senate Ethics Committee staffer, said the committee originally intended an “excepted investment fund,” an exemption to cover mutual funds that buy or sell thousands of different holdings over the course of a year.
Hagel, who was reelected last November by a lopsided majority, declined to comment on the ethics filing matter.
The McCarthy Group Inc. owns fewer than 20 assets.
Hagel’s filing underscores the currently murky world of Senate disclosures rules in which definitions are subject to change and interpretations can be accepted without further question.
However, that definition has apparently changed under the panel’s new staff director, Robert Walker. who met with Hagel’s staff after The Hill began its inquiries.
Under either the old or new definition, Lou Ann Linehan, Hagel’s chief of staff, denied that Hagel had failed to meet the Senate Ethics Committee’s reporting requirements in his annual financial disclosure forms.
Linehan emphasized that Hagel’s financial forms had been reviewed and approved by the Ethics Committee.
“We did it according to what the Ethics Committee told us to do,” she said: “I have box loads of paper from all the times we went down there and had them sign off on it. We went down and talked to them. If there is a mistake, we haven’t made a mistake. The ethics people made a mistake.”
One underlying issue is whether Hagel properly disclosed his financial ties to Election Systems & Software (ES&S), a company that makes nearly half the voting machines used in the United States, including all those used in his native Nebraska.
ES&S is a subsidiary of McCarthy Group Inc., which is jointly held by the holding firm and the Omaha World-Herald Co., which publishes the state’s largest newspaper. The voting machine company makes sophisticated optical scan and touch-screen vote-counting devices that many states have begun buying in recent years.
An official at Nebraska’s Election Administration estimated that ES&S machines tallied 85 percent of the votes cast in Hagel’s 2002 and 1996 election races.
In 1996, ES&S operated as American Information Systems Inc. (AIS). The company became ES&S after merging with Business Records Corp. in 1997.
In a disclosure form filed in 1996, covering the previous year, Hagel, then a Senate candidate, did not report that he was still chairman of AIS for the first 10 weeks of the year, as he was required to do.
Under the ethics panel’s regulations, an “excepted investment fund” is one that is: “publicly traded (or available) or widely diversified.”
Hagel’s compliance with prior Senate regulations hinges on whether the holding company is indeed publicly available and therefore may be properly listed as an excepted investment fund.
As recently as last Thursday, the committee defined a “publicly available” stock or investment as one that can be bought on a public market or for which information is publicly available.
For a stock or investment to be regarded as publicly available — under the panel’s previous definition — the committee should be able to find publicly available information on the company’s activities.
That definition comported with one provided by Stanley Brand, a prominent ethics lawyer who has advised many lawmakers on how to fill out their personal financial disclosure reports.
Brand said an investment is publicly available: “If it is purchasable. If there is a market for it.”
“It could be a regional exchange. It could be a commodities market,” he said.
Brand said it would be hard to show an investment is excepted if “it’s so closely held that it doesn’t have a readily ascertainable value and there’s not a way to trade it on a market, even a regional market or in an electronic way.”
That kind of information would be found in such standard reference outlets as Moody’s Financial Services Information, Standard & Poor’s register, or Barron’s The Dow Jones and Financial Weekly.
A search’s of all three revealed no references to the McCarthy Group Inc.
Furthermore, a comprehensive report ordered by The Hill from Dun & Bradstreet, a leading financial information firm serving creditors and investors, indicated that McCarthy Group Inc.’s financial information is not publicly available.
The report, dated last March, states that McCarthy Group Inc. controller Barb Mcqueen declined to provide any information of the kind that an outside investor would normally need in weighing the company’s prospects.
To back up her argument that McCarthy Group Inc. need not be listed with a financial reference and yet still qualify as publicly available, Linehan noted the instructions that come with the Senate disclosure form.
They state: “If you are unable to ascertain through publicly available reference material or an investment advisor or broker whether an asset is publicly available, you may wish to report it, along with the additional information.”
The instructional language suggests that a lawmaker report the underlying assets of an investment if it is difficult to determine whether it is “publicly available.”
But Linehan claimed that she was sure at least one investment advisor and broker confirmed that McCarthy Group Inc. was publicly available. She was unable,however, to offer the name of any investment broker or advisor who consulted with Hagel or his staff on the matter.
Linehan was unable to provide any examples of outside trades in the firm’s securities.
Instead she cited a revised standard implemented by the committee only this week, after The Hill began its inquiry.
On Monday, the committee changed its definition of “excepted investment fund” after Walker met with Linehan. Baird served as the panel’s director for nearly 16 years.
The committee abandoned the more stringent definition of the term, which under the panel’s rules, Hagel apparently failed to meet.
Under Walker’s revised definition, the committee will decide, based on the specific facts of each case, whether an investment has been made in a publicly available firm, a circumstance that would allow it to be listed as an “excepted investment fund.” But the panel will neither discuss any individual case nor offer any concrete standard under which a case may be judged.
Both definitions, while arcane, are at the core of the matter because they determine whether the two-term senator is obliged to disclose his underlying investment in ES&S, rather than merely cite McCarthy Group Inc., the holding company.
The newly weakened definition makes it virtually impossible to determine whether Hagel — or any other lawmaker — must report investments in non-traded private companies.
Several securities law experts, including Michael Perino, a professor teaching at Columbia University Law School, said “publicly available” is a term coined by the ethics panel that only it can define.
The evolving standard, which the Ethics Committee has yet to put down on paper or codify, reveals the murkiness of some ethics rules and how difficult it can be to determine if a lawmaker transgressed, even though a violation may seem unquestionable at first look.
Michael R. McCarthy, chairman of the McCarthy Group Inc. and Hagel’s campaign treasurer, acknowledged that the holding company is not publicly traded or widely diversified (under the committee’s definition), but claimed that it is publicly available.
“Our company is a privately held company where the shares are available to the public,” said McCarthy. “Our shares trade each year. It’s not SEC registered but it’s available to the public by private exchange or private treaty.”
McCarthy said Hagel’s $1-5 million investment made him a “minor shareholder.”
Hagel’s ties to ES&S go beyond his financial stake. He served as its chairman when it was named AIS from the early ‘90s until March of 1995. He also was an investor in AIS Investors Inc. until the beginning of 1995, McCarthy said.
Hagel also served as president of McCarthy & Co, the financial advisory group, from July of 1992 until the beginning of 1996.
Campaign finance reports show that McCarthy has served as treasurer for Hagel for Nebraska and later Hagel for Senate from 1999 until as recently as December of 2002.
McCarthy’s son, Kevin, works in Hagel’s press shop.
Hagel’s unrecorded stake in the voting systems company poses an apparent conflict of interest on election reform issues.
Three companies, including ES&S, stand to make a large profits from election reform legislation enacted last year by Congress.
Many precincts around the country are expected to upgrade to optical scan and touch-screen voting machines as a result of recently enacted election reform.
“There’s the potential for a real gold rush for federal voting equipment manufacturers,” said Doug Chapin, director of Electionline.org, a clearinghouse of news on election reform sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trusts.
ES&S is one of three companies, along with Diebold Election Systems and Sequoia Voting Systems, that will benefit from the trend.
Linehan called absurd the notion that Hagel attempted to hide his involvement in ES&S.
“There’s no secret here,” said Linehan. “The other big investor in ES&S is the Omaha World-Herald. It’s not a secret. They are the owners in McCarthy Group and ES&S.”
Linehan also noted that the Omaha World-Herald had previously reported Hagel’s ties to ES&S and that McCarthy Group Inc. reveals on its website that ES&S is a subsidiary.
However, Linehan acknowledged that McCarthy Group Inc. has provided that information on the web only since 2000. By then, Hagel had already filed five personal financial disclosure reports listing McCarthy Group Inc. as an “excepted investment fund.”
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Re: CAN THE VOTING MACHINES BE TRUSTED? |
by Bev posted by DAN Disinfo
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 3
31 Jan 2003
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Black Box Voting
Ballot-Tampering
in the 21st Century
For the first time in history, it may be possible to rig an election on a national scale. Vote-rigging has been part of every election process in history but never before have so few people had access to so many votes at once!
The solutions won't cost us a cent, and they are simple! CONTACT: Bev Harris
Phone: 425-228-7131
Fax: 425-228-3965
E-mail: feedback (at) talion.com
Location: Seattle, Washington
Time Zone: Pacific
AUTHOR:
Bev Harris
ISBN:
1-929462-45-X
PUB DATE:
May 2003
http://www.blackboxvoting.com/
Story Angles
1. Could Democracy be stolen from us in 2004? We've developed safeguards to prevent tampering with ballots. We've figured out ways to impede tampering with the voters themselves. But we DO NOT have adequate safeguards to prevent the most dangerous election-rigging of all: Tampering with programmers, vendors and technicians! Why has everything changed, and what are the dangers to Democracy?
[More on risks to Democracy]
2. The Distinguished History of Vote-Rigging Let's face it: We're a flawed species. The best in us shows up in our desire to make our government "of the people, by the people and for the people." But the worst in us shows up every election when, no matter what the system, somebody figures out how to cheat. Here is a brief history of election-tampering. (But computerized vote-tampering alters the scale of things we're no longer talking about the machines rigging a city; Now, we're looking at the ability to commit massive election fraud.)
[More: The Distinguished History of Vote-Rigging]
3. Known errors They knew about it. They admitted it was their own fault. But they never told us about it not when making sales presentations to local county commissions, not when answering questions from the press. Voting machine errors in the range of 20 to 100 percent are not uncommon. (You heard me). Who are "they?" The voting machine manufacturers, who had a duty to disclose, but didn't. Now, it's time for us to grab the reins!
[A sampling of known errors]
4. Top 10 Ways to Rig a Voting Machine Computer and accounting experts tell us that there are not 10, not 20, but literally hundreds of ways to rig the system. Faster than the best programmer can create computerized safeguards, new scoundrels will pop up with ways to beat the system. To conceptualize this, think virus: every time we get protected, a new one is created. With hundreds of millions at stake in getting the "right" candidate into office, the motive is already in place. (The candidate need not even know that his election was rigged!) Here are just 10 of the methods that our sources have identified:
[Top Ten Ways to Rig a Voting Machine]
5. The international problem This is not a United States problem. It isn't a third world problem. It is a global problem. By planting clandestine code in the vote-counting machines, governments could win a war without using any bullets. Can these machines be used to manipulate international politics?
[More: The international problem]
6. Easy, inexpensive ways to correct the problem: Safeguards made easy and practical activism: By mixing low-tech, people-oriented solutions with high tech systems, we can solve this problem. It will be fun (yes, really) and it won't cost taxpayers any money. And it starts with YOU!
[More: Practical activism]
Backgrounders
Backgrounder 1. Could Democracy be stolen from us in 2004? We've developed safeguards to prevent tampering with ballots. We've figured out ways to impede tampering with the voters themselves. But we DO NOT have adequate safeguards to prevent the most dangerous election-rigging of all: Tampering with programmers, vendors and technicians! Why has everything changed, and what are the dangers to Democracy?
How does the integrity of our voting system change when we used machines to count the votes?
- Machines are more inaccurate than hand counting. The machines lose some votes (up to twice as many as hand-counts) and count some votes for the wrong candidate. Human error compounds the mistakes. Election officials must be trained, and software programming errors have resulted in mistakes as high as 100 percent.
- The machines produce new tampering and vote-rigging vulnerabilities. We do not have adequate systems to protect against tampering with programmers, vendors and technicians.
- Voting machines create hidden changes in the way our voting system works. Using the machines, in effect, replaces sworn, elected officials with unsworn, unelected technicians. In most states, elected officials can no longer look at the voter-verified evidence. Many state laws prohibit officials from looking at the paper ballots, and only allow them to look at the counts coming out of the machines, even when there is a recount.
- A safe voting system is one that many eyes can view. Machines eliminate transparency in vote-counting. The newest machines eliminate the paper trail the only voter-verified evidence of how votes really were cast, effectively saying "trust us" voters and local election officials no longer have any way to verify that votes were counted accurately.
- It used to be that we knew who our elected officials were and the names of local election officials were a matter of public record. Manufacturers, who now count our votes, are not required to reveal the names of owners or key people. The codes counting our votes are considered "proprietary" and outside officials are not allowed to examine them.
- Some voting machine manufacturers are salted with vested interests. Among the owners of voting machine companies and testing labs: active politicians, corporate lobbyists, former CIA directors, and people who have been involved in prosecutions for bribery, kickbacks, and fraud. Our "watchdog" groups are also influenced by special interests. Voting machine companies are using lobbying and political influence to influence purchase of machines, specifications and regulations.
- Vote-rigging on computerized machines may be possible on a grand scale, not just a local scale. It's hard to stuff more than a dozen ballot boxes in your trunk, and it's nigh-on impossible to get 100,000 dead people to vote. But with these machines, we sometimes lose hundreds of thousands of votes in a single city!
Why did we buy computerized vote-counting machines?
- Election officials were persuaded to buy them by lobbyists and voting companies with premiums, kickbacks, party boats, and political contributions from vested interests.
- The media demanded to know results faster, in order to win ratings wars.
- Election officials usually failed to ask the right questions. In the rare cases where election officials asked the right questions, voting company salespeople failed to disclose known error rates and known security flaws.
- The media has been engaging in a pep rally instead of covering the real issues. Instead of examining whether the machines are accurate, tamper-proof or free of criminal or special interests, the press has focused on how easy and fun it is to vote on these machines.
What are the risks to Democracy?
- As long as we've had elections, we've had people trying to rig results. Now, vote-rigging is possible on a massive scale, by tampering with the computer programs that count millions of votes.
- Sooner or later someone will start stealing elections. If they haven't already.
- At some point, the balance of power in Congress may shift to the party that was not actually elected, "mandates" will not be mandates, and we may get a president whose votes were augmented by a handful of programmers, instead of an accurate vote "of the people, by the people and for the people."
Backgrounder 2. The Distinguished History of Vote-Rigging Let's face it: We're a flawed species. The best in us shows up in our desire to make our government "of the people, by the people and for the people." But the worst in us shows up every election when, no matter what the system, somebody figures out how to cheat. Here is a brief history of election-tampering. (But computerized vote-tampering alters the scale of things we're no longer talking about the machines rigging a city; Now, we're looking at the ability to commit massive election fraud.)
Paper ballots have been used for over 2,000 years. The first known use of paper ballots in an election in the U.S. was in 1629, to select a church pastor.
Early cheaters: Because at first there was little voter privacy, candidates tried to pay people to vote for them.
People used to wander around town with their ballots, where the slips of paper got into all kinds of trouble. (This began happening in Oregon recently, when they converted to absentee balloting: Modern-day scoundrels stood on street corners with official-looking boxes to "collect" the ballots. Nobody knows what happened to them after that.)
- It was considered a great innovation to print standardized ballots at government expense, give them to the voters at the polling places, and require people to vote and return the ballots on the spot. No, this wasn't invented in America: The Australians came up with this procedure, which is now the most widely used voting system in the world.
Properly administered, this paper ballot system sets a very high standard: privacy, accuracy and impartiality. In fact, why are we willing to trust our votes to anything else?
Boss Tweed In counting there is STRENGTH! It's difficult, but not impossible to rig the Australian paper balloting system. Here's how it's been done: First, create a fancy set of rules for which votes "count." Take control of the vote count. Train your team better than the other team. A really well-coached vote-counting team used to be able to exclude up to 40 percent of votes!
Lever machines made their debut around 1890 and became popular throughout the USA by the 1950s. They've been out of production since 1982, but are still in use. (Maybe, because they're too heavy to lift? These are truly gigantic metal contraptions.)
How to cheat with a lever machine: Like the new touch-screen DRE voting machines, lever machines left no audit trail. And like the touch-screens, they also have the highest error rates (M.I.T./CalTech study rates error rates for hand-counting at 3.3%, optical scan 3.5%, punch card 4.7%, touch screen machines around 6% and lever machines around 7%. Uh, we're spending $3.9 billion to switch from an error-prone punch card system to the only modern system with a HIGHER error rate?)
Technicians learned to rig the lever machines, in ways that were very hard to spot. Some of the rigs stayed in place for years! Yet, lever machines cannot be rigged on a national scale. At least their unauditable, not very accurate, riggable problems are confined to small geographic areas.
- With lever voting machines you have to put your trust in the technicians who maintain the machines. If you want to rig an election, you buy a few technicians.
Punch cards also date back to the 1890s, but really became stylish around 1964. But the early "Votomatic" machines had such problems that in 1988, the National Bureau of Standards published a report by Saltman recommending the immediate abandonment of this technology. Since punch cards were by then the most widely used system, it's taken awhile to let go of them.
One way to rig a punch card system is to consolidate ballot-counting in one area so that precincts are mish-mashed together; Then, the scoundrel team picks someone to quietly add punches to the votes for the other candidate. The double-punched cards become "overvotes" and are thrown out.
In Duval County, Florida in 2000, over 20,000 overvoted punch cards appeared, primarily in two black precincts. No one was allowed to look at them, much less do a statistical analysis on the probability of such a high overvote rate in a discrete area. Governor Jeb Bush has recently cut the funding for the library that safeguards the six million votes from Florida 2000, and when moving the collection, it is likely that the ballots will be destroyed, eliminating any further examination of Duval County.
Optical Scanning: You fill in the dot on paper ballots, and a computer reads them. Pioneers in optically scanned vote-counting were Todd and Bob Urosevich of Omaha, Nebraska, who founded Data Mark Systems, which became American Information Systems, and in 1997 changed its name to Election Systems and Software. Along the way Bob split away to form I-Mark Systems, which became Global Election Systems, which is now Diebold Election Systems.
Some optical scanners have trouble distinguishing faint deliberate marks from smudged erasures. The newer machines can read more accurately, and accuracy is second only to hand-counting.
People thought optical scan machines could not be rigged, but there are anecdotal reports of likely rigging of these machines as far back as 1980.
How to rig an optical scan machine: See below.
Touch screen "DRE" machines These are the latest fad, and they are sleek and fun and convenient. However, like the old lever machines, they haven't been associated with the best accuracy rates, and they don't have any paper trail so voters really have no idea if their vote was counted the way it was cast. The manufacturers surely knew their industry well enough to know that audit trails are a critical component of elections with integrity, but instead of creating a simple receipt so we could say, "Yup! I voted that way!" and drop it in a ballot box, the manufacturers simply took away the paper trail.
It is not difficult to develop touch-screen machines that spit out a voter-verified paper audit trail. It is not even expensive, so one wonders what could possibly have motivated anyone to do away with it. One answer lies in a statement made by Richard Jablonski, of ES&S, who groused about the expense of doing a hand recount when their machines made yet another mistake due to yet another of their own software programming errors. Jablonski said it would be much cheaper to just rerun the machines.
How to rig a touch-screen machine see below.
Internet Voting Almost no one believes that Internet voting is ready for prime time, but that hasn't stopped upstart companies like Election.com and Votehere.net from trying to talk everyone into it. Problem is, VoteHere seems to be succeeding; a recent news report indicates that Washington State approved Internet voting for military overseas voters. Again, let's get rid of that pesky paper trail (You know, the one that lets us know for sure how people voted.)
Internet voting advocates, and they are difficult to find, even among techies, say that encryption techniques are the key. Well, they may be one key, but there are many ways around encryption. (Think: Send a worm to all the Democrats. Or, mess with Earthlink and AOL on Election Day. Or, pay a technician in the telephone company to create a disruption of phone lines.)
See below for Internet vote-rigging ideas.
Although every method offers vote-rigging opportunities, only the optical scan, touch-screen and Internet systems enable high-volume vote-rigging on a national or international scale. And the optical scan, touch-screen and Internet systems give the smallest number of scoundrels opportunities to find ways to tamper with the greatest number of votes. It may take only ONE programmer to tamper with literally millions of votes at once.
Backgrounder 3. Known errors They knew about it. They admitted it was their own fault. But they never told us about it not when making sales presentations to local county commissions, not when answering questions from the press. Voting machine errors in the range of 20 to 100 percent are not uncommon. (You heard me). Who are "they?" The voting machine manufacturers, who had a duty to disclose, but didn't. Now, it's time for us to grab the reins!
We can't know how often the machines get it wrong, because: We aren't allowed to compare the actual vote with the machine-counted vote. Even when there are recounts, we often aren't allowed to compare the actual vote with the machine-counted vote.
But we do know that the machines have gotten it wrong. Manufacturers knew about the errors, but did not disclose them to buyers or regulators.
Following are just a few of the errors manufacturers knew about before the 2002 election cycle. Yet, in the minutes of dozens of recent county meetings, where sales reps made presentations to persuade officials to buy their machines, nowhere were these problems disclosed even when officials asked direct questions about error rates and problems!
McLennan County, Texas:
Better than a pregnant chad these machines can actually give birth! In one precinct, about 800 votes were tallied, although only 500 ballots had been ordered. "It's a mystery," declared McLennan County Elections Administrator Linda Lewis. Like detectives on the Orient Express, officials pointed fingers at one suspected explanation after another. One particular machine may have been the problem, Ms Lewis said. That is, the miscounted votes were scattered throughout the precincts with no one area being miscounted more than another, Ms. Lewis also explained. Wait Some ballots may have been counted more than once, almost doubling the number of votes actually cast. Yes! That could explain it! (Erexcuse me, exactly which ballots were counted twice?)
"We don't think it's serious enough to throw out the election," said county Republican Party Chairman M.A. Taylor. Size of error: 60 percent.
Honolulu, Hawaii:
Tom Eschberger, a vice president of ES&S, said a test conducted soon after the election on the software and the machine that malfunctioned in a Waianae precinct showed the machine worked normally. He said the company did not know that the machine wasn't functioning properly until the Supreme Court-ordered a recount, when a second test on the same machine detected that it wasn't counting properly. "But again, in all fairness, there were 7,000 machines in Venezuela and 500 machines in Dallas that did not have problems," he said.
Dallas, Texas:
Over 41,000 votes were not counted due to software programming errors. A recount was done and ES&S took the blame. A recount showed the error size was about 10 percent. Democrats picked up over 1,000 votes, not quite enough to overturn the election.
Caracas, Venezuela:
Venezuela's highest court suspended elections because of problems with the vote tabulation. Venezuela sent an air force jet to Omaha to fetch computers and experts in a last-ditch effort to fix the problem before the delay was ordered. Dozens of protesters chanted "Gringos get out!" at ES&S technicians. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who U.S. officials would very much like to see unseated, accused ES&S of trying to destabilize the country's electoral process. Chavez also asked for help from the U.S. government because, he said, the United States recommended ES&S.
Crozet, Virginia:
"When I pushed the button beside 'No' the machine registered my vote as a 'Yes.' I tried this a couple of more times and got the same result. Finally, I poked my head outside the curtain and asked the attendant what I should do. He suggested then that I should intentionally push the wrong button..."
Clay County, Kansas:
A squeaker no, a landslide oops, we reversed the totals and about those absentee votes, make that 72-19, not 44-47. Software programming errors, sorry. Oh, and reverse that election, we announced the wrong winner The machines said Jerry Mayo ran a close race but lost, garnering 48 percent of the vote, but a hand recount revealed Mayo won by a landslide, earning 76 percent of the vote.
Memphis, Tennessee:
Computer problems halted the voting process at all 19 of Shelby County's early voting sites during the 2000 Republican presidential primary, forcing officials to use paper ballots (supposed to be provided by the voting machine company as a backup, but for some inexplicable reason, they were unavailable when they were needed). Election officials had to make voters wait in line or tell them to come back later. Because early voting turnout in this election was six times normal, this snafu affected about 13,000 voters. If there was a beneficiary of the problem, it was George W. Bush, who needed to defeat John McCain in Tennessee - Shelby County, which contains the urban Memphis population, usually votes less conservatively than the rest of the state.
Chicago, Illinois:
Size of error: 25 percent One hundred and eight of 403 precincts were not counted. A pin from the cable connecting the ballot reader to the counting computer apparently got bent, after three-fourths of the precincts were counted correctly. No one could explain how a pin inside a cable became bent during the middle of the count. Democrats requested a full recount; a judge disallowed it.
Newport Beach, California:
The voting machine programmer reversed the "yes" and "no" answers in the software used to count the votes, discovered only because California had a law requiring a random sampling of votes by hand. (The new touch-screen machines, however, have no voter-verified audit trail.) Size of error: 100 percent.
Polk County, Florida:
A machine count said that Republican Bruce L. Parker won the election, but after a hand recount, Democrat Marlene Duffy Young turned out to be the winner. The manufacturer (ES&S) denied that its machines were responsible for the miscount.
Backgrounder 4. Top 10 Ways to Rig a Voting Machine Computer and accounting experts tell us that there are not 10, not 20, but literally hundreds of ways to rig the system. Faster than the best programmer can create computerized safeguards, new scoundrels will think up ways to beat the system. To conceptualize this, think virus: every time we get protected, a new one is created. With hundreds of millions at stake in getting the "right" candidate into office, the motive is already in place. (The candidate need not even know that his election was rigged!) Here are just 10 of the methods that our sources have identified:
Methods to rig
1. Optical scan machine: Create a dummy ballot using a special configuration of "votes" that launches a program when put through the machine. This is called a "back door," it takes just ONE programmer to insert this, it uses very short code and is almost undetectable even if certifiers actually look for it, though indications are the the software examination is not rigorous during certification, and even if it was, nothing guarantees that the software that's certified is the same as what's in the actual machines at every precinct.
2) Help the machine pass testing by creating a program to tamper with the day and time. Make sure it can't be triggered to execute the program until the actual election.
3) Replace certified files with new ones during a "technical servicing." Most of these machines carry service contracts, and the technician goes through a set of diagnostic steps. Technicians are often given software patches or "upgrades" to install that do NOT got through any official approval policy. And again, even if they did, there is no guarantee that the software patch used in the machine is the one that was examined.
4) Include a layer of software that is insulated from certification testing. There are two ways this can be done: First, by incorporating Microsoft Windows into the system. Bypass the testing on the Microsoft portion (and embed malicious programs in the Microsoft operating system instead of the voting software). Another way is to patent a layer of the software and sell it to other voting machine manufacturers. This way, the mischief lies with a vendor, not the manufacturer. A single vendor could compromise many companies at once.
5) Build in a "diagnostic" tool that lets technicians add or change programs just before, during, or after Election Day. Some of the new DRE machines have a panel that, when removed, allowed access to the very bowels of the machine, potentially erasing all the votes and replacing them with a brand new cartridge.
6) Have your technicians obtain their files from an internet site. Tell them how to troubleshoot using a batch of replacement files and patches on a server. Anyone who gains access to the server can replace one with another, for example, replacing the central counting program with a file of the same name which contains a variation of the program.
7) On the way to tabulating the votes, substitute one memory cartridge with another. In Georgia during Eletion 2002, dozens of memory cartridges were "misplaced," representing tens of thousands of votes. There was no documented chain of custody during the time they were missing.
8) Tell county commissioners that they don't need to see you demonstrate or test an "upgraded" system, because they saw the demonstration before with the previous version.
9) Get hold of targeted e-mail lists and send a fast-spreading worm to military voters of your opponent's party. When they try to vote on the Internet, they'll experience problems.
10) Buy a tech and plant him as a poll worker. Have him go through the training (this works best when the precinct uses your competitor's machine) and then have him flub the election, by preventing machines from booting up on time and then blaming it on the manufacturer. If things really get messed up, have him call the press and grant interviews.
Backgrounder 5. The international problem This is not a United States problem. It isn't a third world problem. It is a global problem. By planting clandestine code in the vote-counting machines, governments could win a war without using any bullets. Can these machines be used to manipulate international politics?
When safeguards aren't in place, clandestine computer code can be inserted into voting machines to affect election outcomes. Among those with current ties to election companies: A member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a former CIA director.
- Latin American countries are pressured to buy machines made by corporations in the USA
- There are reports that some vendors who supply components for U.S. machines are from the Phillippines, or Russia.
- Diebold is working hard to get its machines into Canada. ES&S is spreading across South America and Europe.
- Votehere is in Sweden and Britain.
- Some countries are holding fast to the safe, accurate old Australian paper ballot system. Canada counts the whole country in four hours. France in six. It can be done, but the number of questions on national elections must be limited to a manageable quantity.
Backgrounder 6. Easy, inexpensive ways to correct the problem: Safeguards made easy and practical activism: By mixing low-tech, people-oriented solutions with high tech systems, we can solve this problem. It will be fun (yes, really) and it won't cost taxpayers any money. And it starts with YOU!
What can we do about it? Get a paper trail, LOOK AT the paper trail, require disclosure
1. Require voter verified paper trails. Require manufacturers to retrofit their machines at their own expense. Do not give them a choice. The reasons: 1) They did not disclose known errors when they sold the system and 2) Like the rest of us, voting machine manufacturers are accountable for understanding their own industry. Shoup and Sequoia have been in business for over 100 years; obviously they knew vote-rigging was an issue. If your bank, for example, waltzed around making addition errors and pretending it was unaware that people might try to steal money, it would be held liable. Our vote is even more precious than our money, so make them accountable!
2. Allow voluntary comparisons of machine counts with hand counts by election officials in any precinct, for any reason. Because most precincts are small, at most 3,000 votes, this can be done on election night. Require spot checks, comparing hand counts with machine counts. Also, allow any citizen to get a hand count, if he pays for it. If this reveals a significant error when compared with machine counts, refund his money because he has done a public service. This can provide revenue for public universities, and by the way should be made available at very reasonable cost.
4. Require full disclosure of errors in future sales presentations and to the news media. Many industries are held to this standard. If you have to tell your next customer that your machines lost 103,000 votes in Florida, 41,000 in Texas, you had to recount the whole state of Hawaii, and Venezuela had people marching in the streets, you become much more careful to make sure the machines are accurate the FIRST time around.
Also, require disclosure of the names of owners and key people at voting machine companies. We have a right to know if people have criminal backgrounds, or if owners are running for office with their own machines counting the vote.
And, require more thorough inspection of the code. Currently, the manufacturers do not permit even the testing labs to do a thorough job of testing the software programming itself. Require excellent documentation of each step to be kept on file at the manufacturer. Allow spot checks by government or citizen auditing groups.
5. Require appropriate remedies when the machines miscount. This may sound obvious, but many of the errors uncovered in Black Box Voting were never corrected, even when machines elected the wrong candidate (which they have done several times, even when the election is not particularly close).
Are the above five safeguards in place?
In the new Help America Vote Act? (no)
In any state statutes (no)
Bev Harris
Interview Questions
1. How did you find out that there are security problems with voting machines?
2. Do you think elections have already been rigged? What evidence do you have?
3. Who owns the companies that make these machines?
4. What can ordinary citizens do to reclaim their right to a paper audit trail?
5. What kinds of errors do these machines make? Have elections been overturned due to machine miscounting?
6. What do you recommend as the first step to get a safer, more secure voting system?
7. What is the most outrageous example of a voting machine screw-up that you have found?
8. What should people do if they have witnessed something with these machines that concerns them?
9. What are the biggest companies? Which ones, in your opinion, are the best?
10. Why is Internet voting considered to be so dangerous?
11. If you were going to rig a machine, what would you choose as the easiest and safest way?
12. Do you think we should go back to paper ballots and hand counting?
13. What other areas, besides vote counting, do these companies handle that cause you concern?
14. Do the errors tend to favor one side or the other?
About Bev Harris
Bev Harris owns Talion.com, a publicity firm, and has been a professional writer for 10 years. She is the author of "How to Unbezzle a Fortune", tips on how to identify accounting fraud and recover embezzled funds. She has spent over two thousand hours researching voting machines, and has interviewed dozens of witnesses, including many election officials and actual voting machine programmers.
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Re: SLAUGHTER OF IRAQI BABIES SHALL NOT BE THWARTED BY FRAIDY CAT EURO-FAGGOTS! |
by Joe Parnarauskis
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 4
31 Jan 2003
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Poor fellow. Probably a case of a closeted, European gay man stuck in an American world. Hey, it's OK to be gay. Maybe it's time to come out and lose your hate. |
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STOP THAT CRAZY THING !! |
by BUFFY AKA DAN Disinfo
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 3
31 Jan 2003
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What you gonna do ? |
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