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Tuesday, August 15, 2006

The November elections mean nothing if the votes aren't counted accurately
Posted by Jill | 7:37 AM
Last night Lou Dobbs had a segment on the on-line availability of parts for Diebold voting machines. Brad Friedman has the whole story, an excerpt of the segment follows:

WARREN STEWART, VOTETRUST USA: I checked for all the other vendors because we know a lot about Diebold now. We'd like to know more about DSS and Sequoia and Hart InterCivic and the other vendors as well.

PILGRIM: A motherboard contains most of the core functioning of the voting machine. In essence, vital information on how the machine records votes. That can be valuable to activist groups who want to check the security of the system or hackers with an interest in tampering with the system.

The group Open Voting Foundation recently demonstrated that the Diebold TS machine could be tampered with only a screwdriver. It is one of the most popular voting machines. Tens of thousands used statewide in Maryland and Georgia, and in scattered counties across the country. The group says hackers could easily figure out the system and Open Voting bought the system on E-Bay.

ALAN DECHERT, OPEN VOTING FOUNDATION: Their programmers can figure out any number of ways to rig the vote with one of these machines. There are no tamper seals on the box at all. You can just use a screwdriver, open up the case. You can take it apart, put it back together and there's no trace.

PILGRIM: Voter watchdog group Blackbox Voting say they recently bought a Diebold optical scan voting machine, complete with memory card, from a bankruptcy sale. They're now testing those machines for vulnerabilities.


And Art Levine reports on draconian new election laws designed to keep the poor and the elderly away from the polls:

Opinion polls show that a majority of the public wants a Democratic Congress, but whether potential voters -- black and Latino voters in particular -- will be able to make their voices heard on Election Day is not assured. Across the country, they will have to contend with Republican-sponsored schemes to limit voting. In a series of laws passed since the 2004 elections, Republican legislators and officials have come up with measures to suppress the turnout of traditional Democratic voting blocs. This fall the favored GOP techniques are new photo I.D. laws, the criminalizing of voter registration drives, and database purges that have disqualified up to 40 percent of newly registered voters from voting in such jurisdictions as Los Angeles County.

"States that are hostile to voting rights have -- intentionally or unintentionally -- created laws or regulations that prevent people from registering, staying on the rolls, or casting a ballot that counts," observes Michael Slater, the election administration specialist for Project Vote, a leading voter registration and voting rights group. And with roughly a quarter of the country's election districts having adopted new voting equipment in the past two years alone, there's a growing prospect that ill-informed election officials, balky machines and restrictive new voting rules could produce a "perfect storm" of fiascos in states such as Ohio, Florida, Arizona and others that have a legacy of voting rights restrictions or chaotic elections. "People with malicious intent can gum up the works and cause an Election Day meltdown," Steele says.

There is rarely hard proof of the Republicans' real agenda. One of the few public declarations of their intent came in 2004, when then state Rep. John Pappageorge of Michigan, who's now running for a state Senate seat, was quoted by the Detroit Free Press: "If we do not suppress the Detroit [read: black ] vote, we're going to have a tough time in this election cycle."

For the 2006 elections, with the control of the House and the Senate in the balance, Salon has selected six states with the most serious potential for vote suppression and the greatest potential for affecting the outcome of key races. In nearly every case, the voter-suppression techniques have been implemented since 2004 by Republican legislators or officials; only one state has a Democratic secretary of state, and only one has a Democratic-controlled legislature.


Go read the entire piece. Sit through the ad if you have to. But the six states are Arizona, Indiana, Ohio (of course), Florida (of course), California, and Missouri.

I would like to see the Democrats run on a platform of why the Bush Administration and their minions in the states are trying to suppress democracy here while allegedly promoting it abroad. Why are Republicans so afraid of fair elections? Why are they so afraid of allowing people outside their own base to vote?

In 2008, I'm planning to respond to the little white card that comes in the mail asking for poll workers. I live in a fairly reliable blue state, but I want to get inside the process and see how it works. In my town, the average age of poll workers tends to be around 82, which is all well and good, but I think it's time for those of us who are a bit younger to bite the bullet, take the vacation day, and learn what actually goes on in the precincts on Election Day.
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