The Diebold Factor

I find it ironic that if I get a Big Mac, I get a receipt. If I vote for the President of the United States, I touch a screen and..... that's it?

Where did my vote go?

There were stories that these machines automatically had votes on them when they turned them on for the first time. Some had negative votes!

Originally posted by curme
There were stories that these machines automatically had votes on them when they turned them on for the first time. Some had negative votes!

These are more than stories.

Bev Harris has been researching the problem for years. Her work is no scam. Only the voting machines' architecture is a scam.

zz



[edit on 5-11-2004 by TrueLies]

The Help America Vote Act is responsible for �helping� states implementing electronic voting. If I�m not mistaken grants can come along if a State decides to adopt the plan.

Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and other defense contractors and arms dealers lobbied for the Help America Vote Act in Congress. source

I wonder what their interests were in �helping America vote�?

Investigating the involvement of different interest groups in the democratic process and uncovering and pursuing unusual events and trends ought to be a hallmark of ATS in my opinion. It's a better use of time than tit for tat amongst children.

I�ve taken this from a couple of posts of mine it�s about the owners of the electronic voting machines in Florida and how they apparently were preloaded towards Bush.



ES&S voting machines,
machines preload with thousands of votes for Bush.

Voters claim abuse of electoral rolls
Students say they were conned into registering twice
Greg Palast in New York
Sunday October 31, 2004

An Observer investigation in the United States has uncovered widespread allegations of electoral abuse, many of them going uninvestigated despite complaints of what would appear to be criminal attempts to manipulate voter lists.

The allegations, which come just two days before Americans go to the polls in one of the most tightly contested elections in a generation, threaten to plunge Tuesday's count into a legal minefield and overshadow even the elections of 2000.

The claims come as both Republicans and Democrats put in place up to 2,000 lawyers across the country to challenge attempts to manipulate the vote in swing states.

Although allegations of misconduct have been leveled at both parties recently, the majority of complaints that have been identified in The Observer' s investigation involved claims against local Republicans.

The claims, made by the BBC's News night, follow alleged attempts by Republicans to illegally suppress the votes in key states. Republican spokesmen deny these allegations.

[Watch the BBC broadcast at news.bbc.co.uk... ]


One of the more serious claims is that no action has been taken in a complex fraud, where more than 4,000 Florida students were allegedly conned into signing a form which could lead them to be doubly registered and void their votes. The Florida Law Enforcement Department has told the complainants that it is too busy to investigate.

In Colorado too, Democrats are complaining about an attempt to remove up to 6,000 convicted felons from the electoral roll, at the behest of the state's Republican secretary of state, Donetta Davidson, despite a US federal law that prohibits eliminating a voter's rights within 90 days of an election to give time for the voter to protest.

About Election Systems & Software

ES&S

Q: What does ES&S do?

A: Election Systems & Software, Inc. (ES&S) is the world�s largest election management company. Headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska with over 400 employees located in eight regional U.S. offices and agents on five continents, ES&S has supported more than 40,000 elections worldwide for over 30 years.

In the 2000 U.S. elections alone, ES&S systems counted over 100 million ballots. ES&S� hardware and software solutions support the entire election process to include voter registration, ballot production, voting, vote tabulation, and results reporting.

The second US Coup d�etat has happened.

Owners of the Election Systems & Software (the manufacturer of voting machines that are used in Florida) are the Republicans
external image

(Howard Ahmanson has 68% of the company).

The iVotronic voting machines used in Florida had a Windows-based GUI (one more link between B.G. and his investments in the Republicans. Or does Bill Gates make political "investments" without purpose?)

THE ES&S �IVOTRONIC� TOUCH-SCREEN TECHNOLOGY

The new iVotronic voting system in use in Miami-Dade County and other areas of Florida was produced by Omaha, Nebraska-based Election Systems & Software (ES&S). In 2001, ES&S received an order from various counties in Florida for $70.6 million to provide the new system. Of this sum, Miami-Dade County paid $24.5 million, while neighboring Broward County paid $18 million. A group called, appropriately, the Florida Association of Counties lobbied for ES&S before the Florida legislature after endorsing ES&S�s touch-screen iVotronic machines, receiving a commission of $300,000 from ES&S in return. The chief lobbyist for ES&S in the deal was Sandra Mortham, who served as Florida�s top election official from 1995-99 and founded �Women for Jeb� (Bush). Some local officials have suggested that Mortham�s actions exhibited a conflict of interest.

The really sickening thing to me is that we sat on our butts for four years watching the implementation of this system make headline news and nobody did anything to stop them. The only real fight against the electronic voting machines came from the state of CA. There has to be a legal precedent somewhere for bringing these companies to civil justice and it needs to be done.

I am wondering if anyone has heard of an organized movement to get some real legal scrutiny into these election results? If there isn't one already, perhaps we could do a research project here on ATS and once completed, send it to various memebers of congress. Can we do that on ATS?

Originally posted by curme
I find it ironic that if I get a Big Mac, I get a receipt. If I vote for the President of the United States, I touch a screen and..... that's it?

Where did my vote go?

I hear ya. I live in a small town, and we have the old fill in the circle scanner machine ballots. I'd never seen one before. I put the sheet in, and then I stood there waiting for a receipt. The guy had to tell me I was done. I was really expecting something to come out, telling me I'd voted and confirming who I'd voted for. It's better than the Diebold machines, since there is something that can be recounted, but still, how do I know it read my sheet right? They're not going to check them, unless there's a reason.

Originally posted by twitchy
I am wondering if anyone has heard of an organized movement to get some real legal scrutiny into these election results? ...

This seems to be the biggest effort underway...

Black Box Voting (.ORG) is conducting the largest Freedom of Information action in history. At 8:30 p.m. Election Night, Black Box Voting blanketed the U.S. with the first in a series of public records requests, to obtain internal computer logs and other documents from 3,000 individual counties and townships. Networks called the election before anyone bothered to perform even the most rudimentary audit.

from www.blackboxvoting.org...

Originally posted by twitchy
www.thepeoplesvoice.org...
September 2, 2003
By Schuyler Ebbets
Two Republican dominated corporations, Election Systems & Software (ES&S), and Diebold Voting Systems, now control 80% of the vote count in the United States.

Huh? 80%? Not likely, NY was not electronic. All of Ohio was not electronic. In fact, from what I heard on Tuesday night in the ATS chat, most electronic voting in OH was in the cities. Ironically that's where Kerry killed Bush in OH. Interesting ...

URL: www.zwire.com...

Election Data Services, a consulting firm, predicted 29 percent of voters would use touch-screen machines on voting day.

URL: www.tallahassee.com...

Almost 14 percent of voters, down from 30.8 percent, will use the punch card systems that caused anguish in 2000. But only 29.5 percent, up from 12.6 percent in 2000, will use the tabletlike computer voting machines that were supposed to play a starring role this year.

He estimates that 626 of the nation's 3,114 counties will have switched completely to electronic voting by November. Many of the remaining counties are waiting to receive their share of $3.9 billion that Congress approved for upgrades in 2002.

Peoplesvoice is as objective as whatreallyhappened is...

Originally posted by titian
[ All of Ohio was not electronic. In fact, from what I heard on Tuesday night in the ATS chat, most electronic voting in OH was in the cities. Ironically that's where Kerry killed Bush in OH. Interesting ...

Ironic indeed. Very.

By what margin was Kerry meant to have "killed" Bush?

What if, in those heavily concentrated centres, 3 in 20 Kerry votes went to Bush?

That would be well disguised, wouldn't it? Hide the extent of the margin and still have the candidate whose votes are being deprived coming out on top! Dastardly. And no audit trail for citizens who are actually concerned about voting and democracy!

All hypothetical of course, but just pointing out that sometimes apparent logic has no basis in logic at all.

Fraud is fraud. It works, for a while, when you get away with it.

[edit on 4-11-2004 by MaskedAvatar]

Who the hell is Vikas Bajaj, and where did he get his info? He's practically a nobody, and he doesn't have any sources, except a Washington, D.C. research firm.

www.saja.org...

We're supposed to believe the stats because Election Data Services says so? They're probably controlled by the neocon party, too. How is that any better than any other source?

[edit on 4-11-2004 by Damned]

Hmmm, very good point indeed MaskedAvatar. I'll concede that; but not my other point. This site is being flooded by people just posting stuff without doing any research to authenticate or debunk. Using left- OR right-wing sites as factual without posting any additional information is plain wrong and contrary to the purpose of this site.

Originally posted by Damned
Who the hell is Vikas Bajaj, and where did he get his info? He's practically a nobody, and he doesn't have any sources, except a Washington, D.C. research firm.

www.saja.org...

We're supposed to believe the stats because Election Data Services says so? They're probably controlled by the neocon party, too.

How is that any better than any other source?

[edit on 4-11-2004 by Damned]

30% and 80% are slightly apart from each other. That is my point. Why don't you research a little to find the answers instead of taking a blame the neocon stance?

More information on the people behind Diebold and other companies making voting machines.

The American vote-count is controlled by three major corporate players -- Diebold, ES&S, and Sequoia -- with a fourth, Science Applications International Corporation, coming on strong. These companies -- all of them hardwired into the Bushist Party power grid -- have been given billions of dollars by the Bush Regime to complete a sweeping computerization of voting machines nationwide by the 2004 election. These glitch-riddled systems -- many using "touch-screen" technology that leaves no paper trail at all -- are almost laughably open to manipulation, according to corporate whistleblowers and computer scientists at Stanford, Johns Hopkins and other universities.

...

Who's behind these private companies? It's hard to tell: The corporate lines -- even the bloodlines -- of these "competitors" are so intricately mixed. For example, at Diebold -- whose corporate chief, Wally O'Dell, a top Bush fundraiser, has publicly committed himself to "delivering" his home state's votes to Bush next year -- the election division [of Diebold] is run by Bob Urosevich. Bob's brother, Todd, is a top executive at "rival" ES&S. The brothers were originally staked in the vote-count business by Howard Ahmanson, a member of the Council for National Policy, a right-wing "steering group" stacked with Bushist faithful.

Ahmanson is also one of the bagmen behind the extremist "Christian Reconstructionist" movement, which openly advocates a theocratic takeover of American democracy, placing the entire society under the "dominion" of "Christ the King." Read more...

I started a separate thread on the Rise of the Reconstructionists.

Are these people to be trusted with your vote?

Ahmanson's Council for National Policy actually runs the republican party!!

.

Check out this little editorial about Ohio.
www.truthout.org...
Apparently dieold wasn't the only factor in Ohio...

Originally posted by twitchy
Check out this little editorial about Ohio.
www.truthout.org...
Apparently dieold wasn't the only factor in Ohio...

That's pretty much what I figured would happen.

Hell they can apparently legally change, er I mean redsitribute, your vote with the news systems, check this tid bit out...

news.yahoo.com.../ap/20041105/ap_on_el_pr/voting_problems
Meanwhile, in San Francisco, a glitch occurred with software designed by Election Systems & Software Inc. for the city's new "ranked-choice voting," in which voters list their top three choices for municipal offices. If no candidate gets a majority of first-place votes outright, voters' second and third-place preferences are then distributed among candidates who weren't eliminated in the first round.

And from the same article...

news.yahoo.com.../ap/20041105/ap_on_el_pr/voting_problems
Franklin County's unofficial results had Bush receiving 4,258 votes to Democrat John Kerry (news - web sites)'s 260 votes in a precinct in Gahanna. Records show only 638 voters cast ballots in that precinct. Bush's total should have been recorded as 365....
In one North Carolina county, more than 4,500 votes were lost in this election because officials mistakenly believed a computer that stored ballots electronically could hold more data than it did....
After voting ends, the cartridge is either transported to a tabulation facility or its data sent via modem.
Kimball Brace, president of the consulting firm Election Data Services, said it's possible the fault lies with the software that tallies the votes from individual cartridges rather than the machines or the cartridges themselves.
Either way, he said, such tallying software ought to have a way to ensure that the totals don't exceed the number of voters. ...
Matthew Damschroder, director of the Franklin County Board of Elections, told The Columbus Dispatch that on one of the three machines at that precinct, a malfunction occurred when its cartridge was plugged into a reader and generated a faulty number. He could not explain how the malfunction occurred. ...County officials did not return calls seeking details....Danaher did not immediately return a message for comment.

story.news.yahoo.com.../ap/20041105/ap_on_re_us/voting_report_1
A national voting rights group says it documented hundreds of voting irregularities affecting poor and minority voters in seven Southern states � from long lines and faulty equipment to deliberate voter intimidation.

California should have been a warning light to america but we ignored the implications for years.

news.com.com...
SACRAMENTO, Calif.--California election officials on Thursday recommended banning some Diebold Election Systems voting machines and referred an investigation into the company to the attorney general for possible civil and criminal sanctions....Like others at Diebold, Urosevich declined to comment on the recommendation to send the report to the attorney general....E-vote critics discovered the company's elections equipment source code sitting unprotected on a public FTP server.
That code subsequently underwent analysis by security experts who called its security measures inadequate at best. And the company undertook--and later abandoned, under public, legal and even congressional pressure--a copyright offensive against people who posted damaging internal Diebold e-mail correspondence online.

news.com.com...
Voting machine vendors collectively have felt some of the heat applied to Diebold Election Systems, of North Canton, Ohio, which has become a lightning rod for criticism following adverse security reports, partisan comments by its CEO and a legal fracas following the distribution of embarrassing internal e-mail correspondence.

No they are not secure systems.

news.com.com...
Four computer security experts have warned proponents of Internet voting that such systems cannot be secured against fraud.
The experts--three computer science professors and a former IBM researcher--said Wednesday that creating an e-voting system that both guarantees each person votes once and protects the voter's identity is impossible on the current Internet system.

Here's some more...

Voting machine fails inspection
news.com.com...

Apparently diebold deosn't like it when their emials get leaked, but who would, given the leaked emails indicate fraud...

Diebold retreats; lawmaker demands inquiry
news.com.com...

A good debate can be found here...

news.com.com...
The harms are not potential; they are real. The obvious harm is that no sensible person will have confidence in a system that cannot be meaningfully audited. Electronic voting in its current form is morally equivalent to handing over the counting of votes to private groups who count the ballots behind closed doors--and then destroy them before anyone else can do a recount.
Apparently, many people learned the wrong lesson from Florida 2000--that recounts are bad. The right lesson is that we need to be able to do good recounts. Electronic voting has the advantage for some--of eliminating the ability to do a recount altogether. To paraphrase (California Voter Foundation President) Kim Alexander, that's like eliminating fraud by eliminating the accounting department.

The following is a must read from the 2000 elections...

www.scoop.co.nz...
The Diebold Memos' Smoking Gun
Volusia County Memos Disclose Election 2000 Vote Fraud
By Alastair Thompson
"DELAND, Fla., Nov. 11 - Something very strange happened on election night to Deborah Tannenbaum, a Democratic Party official in Volusia County. At 10 p.m., she called the county elections department and learned that Al Gore was leading George W. Bush 83,000 votes to 62,000. But when she checked the county's Web site for an update half an hour later, she found a startling development: Gore's count had dropped by 16,000 votes, while an obscure Socialist candidate had picked up 10,000--all because of a single precinct with only 600 voters."

Another must read fromt he 2002 elections...

www.theemailactivist.org...
Hopkins researchers also found loopholes that could have allowed votes to be altered without a voter�s knowledge, either on the spot or by remote access. This means that a voter could leave the voting booth believing that he or she had voted for Candidate A, but the machine would actually have recorded his or her vote for Candidate B. This also means that someone with a device as simple as a Palm Pilot could alter votes from across the room.

Do some homework folks, we have been had....
www.google.com...

Nice work twitchy!

There are also some good articles on www.globalresearch.ca

I found something interesting last night.

If you do a google search on Athan Gibbs the inventor of the TruVote system described as the "perfect solution" in one of my posts above you can easily find the following information:

Seem Mr. Gibbs died back in March in a car "accident".

...the inventor of the TruVote system, died when his vehicle collided with an 18-wheeled truck which rolled his Chevy Blazer several times and forced it over the highway retaining wall where it came to rest on its roof.

Coincidence theorists will simply dismiss the death of Gibbs as a tragic accident.
...
Now, the man asking the obvious question, and demonstrating an obvious tangible solution is dead in another tragic accident, a week after both articles were in circulation.

From another article...

Mr. Gibbs was killed about 10:30 a.m. Friday in a car crash on Interstate 65 near Eighth Avenue North as he drove from his north Nashville home to his downtown office at Tennessee State University's Business Incubation Center.

Metro police said Mr. Gibbs lost control of his Chevy Blazer after he cut in front of an 18- wheeler and the two vehicles collided. The Blazer rolled several times in the southbound lanes, went over the retaining wall and came to rest on its roof on the northbound side. Gibbs was ejected, police said.

Before his sudden death, friends and family said, Mr. Gibbs worked tirelessly on the TruVote system and, with backing from Microsoft Inc., was marketing his invention nationwide.

Scanning through the articles that come up in a Google search, I'm not able to find enough information to decide if foul play was indead involved.

So was it coincidence?

.