Report from CA-50 emergency town hall meeting!

[kansasblue]

http://xnerg.blogspot.com/

Wednesday, June 28, 2006
marcy winograd, bradblog, dharma's mom & skippy! - at the voters' townhall meeting
skippy the bush kangaroo attended the townhall meeting for voting accountability tonight in venice, calif, hosted by the lovely bradblog, and featuring a plethora of speakers who had a strange combination of both a lot of bad news and inspiration for the 100 or so citizens who showed up.

rob cohen, documentarian of the film votergate (name change imminent...tho we kind of like "de-voted," the crowd went for "hacked") showed a small clip of his movie, currently in production.

in the clip, bev harris of black box voting was seen visiting patty newton, a poll worker in san diego for the recent california 50 busby-bilbray election. patty told bev that after a brief afternoon of training, the poll workers were literally handed the voting machines and told to take them home and store them there until the election a few weeks later.

patty showed bev the garage where she stored her charges, and explained that all the poll workers had to do to receive the machines that would decide the fate of san diego county's senatorial concerns was sign a piece of paper. but don't worry, folks, there was an official seal over each of the voting machines: a xerox of the county registrar's seal stuck on with sticky paper. talk about security!

the lovely bradblog gave some good news: that looney tinfoil hat wearing lefty communist lou dobbs has been reporting on the widespread problems with election machines, under the banner "democracy for sale."

as an example of the problems inherent with electronic voting, bradblog told the story of harri hursti who proved the diebold machines were hackable with the mock election held in leon county, florida, in december of 2005. 6 mock voters voted "no" and 2 voted "yes" to the question "can diebold machines be hacked via their memory card?" the voters retained their paper ballots. but when the results were run thru the optical scanner, the machine tallied the votes as 1 "yes" and 7 "no's." no, there's no problem with diebold!