Sacramento Bee: "ELECTION 2006: LOOMING, DIRE QUESTION OF TRUST," by Peter Schrag (regular columnist), 7/5/06
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"Last month's race in California's 50th Congressional District in San Diego County between Republican Brian Bilbray and Democrat Francine Busby was regarded by many observers as an indicator of whether the Democrats could recapture the House in November.
"But the response to the election may foretell as much or more about the level of confidence Americans will have in the reported results in November as they do about who controls the House in January. If you Google the words Bilbray, Busby and Diebold, you'll get 67,000 hits, most of them casting doubt on whether the reported results -- 78,000 votes (49.5 percent) for Bilbray, 71,000 (45 percent) for Busby, according the San Diego registrar of voters -- could really be trusted. Diebold's electronic voting machines are the X factor.
" The seat, as almost everybody knows, was vacated by Randy "Duke" Cunningham, the high-living felonious congressman who was forced to exchange his seat in one institution for a term in a much less pleasant one.
"The 50th has long been a safely Republican district that Bilbray ought to have won easily. It shouldn't have been a bellwether for anything. But this is not an ordinary year for reasons too numerous to list. Cunningham was just one example of the long list of crooks and other shabby characters -- members of Congress and the administration, staffers, lobbyists and various influence peddlers -- who've disgraced Washington in this new Gilded Age.
"Bilbray almost certainly won the election. But you'll never convince thousands of Californians, not all of them Democrats, most of them not kooks, that the reported results were accurate.
The chief piece of evidence is those electronic Diebold machines, whose reputation as eminently hackable and whose other problems, political and mechanical, have dogged them for years. Combine that with the fact that San Diego election officials allowed poll workers to take the machines home for what one critic called "sleepovers" -- some of them for more than a week -- and you have a pretty good case for suspicion.
(snip)
"...two new reports, one from Common Cause, the other from the nonpartisan Brennan Center in New York, reinforce the special doubts about the security and reliability of electronic voting systems. The most widely used systems, including Diebold's, said the Brennan report, "have significant security and reliability vulnerabilities, which pose a real danger to the integrity of national, state and local elections." Common Cause says 17 states, not including California, are at "high risk" for compromised election results.
(snip)
Given laws recently passed by GOP-controlled legislatures in Ohio and Georgia that effectively discourage or block voters -- minorities especially -- likely to cast ballots for Democrats, the fears about rigged elections are not out of line.
(snip)
The doubters about Bilbray-Busby are probably wrong; the threat to democracy is very real.
http://www.sacbee.com/content/politics/columns/schrag/s... ------------------------------------------------
From Peace Patriot: I've lived in California all my life and I'm very familiar with the Sacramento Bee. I can't tell you how amazed I was to read this column this morning, from one of the Sacto Bee's veteran columnists. The Sacto Bee is a corporate rag, if there ever was one. My stunned brain just kept repeating the phrase: "The election fraud issue has ARRIVED! We've ARRIVED! The most important democracy issue in modern American history has ARRIVED in the corporate news monopoly press!" Then I immediately became suspicious. (Why are they doing this NOW? To suppress the vote?) But I think, rather, that RFK Jr.--in his Rolling Stone article on the stolen election '04--has broken something loose. The taboo is off! The "Iron Curtain" has a major crack in it! Brad Friedman, Bob Koehler and Lou Dobbs all get mentioned--and credited--by name, for crying the alarm. Schrag of course pooh-poohs the idea that any fraud occurred in the Bilbray/Bushby CA-50 (s)election (typical Bee--typical corporate media--why say this? Hm? How do they KNOW?!) And, of course, no mention of WHO OWNS and CONTROLS the "trade secret" vote tabulation code in these machines (major Bush corporate supporters). (That always amazes me--secret vote tabulation by partisans, and this doesn't smack 'em in the eye?!) And the article has not yet been carefully scanned for disinformation (always a danger with the corporate press). Nevertheless, this sure seems like a breakthrough--and a very surprising one. I mean, the Sacto Bee is saying we're "not kooks"! People who want transparent vote counting ARE NOT KOOKS! Think about THAT!
:applause: :bounce: :party: :silly: :freak: :crazy: :wow: "NOT KOOKS!" :wow: :freak: :silly: :patriot: :party: :bounce: :applause:
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