20 Amazing Facts About Voting In The United States

[angry_chuck]

http://www.guerrillafunk.com/thoughts/doc000023.html
20 Amazing Facts About Voting In The United States

1. 80% of all votes in America are counted by only two companies: Diebold and ES&S.

2. There is no federal agency with regulatory authority or oversight of the US voting machine industry.

3. The vice-president of Diebold and the president of ES&S are brothers.

4. The chairman and CEO of Diebold is a major Bush campaign organizer and donor who wrote in 2003 that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." it gets worse?

WTF is wrong with these people? America should kick their asses, like Celebrity Deathmatch: Diebold vs Uncle Sam II:Redemption; wherein Unc stomps diebold, of course.


Many links to a lot of different pages at the bottom of the article.

[FogerRox]

1. That is old. & No longer accurate, hasn't been for a while

#3) 3. The vice-president of Diebold and the president of ES&S are brothers. That stopped being true about 18 months ago. The Diebold Urisovich was let go.

#9)The Diebold TSX DRE has a VVPB printer.

#12. Diebold employs 5 convicted felons as developers. These are the people who write the voting machine computer code.

#13. Diebold's Senior Vice-President, Jeff Dean, was convicted of 23 counts of felony theft in the first degree.

12 & 13 are probably 2 years out of date.

[LaPera]

4. Well, here's are some up to date (December 21st 2006) facts for you....

GAITHERSBURG, Md. -- The paper ballots and hanging chads that marred the 2000 presidential election have almost vanished from polling places, replaced by electronic-voting machines that are supposed to eliminate recount chaos.

But now election directors have a new worry: printer jams The new machines spool out a small paper receipt of each vote cast to verify the machine correctly recorded the vote and to provides a hard copy during a re-count.

Some states like Maryland have been using paperless systems using touch-screen ATM-like computers that record and tabulate votes. But that has produced its own problems and legislation is likely to be filed in Maryland next year to switch from touch-screen to optical-scannning devices, leaving a paper trail.

In Cuyahoga County, Ohio, a manual count of the paper record during the May primary didn't match the voting results tallied by touch-screen machines.

Machines in some California, Missouri and Mississippi precincts jammed. In Guilford County, N.C., where the paper record would be used in a recount, an audit of a sample of machines showed 9 percent of printers that were supposed to record touch-screen votes either didn't work properly or had paper problems.

"How many votes were lost as a result of that, with the printer chewing it up?" asked George Gilbert, elections director for the county that includes Greensboro, N.C. "If you don't have a complete paper record, you can't use it for a recount."

Paper trails have other shortcomings. Blind voters can't read the paper to verify their votes were correctly recorded. And a paper printout from a touch-screen machine could be used to tell how a person voted, compromising privacy.

Even electronic voting critics who have long sought a paper record or other way to independently verify voting machines say the current paper trail systems are inadequate.

"This isn't what we had in mind when we called for paper," said Johns Hopkins University computer scientist Avi Rubin, who has studied the security of voting machines. "I have yet to see a paper trail system I like."

After the problem-plagued 2000 election, most states fled voting systems that use paper ballots, spending millions of dollars on new electronic voting systems that were paper free. These include the touch-screen devices.

But critics claimed those computerized systems could be easily hacked or malfunction, altering election results without anyone knowing. They also fretted that some voting machine manufacturers don't provide access to the computer coding of the machines, making it difficult for outsiders to check for glitches.

In response, many states have gone back to adding paper to voting. Printers that spool out a thin paper tape similar to an ATM receipt were added to touch-screen machines. Other states bought optical-scan machines where voters fill out ballots by hand that are then read by a computer.

Twenty-seven states now require the use of paper records, while another 18 don't require them but use them either statewide or in local jurisdictions. More than half of all voters used machines with paper records during the 2006 elections. Five states _ Maryland, Delaware, Georgia, Louisiana and South Carolina _ use touch screens without paper trails.

In Congress, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., have said they plan bills next year to require paper trails.

Earlier this month, a report by staffers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology recently recommended that states not use voting machines that don't have a paper trail or other means of independent verification.

An advisory panel to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission recently called for states to change to independently verifiable voting devices, but advised against using the thermal printers now widely used by touch screens.

While many printers performed well during this year's elections, some had problems. Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland, is considering dropping its touch-screen machines after an audit of paper record samples from the May primary found 10 percent of paper ballots were either smeared, torn, crumpled or blank. In some precincts, the paper record count and the machine count were off by considerable amounts.

New paperless systems that allow voter verification are under development. Some paper trail advocates say optical scan is the best option currently available, despite the fact it could be vulnerable to some of the old errors that voters made on paper ballots filled out by hand. About half of all voters used optical-scan machines this fall.


(More)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/21/AR2006122100123.html

[Peace Patriot]

5. This information in never old, FogerRox! You may have angry_chuck on a

technicality, that Wally O'Dell took his zillions and got the hell outa Dodge about a year ago, and that one of the Urosevich's also took a flyer. But what will always be news, even unto future generations--who, if they have a life, and a country, and a planet, after the Bush Junta, will look back on our blindness with amazement--is that, leading up to the 2004 election--after the Bush Junta had gotten us into an illegal and heinous war, and had slaughtered a hundred thousand innocent people and tortured many more, and had stolen $10 trillion of our country's future revenues, and had ripped the U.S. Constitution to shreds, we permitted two Bushite corporations to take over our election system and count 80% of the votes in the 2004 presidential election under a veil of corporate secrecy.

It doesn't matter that O'Dell has absconded with bags of taxpayers money and is gone NOW. It doesn't matter that the incestuous relationship between Diebold and ES&S--which involved more than the brothers in prominent operational positions, it involved ES&S as a spinoff of Diebold with similar computer architecture (crapass, Windows-based, extremely insider hackable)--has been cosmetically changed NOW, because people got onto it, publicized it and questioned it. What matters is that these MIND-BOGGLING conditions--monopoly, conflict of interest, incestuous ties, very close ties to the Bush Junta, personnel with a history of felonies, and TRADE SECRET, PROPRIETARY programming code--were permitted by our election officials and legislators, and by our Democratic leadership, with NOT ONE WORD OF OBJECTION.

This never should have happened. We must never let it get swept under the rug. And that it should inform our opinions and our actions NOW--including our decisions about our election system and what reforms are needed, our opinions of the people who let this happen, our understanding of the beneficiaries of non-transparent vote counting by Bushite corporations, our struggle to restore our right to vote, and our determination to be vigilant over that right in the future.

You seem to say that it was okay that a major fundraiser for the Bush-Cheney campaign--who raised $600,000 for Dick Cheney, who was a Bush "Pioneer" right up there with Ken Lay, and was chair of their campaign in Ohio--running our election in 2004, counting the votes, with secret programming, because it's over now--it was two years ago! And is it okay with you that their spinoff, ES&S--which counted the OTHER 40% of the votes--was initially funded by rightwing billionaire Howard Ahmanson, who also gave one million dollars to the extremist 'christian' Chalcedon foundation--which touts the death penalty for homosexuals? It's okay because it's over now--it's in the past?

What does this tell you about th 2004 election? And what does it tell you about our election system now, still run by these same rightwing corporations, still tabulating our votes with TRADE SECRET, PROPRIETARY programming code, still with no audit in many places, and with barely improved audit procedures everywhere else?

What it tells me is that we have been had.

[Nabia2004]

6. great post, thank you - nt

[FogerRox]

7. I like this one

Paper work filled with the SEC on ....Nov 3rd 2004...., showed Wally Odell got about 35 million in stock options from Diebold.

Remember the election was Nov 2nd

Heck of a Job Wally...........

[GreenTea]

2. The sad thing is now that the Dem's won congress not many seem

to care or are interested in changing the easily hackable....there better be some kind of legislation before 2008 - Many elections the republicans "won" this past November through non traceable votes via Diebold and ES&S machines...Not just the obvious election theft this past election the republicans stole in Florida, Kathrine Harris' seat 18,000 voters votes were never counted for the congressional seat...

it occurred all over the country and the Dem's had more seats stolen from them again this past election but no one cares because the Dem's took back congress...so now...well, it's near impossible to hear anyone but Peter B and Brad Blog still talking about it...

Two things are extremely important to me, and absolutely need to get done in the next two years and impeachment isn't one of them...if it happens great...but the two things that must be taken care of through legislation is keeping the absolute freedom of the Internet (to avoid neocon censoring in the future) and getting rid of the easily hackable electronic voting machines, with receipt ballots that have exactly how one voted printed on it (if not scream about it and vote again) and put that ballot, once one confirmed by the voter into a voting box and have random audits making sure the machines and the ballots in the boxes match.

As long as we secure our voice through both of those things (voting & Internet) our voices will continue to make a difference in the future.

[Stevepol]

3. K&R! I get to give numero cinco!

[Stevepol]

8. 12, 13, and 14 on the list aren't exactly accurate.

Here's how I heard the story. Jeff Dean, along with four other ex-felons, was employed by Global Election Systems at the time of its acquisition by Diebold in January of 2002. He was senior vice-president of GES, not Diebold as far as I know. GES had been writing some or all of the software for Diebold's voting machines. After the acquisition, Diebold claimed that Dean didn't work for them anymore, but Bev Harris had internal memos that indicated that Dean worked as a consultant during the summer of 2002 when the program for the GA election was written, the election that is probably the pivot point, the point when democracy was lost in the US. GA wasn't the only place where results were almost certainly fraudulent but it was the most serious and the most obvious if pre-election polls have any validity at all.

Jeff Dean, supposedly, doesn't work for Diebold anymore, tho I suspect he's still around helping out in some capacity. The other four ex-felons also worked with GES (which became GEMS once the acquisition took place). They may still be working with Diebold's GEMS division or section or perhaps in some other division of Diebold. I don't know about that. One of the ex-felons served time for stock market fraud. Dean's 5 years in the slammer was for embezzlement of the law firm he worked for over a 2 1/2 year period using highly sophisticated computer programming and the judge at his sentencing said that when and if he was released he shd not be allowed to work directly with the handling of money or something like that.

Whoever wrote this list should update that information. It's still telling but it would be better if it were as close to the literal truth as possible. Dean is mentioned by Harris in her book Black Box Voting and by Mark Crispin Miller in his book as well (Fooled Again).

[Kurovski]

9. K&R

Thanks to everyone who gave updates!