Posted on 01/30/2006 8:17:56 AM PST by Toddsterpatriot
As coincidence would have it, Mark Crispin Miller's new book, "Fooled Again" (Basic Books), documenting the Republican theft of the 2004 presidential election, arrived in the same mail delivery with the Jan. 12 edition of the Defuniak Springs Herald, the locally owned weekly newspaper in a Florida panhandle county seat.
The Florida panhandle is thoroughgoing Republican. Even Democrats run as Republicans. Nevertheless, the newspaper's editor, Ron Kelley, believes that American political life is measured by something larger than party affiliation. In his editorial, "The Shepherds and the Sheep," Kelley reports that two Florida counties have banned any further use of Diebold voting machines after witnessing a professional demonstration that the machines, contrary to Diebold's claim, are easily hacked to record votes differently from the way in which they are cast by voters.
The pre-election statement by Diebold's CEO that he would work to deliver the election to Bush was apparently no idle boast. In five states where the new "foolproof" electronic voting machines were used, the vote tallies differed substantially from the exit polls. Such a disparity is unusual. The chances of exit polls in five states being wrong are no more than one in a million. (OMG, what a stupid thing to say!!)
Miller describes considerably more election fraud than voting machines programmed to count a proportion of Kerry votes as Bush votes. Voters were disenfranchised in a number of ways. Miller reports incidences of intimidation of, and reduced voting opportunities for, poorer voters who tend to vote Democrat.
Some of Miller's evidence is circumstantial. However, he documents widespread Republican dirty tricks and foul play. The media's indifference to a stolen election burns Miller as much as the stolen election itself.
Miller is not alone in his concerns. The nonpartisan U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), in response to a congressional request, investigated a number of complaints regarding the electronic voting machines.
Here are some of the problems noted in the GAO's September 2005 report:
Some voting machines did not encrypt cast ballots or system audit logs, and it was possible to alter both without being detected.
It was possible to alter the machines so that a ballot cast for one candidate would be recorded for another.
Vendors installed uncertified versions of voting system software at the local level.
Access was easily compromised and did not require a widespread conspiracy. A small handful of people is sufficient to steal an election. Curiously, the media have shown no interest in the GAO report. In my opinion, a free press has proven to be inconsistent with the recently permitted highly concentrated corporate ownership of the U.S. media.
The electronic voting machines leave virtually no paper trail, and their use involves private, potentially partisan corporations tabulating the votes with proprietary software that is not transparent.
A number of counties in various states have decided to return to paper ballots that can be verified and recounted. But now that Republicans have learned that they can use the electronic machines to control election outcomes, the disenfranchisement of Democrats is likely to be a permanent feature of American "democracy."
Other reports claim that the undersampling by pollsters of Democratic voters creates a percentage bias that exaggerates the number of Republican voters by as much as 5 percent, thus providing cover for vote fraud. If hard-to-reach Democratic voters, such as the working poor, are less likely to answer telephones, polls can create the illusion that there are more Republican voters than in fact exist.
If the electronic voting machines are then rigged to shift 5 percent or 6 percent of the vote to the Republican candidate, the result is not at odds with the expected result and can be used as "evidence" to counter the divergence between exit polls and vote tally.
The outcome of the 2004 presidential election has always struck me as strange. Although Kerry was a poor candidate and evaded the issue most on the public's mind, by November 2004 a majority of Americans were aware that Bush had led the country into a gratuitous war on the basis either of incompetence or deception.
By November 2004, it was completely clear that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction and that Bush had rushed to war. People were concerned by the changing rationales that Bush was offering for going to war. Moreover, the needless war was going badly, and the results bore no relationship to the rosy scenario painted at the time of the invasion. It seems contrary to American common sense for voters to have re-elected a president who had failed in such a dramatic way.
Miller directs our attention to Bush's high-handed treatment of dissenters. If electronic voting machines programmed by private Republican firms remain in our future, dissent will become pointless unless it boils over into revolution. Power-mad Republicans need to consider the result when democracy loses its legitimacy and only the rich have anything to lose.
COPYRIGHT 2006 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.
New name. From http://www.gao.gov/about/namechange.html
GAO's Name Change and Other Provisions of the GAO Human Capital Reform Act of 2004
Effective July 7, 2004, the GAO's legal name became the Government Accountability Office. The change, which better reflects the modern professional services organization GAO has become, is the most visible provision of the GAO Human Capital Reform Act of 2004, Pub. L. 108-271, 118 Stat. 811 (2004).
He's probably writing this drivel from some cabin way out in the woods in Nowhere, Montana.
and King County, Washington.
Correcting the record:
a) It takes 4 Akron Beacon-Journals to be the equivalent of 3 normal newspapers. Despite the sorry state of the print media today, the Beacon-Journal is worse. Hence, we counted the 4 as 3.
b) You obviously only glanced at your speedometer when you were traveling at that rate of speed. Over 10 miles, you averaged 10 mph over the limit.
A quick question to ensure the legitimacy of this surviellance; You have been in contact with a foreign national in the last 30 days, correct?
ROTLFMAO
It is true that have had an e-mail exchange with a foreign national in the past 30 days.
I will begin packing for my vacation at Club Gitmo. Please meet me at my front door so I may surrender.
PS, please smash in the door when you come by in your black Crown Victoria so my wife doesn't become suspicious.
CHICAGO too!
It's easy, once you get the hang of it.
Diebold! Diebold! Isn't the chief evidence that the dem didn't win? That's really all it comes down to.
"He was otherwise my favorite candidate" That's nice Paul, time for your afternoon pill. That's a good boy! I brought you your jello, lemon, your favorite.
I missed the announcement
The new PC name will, no doubt, result in a much more efficient govt.
I don't usually read Mr. Roberts, anymore.
I hadn't realized that he'd gone off the deep end.
Perhaps we could take up a collection to get him some medication.
I figured they were talking about Washington state
So the bottom line is that the machines made it easier for Dems to cheat but they lost anyway.
Which party pushed to use the machines?
Don't you know that being a Democrat means never having to admit you f***ed up?
Oh, please. I'd just LOVE to ask the author just how he came up with this one. LOL
Republicans will continue to lose in PA until they get their message to the Philly suburbs and to ethnic Roman Catholics in coal country. Everyone knows we lose Philly, heavily. We make up for that in the rest of the state, but in the last two elections we simply have been clobbered by the five counties surrounding the city. Time to stop blaming fraud, learn from our mistakes and get the message to the suburbs.
(Denny Crane: "I Don't Want To Socialize With A Pinko Liberal Democrat Commie. Say What You Like About Republicans. We Stick To Our Convictions. Even When We Know We're Dead Wrong.")
If the chances are no more than one in a million, that's the same as saying the chances are less than one in a million!
That basically means the chances can be only UP TO one in a million, which means it could even be as low as a 50/50 chance or even LESS that the polls were wrong!
I'll bet he did that on purpose to throw everyone off!
I have noticed that protectionists are notoriously bad at math.
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