HACKING DEMOCRACY: THIS WILL NOT STAND

In Volusia County Florida in the year 2000 over 16,000 votes for Al Gore were thrown in the trash by a Republican Supervisor of Election using Diebold machines. Diebold is owned by a rabid right wing Publican who boldly said the pubs would win Florida if he had anything to do with it and he certainly did. It was successful with the help of the neo cons on the Supreme Court.

For those of you who think the idea of electronic voting without a paper trail is the product of wild eyed fruitcake conspiracy theorists think again. It is the most genuine threat to our democracy in the long history of the American Republic. Both the Florida vote desecration in 2000 and the absurd results of the Ohio vote in 2004 are proof enough. For much more please go to this website where an HBO Documentary on Novemeber 2 2006 will air.

http://www.hbo.com/docs/programs/hackingdemocracy/synopsis.html

“Diebold software, or other software like it, is installed
thousands of counties across 32 states. David Dill, professor of computer science at Stanford, says the problem is that there are "lots of people involved in writing the software, and lots of people who could have touched the software before it went into that machine. If one of those people put something malicious in the software and it's distributed to all the machines, then that one person could be responsible for changing tens of thousands of votes, maybe even hundreds of thousands, across the country." In Florida, Supervisor of Elections Ion Sancho presided over a trial "mini-election" to see if the vote could be hacked without being detected. Before votes were actually cast, computer analyst Harri Hursti "stuffed the ballot box" by entering votes on the computer's memory card. Then, after votes were cast, the results displayed when the same memory card was entered in the central tabulating program indicated that fraud was indeed possible. In other words, by accessing a memory card before an election, someone could change the results - a claim Diebold had denied was possible.”

Over the past few days the various national news organizations are amazingly reporting despite all evidence to the contrary that bush and rove are supremely confident that the Publicans will win in Nov 2006 and have nothing to worry about. The question has been asked "Do they know something the rest of us don't know?" Maybe we should ask the manufacturers of the Diebold and other machines eh?

Terel