While the US elections are watched (on television) they are not as closely monitored as some third world countries elections.
Now, given the level of corruption we have in Washington, on both sides, that has both left and right moaning, how about we stop trusting the politicians and start thinking about watching them all a little more closely?
It’s the blind acceptance of whatever the hell is going on, not that anybody actually knows what that is, that is the worst… such as having shitty procedures and easily faked machine results.
Who knows or cares what exactly happened in the past, that’s over with. It’s the future screw-ups we need to worry about. Not that anybody really is.
[Jonathan Adler, June 5, 2006 at 11:23am] 0 Trackbacks / Possibly More Trackbacks
RFK Jr. on Election 2004:
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has turned his attention from the environment to the 2004 election, with predictable results. In this Rolling Stone article ( http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10432334/was_the_2004_election_stolen ), Kennedy argues that Republicans used dirty tricks to steal the 2004 presidential election. The article cites a wide variety of sources, but Kennedy’s claim ultimately rests on the discrepancy between exit polls and the reported results – and that is a thin reed upon which to base his claim.
Election law experts are not convinced by Kennedy’s account. Ohio State’s Dan Tokaji is sympathetic to some of Kennedy’s arguments, and believes the 2004 election offers many important lessons for election reform, but finds the argument that Kerry won “strains credulity.” ( http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/blogs/tokaji/2006/06/back-to-ohio-rolling-stone-piece.html ) Salon’s Farhad Manjoo is far less generous ( The last Kennedy | Salon.com ), finding Kennedy’s “argument is filled with distortions and blatant omissions.” Bob Bauer concurs, concluding Kennedy’s “case does not stand up to even casual scrutiny,” and may even set back the case for “progressive election reform.” ( http://www.moresoftmoneyhardlaw.com/news.html?AID=728 )
Now all you have to do is ignore the fact that e-voting machines are proven 100% hackable and that only three short months after Bush’s “landslide victory” – he suddenly had the lowest approval rating of any second term President in modern history.
Bush’s Poll Position Is Worst on Record
April 11, 2005
With apologies to George Tenet, the first 100 days of President Bush’s second term have been no slam-dunk.
How rough has it been? Bush has the lowest approval rating of any president at this point in his second term, according to Gallup polls going back to World War II.
As if people suddenly realized – ya know he’s just not the guy I thought he was…
Now all you have to do is ignore the fact that e-voting machines are proven 100% hackable and that only three short months after Bush’s “landslide victory” – he suddenly had the lowest approval rating of any second term President in modern history.
Bush’s Poll Position Is Worst on Record
April 11, 2005
With apologies to George Tenet, the first 100 days of President Bush’s second term have been no slam-dunk.
How rough has it been? Bush has the lowest approval rating of any president at this point in his second term, according to Gallup polls going back to World War II.
As if people suddenly realized – ya know he’s just not the guy I thought he was…
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Irrelevant, because his opinion rating is based solely on whether people approve of the job Bush is doing, not in consideration of an alternative – when given the alternative of Kerry, you’re presenting a different query.
The way they keep rolling these things out KNOWING how vulnerable they WERE and ARE while actively dismissing the need for a paper trail audit I think implies clear intent to manipulate the vote.
Keep in mind while reading the latest news that this is almost three years after the election – AFTER almost three years of security improvements and upgrades…
A Single Person Could Swing an Election
Electronic Systems’ Weaknesses May Be Countered With Audits, Report Suggests
The Washington Post
Wednesday, June 28, 2006
To determine what it would take to hack a U.S. election, a team of cybersecurity experts turned to a fictional battleground state called Pennasota and a fictional gubernatorial race between Tom Jefferson and Johnny Adams. It’s the year 2007, and the state uses electronic voting machines.
Jefferson was forecast to win the race by about 80,000 votes, or 2.3 percent of the vote. Adams’s conspirators thought, “How easily can we manipulate the election results?”
The experts thought about all the ways to do it. And they concluded in a report issued yesterday that it would take only one person, with a sophisticated technical knowledge and timely access to the software that runs the voting machines, to change the outcome.
The report, which was unveiled at a Capitol Hill news conference by New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice and billed as the most authoritative to date, tackles some of the most contentious questions about the security of electronic voting.
Study: Fed ‘Guidelines’ Imperil E-Voting Security
June 28, 2006
The 2008 presidential election could be interesting.
After four years, more than $3 billion taxpayer dollars, and an alphabet soup of newly created bureaucracies, electronic voting isn’t safe.
Key members of the Technical Guidance Development Committee (TGDC) that drafted federal guidelines for designing and testing electronic voting machines admit that significant flaws in the machines could be exploited by hackers to change the outcome of local or national elections…
The guidelines, called the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines (VVSG), also leave gaping security holes, they say, by allowing wireless communications with electronic voting machines and by exempting commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software from testing. http://www.internetnews.com/security/article.php/3616656
Lou Dobbs on E-Voting Security: ‘Elections Can be Outright Stolen and No One Would Ever Know…It’s Incredible’
CNN Notices That Wireless Personal Digital Assistants Could Wreak Havoc on Voting Machine
A call to investigate the 2004 election
Boston Globe
June 26, 2006
Election Day 2004 also saw the advent of a congressional mandate under the Help America Vote Act to replace punch-card systems with new, unproven technologies. In that election, 64 percent of Americans voted on direct recorded electronic voting machines or optical-scan systems, both of which are vulnerable to hacking or programming fraud.
According to a September 2005 General Accountability Office investigation, such systems contained flaws that “could allow unauthorized personnel to disrupt operations or modify data and programs that are critical to… the integrity of the voting process.”
A reasonable person could thus argue that a well-conducted exit poll that confirmed the official count would be about the only reason we would have to believe the results of such an election. Without an audit or a recount to verify the official count, those of us who suspect that the presidential election was stolen do so based on the information now available…
Good question.
Did the NSA help Bush hack the vote?
January 9, 2006
What part of the headline in the Columbus Dispatch: “Diebold vote machine can be hacked, test finds” don’t people understand? The electronic hacking and monitoring of votes by U.S. intelligence agencies has a long history, from mainframe computers in the 70s and 80s to DREs in the 80s and 90s…
The recent revelations about hacking of Diebold voting machines and the findings of the General Accountability Office as to the insecurity of the e-voting networks cannot be separated from the president’s criminal use of the NSA to spy on American citizens. As much as we rejoice in the resignation of Diebold CEO Walden O’Dell and the pending lawsuits by shareholders against Diebold, it should not obscure the massive continued potential to hack the vote.
Both Popular Science and Popular Mechanics magazines ran November 2004 cover stories on how easy it is to hack the e-voting machines and their communication networks. In one famous cartoon, a teenage hacker was announced as the president…
Would a president who believes he has spy powers, the right to torture, the ability to wage illegal wars based on bogus, manufactured intelligence reports, simply refuse to spy on Kerry and rig an election electronically? In Ohio, two burglaries occurred against the Democratic Party in Lucas County and Franklin County just prior to 2004 election involving computer theft.
Congress must investigate whether Bush used the NSA for partisan political gain during the 2004 election, and whether any NSA Bush operatives or other members of the security industrial complex had access to e-voting machines, central tabulators or the communication lines that delivered the voting results.
Proven hackable, insecure, no paper trail, Republican owned voting machines with WIRELESS ports, NSA wire tapping, wildly inaccurate exit polls and a drunk, drug abusing, doesn’t know what “sovereignty” means, corporate failure getting elected to a second term just after losing all three debates – and to think, about the only obstacle that stood between the GOP and a stolen election was their “integrity”. http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/gopscorecard.htm
