RFK Jr. Blows
the Whistle on Diebold

By John Ireland, In These Times
Posted on July 21, 2006, Printed on July 21, 2006

On July 13, the Pensacola, Fla.-based law firm of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. filed a “qui tam” lawsuit in U.S. District Court, alleging that Diebold and other electronic voting machine (EVM) companies fraudulently represented to state election boards and the federal government that their products were “unhackable.”

Kennedy claims to have witnesses “centrally located, deep within the corporations,” who will confirm that company officials withheld their knowledge of problems with accuracy, reliability and security of EVMs in order to procure government contracts. Since going into service, many of these machines have been linked to allegations of election fraud.

In the wake of alleged vote count inconsistencies and the “hanging chad” debacle of 2000, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) in 2002. HAVA appropriated $3 billion to replace voting equipment and make other improvements in election administration. Diebold, Election Systems & Software and Sequoia Systems secured the lion’s share of nearly half that sum in contracts to purchase EVMs. All 50 states have received funds and many are hurriedly spending it on replacing lever and punch card machines in time for November.

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*In response to concerns that have been raised recently about
VoteTrustUSA, we would like to issue the following statement:*

Donna Curling has never attempted to influence the policy,
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will result in legislation, regulation, and oversight to curb the
type of abusive practices that have been revealed by Greg Palast and
others in the media.

VoteTrustUSA has never questioned Greg Palast’s veracity.

John Gideon was not acting as a spokesperson for VoteTrustUSA when he
posted remarks critical of Greg Palast on the Black Box Voting Forum
message board. Mr. Gideon has apologized to Mr. Palast and publicly
retracted his post.

The mission of VoteTrustUSA is to ensure that future elections are
open, fair, accessible, publicly transparent, and accurately reflect
the intentions of the voters. VoteTrustUSA condemns in the strongest
possible terms any practices that seek to deny any eligible voter
their right to vote.

Joan Krawitz
Executive Director

Warren Stewart
Director of Legislative Issues and Policy

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What makes you think I want to “take no steps”? Have you read any of my work?

The DRE machines cannot be trusted. Period. We should–and, one day, will– be following the lead of the democracies in Canada and Europe, and moving to a system of all paper ballots. No doubt you’ll call that plan “unrealistic.” It’s actually a lot more realistic than the use of paper trails, which Bush & Co. supports. Why do you think they support it? Because they know that it won’t do them any harm, and may in fact do them some good.

You, and everybody else, should now be concentrating on informing the American public of the actual unworkability of DRE technology for any civic purpose. Once the people know the score, they’ll see that paper ballots are a lot more realistic than a fake “solution” that will only make things that much worse.

I read what I can only categorize as your bizarre response to today’s article on evoting.

Yes, a paper trail is only a step in the right direction. But what would you have us do? Take no steps and whine forever how our democracy is lost?

I’m interested in your proposal of what we SHOULD do, not what we should NOT do. Where is it? Can I read it somewhere?

Lisa P
Blog: http://realhistoryarchives.blogspot.com
Site: www.realhistoryarchives.com
Book: www.TheAssassinations.com

“Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day.” – Thomas Jefferson

Democracy in Crisis – Interview
with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
www.BradBlog.com

Tuesday 18 July 2006

An Exclusive Interview for The BRAD BLOG [1] as Guest Blogged by Joy [2] and Tom Williams

“The Republican Party, the Republican National Committee, has been using old-fashioned, Jim Crow, apartheid-type maneuvers to steal the last two national elections.”
- Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Recently, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., (bio [3]) , wrote the article: “Was the 2004 Election Stolen [4]” where he examined the election fraud in Ohio that took place during the last Presidential Election. He also has written a book “Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush & His Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking our Democracy [5]“. Mr. Kennedy, along with Mike Papantonio have filed a “qui tam” lawsuit [6] against some of the voting machines companies, in an effort to save our Democracy.

Read more.

FEMA muzzling La. trailer-park residents
By The Associated Press
07.20.06

MORGAN CITY, La. – Residents of trailer parks set up by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to house hurricane victims in Louisiana aren’t allowed to talk to the press without an official escort, The (Baton Rouge) Advocate reported.

In one instance, a security guard ordered an Advocate reporter out of a trailer during an interview in Morgan City. Similar FEMA rules were enforced in Davant, in Plaquemines Parish.

FEMA spokeswoman Rachel Rodi wouldn’t say whether the security guards’ actions complied with FEMA policy, saying the matter was being reviewed. But she confirmed that FEMA does not allow the news media to speak alone to residents in their trailers.

Read more.

He talked about the hardships of the movement.”

!!!!

Bush Touts Voting Rights Act Renewal

By DEB RIECHMANN
The Associated Press
Thursday, July 20, 2006; 11:25 AM

WASHINGTON — President Bush on Thursday urged the Senate to renew a landmark civil rights law passed in the 1960s to stop racist voting practices in the South.

“President Johnson called the right to vote the lifeblood of our democracy. That was true then and it remains true today,” Bush said in the first address of his presidency to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s annual convention.

Acknowledging his administration’s bumpy relations with black voters, Bush said he wants to change the Republican Party’s relationship with African-Americans.

“I understand that racism still lingers in America,” Bush said. “It’s a lot easier to change a law than to change a human heart. And I understand that many African-Americans distrust my political party.

“I consider it a tragedy that the party of Abraham Lincoln let go of its historical ties with the African-American community. For too long, my party wrote off the African-American vote, and many African-Americans wrote off the Republican Party.”

Bush, joined by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and his chief political adviser Karl Rove, spoke as the Senate debated a bill to approve a 25-year extension of expiring provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The House has passed the bill, and the Senate was expected to pass it quickly, propelled by a Republican push to increase the party’s credibility with minorities.

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Many of us in this movement realize the fight continues to be against the use of DRE and centralized vote counting technology in our nation’s public elections. We do not need computer-generated paper trails if the machines are banned from use as they should be. The fight for paper trails only further legitimizes use of insecure technology. If this requires repeal of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), then this must be our course of action. We must continue to demand that voters be given paper ballots on which to vote and that every ballot be counted by a team of civic-minded members of the community utilizing a voter intent standard. We must fight to protect the voting rights of all citizens locally, and hold local and state public elections officials accountable for the honest administration of elections. Those who engage in partisan activities with political party campaigns or candidates, or who solicit private vendors who contract with the state to provide election-related services ought to be fired and fined heavily. We must pursue or support legal action to force electronic voting companies to return the 3.6 billion dollar taxpayer investment in insecure voting technology to the U.S. Treasury.

Kat

My response to Michael Scherer’s Salon article (see below):

I hate to rain on anyone’s parade, but this is not a good idea.

Why is our democracy at risk? Is it just because those DRE machines don’t leave a paper trail? Or is it that the Bush Republicans detest democracy, since they cannot wield power without subverting the electoral system? The fact is that they’re pushing an agenda that could never win majority support in the United States–from liberals or conservatives. They’ve therefore had no choice but to commit election fraud, repeatedly and on a mammoth scale, deploying every trick and tactic in the book, and then some.

As I point out in Fooled Again, the Bush Republicans used paperless machines to cut the Democratic vote, not only in Ohio but from coast to coast–but they also cut the vote in states and counties that did not use paperless machines; and in those places that did use them, the Busheviks also relied on many other means of disenfranchising the majority.

They kept Americans from registering, tossed out or passed over countless ballots (including absentee ballots), wiped the names of (at least) tens of thousands from the voter rolls, carefully dispatched too few machines to Democratic precincts nationwide, used “challengers” to bully countless would-be voters into going home or staying home, mounted vast disinformation drives to mislead countless more, arranged a most fortuitous computer glitch so as to keep some two million expatriates from voting absentee, and otherwise transported this whole nation, white and black alike, back to the catastrophic epoch of Jim Crow.

The problem, then, is civic, not just technical, concerning the fanatical persistence of a full-scale movement deeply hostile to the letter and the spirit of our Constitution.

Now, we must ask ourselves: Would that movement be frustrated, its agenda thwarted, by the use of paper trails? Evidently not–since members of that very movement also back the Holt bill with enthusiasm. As the Salon piece points out, Mary Jo Kiffmeyer, Minnesota’s Secretary of State, has now testified in favor of the bill. It is more than relevant to note that Kiffmeyer is a stalwart Bushevik and theocratic maniac, who has publicly deplored the separation of church and state, and who did everything she could to slash the Democratic vote in Minnesota in the last election. (That appalling story is in Fooled Again, pp. 138-39.) Her record is so dismal that she’s now in trouble, facing a strong challenge by Mark Ritchie, who knows full well what she has done to the electoral system in his state and means to change the situation. That such an operative as she–and David Cole, and John Groh of ES&S, and other Bushist agents–would support this measure tells us all we need to know about its usefulness.

We have heard it argued that the Holt bill is a half-step in the right direction, and that some reform is surely preferable to none at all. In this case that’s a dangerous self-delusion. Sometimes “compromise” can only make things worse, as there really is no valid “middle way.” So it is with torture, and illegal wars. Whatever “compromise” serves merely to protract such horrors is finally nothing but abetment, however well-intended it may be.
And so it is with the far-right crusade against American democracy. We must oppose that drive in every way we can–and that means not allowing its own managers to cast themselves as champions of electoral “reform.”

Taking the paper trail to Washington
The dangers of electronic voting machines got tallied Wednesday on Capitol Hill.
By Michael Scherer

Jul. 20, 2006 | White T-shirts are a significant departure from the standard dress code in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill. So when a couple dozen activists walked into a joint meeting of the Science and Administration committees Wednesday wearing bleached cotton instead of the typical pantsuits and striped ties, it was not surprising that someone dispatched a Capitol Police officer to stand guard in case things got out of hand.

The T-shirts were imprinted with bold black letters that read “Got Paper?” or “Got Audits?” — coded, chest-high messages that were directed at lawmakers to express the widespread concern that new computerized voting machines can be tampered with to swing elections. The activists had come to Washington to push legislation that would mandate voter-verifiable paper records for every ballot cast in the nation, a reversal of a recent trend toward touch-screen computers that only tally votes electronically. It didn’t matter that the House committees did not plan to discuss the issue of ballot paper trails. “Hearings are all about theater,” explained Susannah Goodman of the liberal election reform group Common Cause, in a pre-hearing meeting with the activists. “We’re hijacking it.”

Read more.