Secret Service Wants Blakboxvoting.org (tags)
April 29th, 2004 From www.blackboxvoting.org The Secret Service Wants Your Name: Will "subpeona" this web site By Bev Harris And by the way, they read every word. Hi, agent Mike. This "investigation" no longer passes the stink test. He says not to tell folks about the "investigating" they are doing. I have cooperated ad nauseum to this absurd investigation of the "VoteHere hack" which looks to me like it is something entirely different. I'll tell you what it looks like to me: A fishing expedition. It appears that they may be using the Patriot Act to circumvent some of the civil rights protections laid down in the 60s. You see, it is illegal for a government agency to go in and demand the list of all the members of a group. And you can't investigate leaks to journalists by going in and grabbing the reporter's computer. After the Diebold memos were leaked, and my web site was shut down, around the time of the California recall election, I started getting solicited to accept VoteHere software. I didn't bite, because it was obvious that this was an entrapment attempt. Okay, a word about VoteHere: This is the company that has no visible means of support. It doesn't seem to sell anything. Its board is heavily infested with defense industry types -- a former CIA director (Robert Gates, now heads George Bush School of Government); it had Admiral Bill Owens, also Vice-Chairman of SAIC and a member of the Defense Policy Board with Perle and Wolfowitz, a very close friend of Cheney; currently headed by former Washington Secretary of State Ralph Munro.
E-Vote Protest Gains Momentum (tags)
Swarthmore College students embroiled in a legal battle against voting-machine maker Diebold Election Systems have received a groundswell of support from universities and colleges nationwide.
All the President's votes? (tags)
A quiet revolution is taking place in US politics. By the time it's over, the integrity of elections will be in the unchallenged, unscrutinised control of a few large - and pro-Republican - corporations. Andrew Gumbel wonders if democracy in America can survive
UK Independent reports Republicans use E-voting systems to steal elections (tags)
If much of the worry about vote-tampering is directed at the Republicans, it is largely because the big three touchscreen companies are all big Republican donors, pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into party coffers in the past few years. The ownership issue is, of course, compounded by the lack of transparency. Or, as Dr Mercuri puts it: "If the machines were independently verifiable, who would give a crap who owns them?" As it is, fears that US democracy is being hijacked by corporate interests are being fuelled by links between the big three and broader business interests, as well as extremist organisations. Two of the early backers of American Information Systems, a company later merged into ES&S, are also prominent supporters of the Chalcedon Foundation, an organisation that espouses theocratic governance according to a literal reading of the Bible and advocates capital punishment for blasphemy and homosexuality.
Kim Alexander: 'Electronic rigging?' (tags)
As election officials scramble to replace old, Florida-style voting systems with new, modern ones, many people are beginning to question the wisdom of entrusting our precious ballots to an entirely computerized process. These concerns are well-founded.