NationStates Jolt Archive

Are you for or against electronic voting in the presidential election? I see arguements for both sides:

FOR: no "hanging chad" fiascos, e-voting produces more accurate result
AGAINST: all it takes is an opinionated hacker to give one side or the other an extra 10,000 votes.

I personally am against it. You all probably know that I am conservative and the liberal conspiracy theorists (ex: The (late) Red Arrow) are hell-bent on believing e-voting rigged the election for Bush, but I don't want a single person to change the course of the election because they know java (or whatever the language is).

Final note: I realize the irony of the poll :wink:

I wish I knew how to add 10,000 votes to one of these options...

I've made my opinion on this known more than once--I'm very opposed to electronic voting because of the increased potential for fraud, and I fear fraud regardless of who's in power and who benefits from it.

The reason that the call has been taken up by the left over the last year is because, quite frankly, most pundits on the right have refused to acknowledge that there's even the possibility of a problem. It's the same in the political arena--Rush Holt has had a bill before the House for over a year now (HR 2239) that would require a paper trail. It has over 130 co-sponsors, and only one or two are Republicans and they only joined a couple of months ago. There's a similar bill in the Senate (there were two, but they've been combined) that can't get a hearing because the Republican leadership won't let it come out.

That's not to say that I think that the Republicans are part of some massive conspiracy to cheat the US by using fraudulent voting machines, but when you see the stalling in the Congress, the mass refusal to acknowledge that there could be a problem, and the fact that the owners and CEOs of the voting machines companies are large Republican donors and supporters, you have a lot of fodder for conspiracy theorists.

Against. Too many things can go wrong in the Era of Computer Viruses.

Against. Too many things can go wrong in the Era of Computer Viruses.Especially when you consider that most of the machines use Microsoft Access as their operating system.

Against. Too many things can go wrong in the Era of Computer Viruses.Especially when you consider that most of the machines use Microsoft Access as their operating system.

Microsoft Access (http://office.microsoft.com/home/office.aspx?assetid=FX01085791) is not an operating system. It is a database (EDIT: management package).

Granted, I curse the apparent ineptitude of Microsoft as much as anyone else, however, a lot (if not most) of the time, problems with security and such are the fault of end-users who do not take the necessary precautions. Microsoft puts out security patches and updates out months in advance and people ignore them. Then when the next virus/worm/whatever hits and all these people's systems get fragged, who gets blamed?

Every computer in my home is firewalled as well as virus scanned, patched, updated (http://v4.windowsupdate.microsoft.com/en/default.asp) and backed-up regularly. Other than the occasional virus hit, (EDIT: which is immediately detected and quarantined by said virus scanner), there has never been a major problem. Those who don't practice proper network security and maintenance will have problems and all their bellyaching about Microsoft isn't going to change anything. :D

Against. Too many things can go wrong in the Era of Computer Viruses.Especially when you consider that most of the machines use Microsoft Access as their operating system.

Microsoft Access (http://office.microsoft.com/home/office.aspx?assetid=FX01085791) is not an operating system. It is a database system.

Granted, I curse the apparent ineptitude of Microsoft as much as anyone else, however, a lot (if not most) of the time, problems with security and such are the fault of end-users who do not take the necessary precautions. Microsoft puts out security patches and updates out months in advance and people ignore them. Then when the next virus/worm/whatever hits and all these people's systems get fragged, who gets blamed?

Every computer in my home is firewalled as well as virus scanned, patched, updated and backed-up regularly. Other than the occasional virus hit, which is immediately taken care of without a hitch, there has never been a major problem. Those who don't practice proper network security and maintenance will have problems and all their bellyaching about Microsoft isn't going to change anything. :DYou're absolutely right about Access--too little sleep on my part, I guess. :lol:

And your point about security patches and the like for home users are good, but I don't think they apply here because of what these machines are being used for.

These machines have to be as secure as they can possibly be made before they shift, because they're dealing with what most Americans consider their most sacred obligation as a citizen--voting. Finding a problem later and providing a last minute patch--as both Diebold and ES&S have done in the past in violation of state law--shouldn't be acceptable. What's the hurry, after all? As I understand it, Canade still uses paper ballots that are counted by hand and they manage to get the job done in 4 hours or so--I say we go back to that if necessary until we get the kinks worked out here.

I should note that I'm not completely opposed to the idea of electronic voting, as long as there are some protections in place. There needs to be a voter-verifiable paper receipt that is dispensed into a lockbox that can be used both as a backup and as an audit trail. There needs to be periodic random audits of the machines during elections, and if there's a discrepancy, then you have to do a hand recount of the receipts. And most importantly, the owners of the companies who build the machines (and perhaps even the people involved in the programming of the machines) must be fully independent, unable to give contributions to political parties so as to avoid even the appearance of bias. And that's just for starters.

These machines have to be as secure as they can possibly be made before they shift, because they're dealing with what most Americans consider their most sacred obligation as a citizen--voting. Finding a problem later and providing a last minute patch--as both Diebold and ES&S have done in the past in violation of state law--shouldn't be acceptable. What's the hurry, after all?


The problem is that the invulnerable, totally secure computer is a myth. A company can and should make a system as secure as possible before release, however, someone somewhere is going to find a way to break it. The only possible way to deal with this is to take note of the weaknesses as they are found in the wild and patch them. We can sit around refusing to release until every possible method for breaking the system is found, or we can release systems and adapt them to challenges as they are met. The first method will never see a release. Ever. The second method might not be 100% secure, but assuming that those administering the system take the necessary precautions, it works.

I wonder if people who are afraid of electronic voting for security reasons use credit cards or banks which keep track of their accounts by computer. A totally secure computer system might not be possible, but the fact of the matter is handing ones credit card number over to a reader which sends financial data out over the internet is vastly more secure than handing that card over to a human being. The vast majority of stolen credit card numbers and other financial fraud are committed by human beings working with paper, not computers. I wonder if the same would hold true for paper elections?

The problem is that the invulnerable, totally secure computer is a myth. A company can and should make a system as secure as possible before release, however, someone somewhere is going to find a way to break it. The only possible way to deal with this is to take note of the weaknesses as they are found in the wild and patch them. We can sit around refusing to release until every possible method for breaking the system is found, or we can release systems and adapt them to challenges as they are met. The first method will never see a release. Ever. The second method might not be 100% secure, but assuming that those administering the system take the necessary precautions, it works.

I wonder if people who are afraid of electronic voting for security reasons use credit cards or banks which keep track of their accounts by computer. A totally secure computer system might not be possible, but the fact of the matter is handing ones credit card number over to a reader which sends financial data out over the internet is vastly more secure than handing that card over to a human being. The vast majority of stolen credit card numbers and other financial fraud are committed by human beings working with paper, not computers. I wonder if the same would hold true for paper elections?It's actually because I use an atm machine almost every day that I have faith that the system could work eventually. Those machines do thousands of transactions a day individually, every single day, and if there's a twenty missing somewhere, the bank knows almost immediately. Those things are built like fortresses too, which isn't the case with the voting machines.

And I know that an invulnerable system is impossible, but the problem is that these systems, from all recent reports, seem to have vulnerabilities built into them. The code is apparently sloppy in a lot of places (although I'm not a programmer so I couldn't tell you from Adam), and in pretty much every test that I've read about, the hackers were able to get in and out without being detected because of it.

It's not that I'm worried about the system failing--it's going to fail at some time, and there's no getting around that. The key is to make sure it fails well, that there are safeguards in place to try to make sure the votes are able to be counted in some manner. Paper backups do that. The current machines in a lot of places don't provide for any kind of backup in case there's a failure, or even a question. That bugs me, and will always bug me.

It's not foolproof (nothing is) but how about an offline electronic voting system?
Each voting-booth unit would include a sort of safe that encases the custom-built unique harddrive with fully detailed and well encrypted voting information. When the polls are closed, these disks would be taken in armored vehicles to regional centers where special machines with many slots for the many vote-drives tally the votes and produce a completely encoded unique ID that would correllate with the tallied votes. Then the person in charge of this machine would phone an even more central station and give the tally and the ID. These would be fed into yet another machine that would count the totals and produce yet another super-secure ID that would then be verified at the federal vote-counting system...
(Any point at which people have to handle things would be done with a large number of witnesses around, in addition to digital monitoring.)
Now, where exactly can hackers get in, assuming the whole process of producing, shipping, and installing the voting machines and related hardware would be highly secured and monitored to make sure there is no foul play?
Just cause it's electronic doesn't mean it has to go over the internet...

It's not foolproof (nothing is) but how about an offline electronic voting system?that's what this thread is about. Adding the Internet to the equation makes the situation even worse

You haven't looked up the facts of how the election was rigged have you?

http://www.ericblumrich.com/gta.html

http://gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=217&row=2

I vote yes on electronic voting if we do it the austrialian way.

Right now there are too many problems with it so at this point I say no.

Winning the Election – The Republican Way: Racism, Theft and Fraud in Florida
The Weekly Dig, Boston, MA
Tuesday, April 22, 2003
E-Mail Article
Printer Friendly Version

by Liam Scheff



When future historians want to know what happened to America in 2000, they’ll read Greg Palast’s The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. The book follows the paper trail of perjury, deception and incompetence left by the Bush family, and the billionaires who fund them, as they trample through the world – from mining disaster cover-ups to the California energy scandal to the pre-9/11 intelligence black-out that let a handful of Saudi terrorists slip past the NSA, FBI and CIA.



The book also uncovers inside documents on the IMF and World Bank, Pat Robertson‘s unholy money-schemes, and the co-opted US media that won‘t report what the rest of the world gets on the front page.



The book opens with the crime that keeps on stealing – the 2000 presidential election. George Bush lost the popular election by 500,000 votes, but won the electoral vote by winning hotly contested Florida, the state that tipped the scales, and the state where his brother Jeb is governor. His tiny 500-vote win there was accompanied by a torrent of hanging chads and unhappy voters, who claimed their votes were stolen. Last week Palast came to Boston to promote the new edition of The Best Democracy… I asked him exactly what he uncovered.



What really happened in Florida?



Five months before the election, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris ordered the removal of 57,700 names from Florida’s voter rolls on grounds that they were felons. Voter rolls contain the names of all eligible, registered voters. If you’re not on the list, you don’t get to vote.



If you commit a felony in Florida, you lose your right to vote there, and you‘re “scrubbed” from the rolls. You become a non-citizen, like in the old Soviet Union. This is not the case in most other states; it’s an uncivilized vestige of the Deep South.



My office carefully went through the scrub list and discovered that at minimum, 90.2 percent of the people were completely innocent of any crime – except for being African American. We didn’t have to guess about that, because next to each voter’s name was their race.



When I questioned Harris’ office about the high percentage of African Americans on the scrub list, they responded, “Well, you know how many black people commit crimes.”



But these people weren’t felons, so why were they scrubbed?



The Florida Republicans wanted to block African Americans, who largely vote as Democrats, from voting. In 1999 they fired the company they were paying $5,700 to compile their felony “scrub” lists and replaced them with Database Technologies [DBT], who they paid $2.3 million to do the same job. [DBT is the Florida division of Choicepoint, a massive database company that does extensive work for the FBI.]



There are a lot of Joe Smiths in the Florida phonebook. DBT was hired to verify which Joe Smith was a felon and which was not. They were supposed to use their extensive databases to check credit cards, bank information, addresses and phone numbers, in addition to names, ages, and social security numbers. But they didn’t. They didn’t use one of their 1,200 databases to verify personal information, nor did they make a single phone call to verify the identity of scrubbed names.



So where did DBT get their data?



From the Internet. They went to 11 other states’ Internet sites and took names off dirt-cheap. They scrubbed Florida voters whose names were similar to out-of-state felons. An Illinois felon named John Michaels could knock off Florida voter John, Johnny, Jonathan or Jon R. Michaels, or even J.R. Michaelson. DBT matched for race and gender, but names only had to be similar to a certain degree. Names could be reversed, and suffixes (Jr., Sr.) were ignored, but aliases were included. So the felon John “Buddy” Michaels could knock non-felon Michael Johns or Bud Johnson Jr. off the voter rolls. This happened again and again.



Although DBT didn’t get names, birthdays or social security numbers right, they were very careful to match for race. A black felon named Mr. Green would only knock off a black Mr. Green, but not a single white Mr. Green. That’s how DBT earned its $2.3 million.


Why didn’t DBT use their own databases?



They didn’t, because the state told them not to.
Choicepoint vice-president James Lee was grilled by a Congressional committee, headed by Cynthia McKinney, and he admitted everything, but said DBT was following state directives. Florida state officials told DBT to knock off voters by incorrectly matching them with felons.



Congresswoman McKinney led this commission to her own peril. Choicepoint is in her Atlanta district. She was destroyed in the last election by fabricated quotes and a vicious propaganda campaign.



Is this the only way votes were stolen?



No. There were 8,000 Floridians who had committed misdemeanors, but were counted as felons. Their votes were scrubbed. Katherine Harris’ office illegally scrubbed people who’d served time in other states, then moved to Florida, and Jeb Bush’s office illegally barred these people from registering to vote at all.



The biggest wholesale theft occurred inside the voting booths in black rural counties. In Gadsden County, one of the blackest in the state, thousands of votes were simply thrown away. Gadsden used paper ballots which are read by an optical reader. Ballots with a single extra mark were considered “spoiled“ and not counted. The buttons used to fill out the ballots were set up – with approval from Bush and Harris – to make votes appear unclear to the machine. One in eight ballots in Gadsden was voided by the state.



The same ballots were used in Tallahassee County, which is mostly white. There only one in 100 votes was “spoiled.” What made the difference? In Tallahassee, ballots were read on the premises, and if they were marked incorrectly, voters were sent to revote until they got it right. In the black counties, the votes were trucked off immediately. There were no machines on site. Voters weren’t told that their votes were spoiled, and they certainly weren’t permitted to re-vote.



When Ted Koppel investigated voter theft in Florida, he concluded that blacks lost votes because they weren’t well educated, and made mistakes that whites hadn‘t. He didn’t even bother to ask how the machines were set up. This is the kind of reporting we get in America. In Britain, this story ran 3 weeks after the election, when Gore was still in race. It was in the papers and on TV. In the US, it was seven months before the Washington Post ran it, and then it was only a partial version. After the election, Gadsden County replaced its voting commissioner. In 2002 they only lost one in 500 votes. So you can say blacks in Gadsden got smarter in one way – they elected a black elections chief.



What happened to Choicepoint?



Bush is handing them the big contracts in the War on Terror; immigration reviews, DNA cataloging, airport profiling, and their voting systems are being rolled out across the country.



It wasn’t reported in mainstream press, but the NAACP sued Harris and the gang for the black purge, and won. The state threw up its hands immediately and said, ‘You got us! We’ll put these people back as soon as we can.’ We’re still waiting.


http://weeklydig.com/dig/content/2846.aspx

Wow, another liberal article about how Florida 2000 was rigged.

Tell you what. Want me to find a National Review article about how it wasn't? Would you accept that as proof?

First off, this little biased clip :

If you commit a felony in Florida, you lose your right to vote there, and you‘re “scrubbed” from the rolls. You become a non-citizen, like in the old Soviet Union. This is not the case in most other states; it’s an uncivilized vestige of the Deep South.
Is completely inaccurate. Besides being a bigot and blasting the Deep South, its not just limited to the Deep South. Most of them are in the West, however even places like, I think, Massachusettes and Connecticut have some form of limitations. As do, IIRC, Delaware, and New Mexico, two states that voted for Gore.

Anyway, I'm sure you've heard Stephistan talk about how the war on Iraq was illegal. And so, if American traitor-deserters fled to Canada, they would be sheltered and not handed over, because Canada dosen't view the act as illegal. Even though American law says it is. Well, the same thing applies here : Even *if* a place like, say, Minnesota dosen't have a ban on felons voting, if they move to Florida, then they can't vote.

I can't comment on them going through the list and finding 90.2% of them being innocent. Besides it being a classic case of "my office" work (Which is often false), as the article itself said, the act took place 5 months before the election. Why only the accusations after?

And then of course the usual conspieracy theories about Republicans blocking blacks from voting and throwing their votes away. Just like how people on the right will complain that Democrats bribed homeless people with cigarettes to vote and how they made illegal Haitians vote for them, too. Or maybe the good ol' one about how the Democrats got the media to call Florida for Bush early, even thouhg Gore was leading, causing thousands of people in the Panhandle not to vote.

The list goes on and on. Its silly.

can't fcuk with proven facts beeyatch :P

Stupid hanging chads and stuff, i got sick of that bullshit last election, especially since my candidate didn't win.

I don't know about electronic voting though because electronics can come with many glitches.

http://www.fraudfactor.com/ffef2kcountways.html
Here :

Numerous methods were used by Democrat Party operatives to steal the 2000 Presidential Election from Republican George W. Bush and the American people. The following is a documentary of these Democrat election fraud and election theft efforts.

The following is a partial list of Democrat election fraud methods used in the 2000 Presidential Election:

A Democrat Party operative waited until a few days before the election, and then planted a story with a news reporter about a 24 year old Driving Under the Influence (alcohol DUI) arrest of George W. Bush

Widespread illegal voting by illegal aliens throughout the south-western United States, due in large part to Democrat organization programs and operations to encourage and facilitate this illegal activity

Illegal voting by non-citizen Haitian immigrants in Florida
Illegal voting by convicted felons in Florida and elsewhere
Vote buying
Vote swapping
Voting multiple times
Post-election ballot tampering

Voter News Service effectively suppressed voter turnout for Republicans and other Bush supporters by falsely and prematurely calling Al Gore the election winner in Florida and in the entire election, an hours before the polls were closed in the heavily Republican Florida panhandle, as well as the central and western states. Bush was ahead in all of the polls by at least one percent nationwide going into the election, yet he lost the popular vote. The Democrats then tried to accuse a cousin of Bush of influencing a later call of the election for Bush, without evidence, and even though the polls were already closed. [This item needs more specific information for the last sentence - will get and re-write as necessary]

Democrat Party fabrication of a "confusing ballot" controversy in Palm Beach County, Florida, which was used as the basis for demanding a county-wide re-vote. This re-vote would have allowed Democrats who voted for Green Party candidate Ralph Nader to switch their vote to Democrat candidate Al Gore.

The Florida Supreme Court intervened in the Democrat Party lawsuit involving Florida's statutory county election return reporting deadline, which is unusual because the courts usually avoid becoming involved in election matters, especially after an election is over, and especially when the case does not involve election fraud. In addition, the Florida Supreme Court took an even more extraordinary action by bringing this case to itself. Normally, a case would be brought to a higher level court by the plaintiff or defendant appealing the case to the higher court. It is extremely rare for any court to bring a case to itself. In this case, the Florida Supreme Court ignored the Florida Statutes and Constitution, and violated the separation of powers by usurping the power and authority of the legislative and executive branches of state government. The Florida State Supreme Court came up with an implausible, irrational interpretation of Sections 102.111 and 102.112 that the Secretary of State shall not ignore late county election returns and that the deadline shall be extended to an arbitrary date picked by the court. It is absolutely certain that the Democrat appointees on the Florida Supreme Court acted in a highly partisan manner to steal the election for Democrat Al Gore.

Miscounting of ballots by Democrat officials in several Florida counties

Lawsuits and liberal judicial activist judges violating the Constitution and the law

Democrat lawsuits to exclude more than 200,000 legal and legitimate ballots in Florida's Seminole and Martin Counties, where a majority voted for Republican George Bush

Democrat lawyers challenging overseas absentee ballots from American military men and women

Democrat lawsuit challenging Dick Cheney's legal residency

Democrat efforts to pressure, threaten, intimidate, and otherwise improperly induce Electoral College electors who were elected to vote for Bush to switch their vote and instead vote for Gore

Democrat operatives in the media and elsewhere trying to steal the legitimacy of the election victor, Republican George W. Bush, after efforts to steal the election were unsuccessful

Manipulative "manual vote recounts" by news media and other political organizations of the so-called "under-vote" in specially selected Florida counties

The Democrat Party officials and their political allies in the news media claimed that Al Gore should be president because he won the popular vote, and they and they pressured the Electoral College electors who were elected to vote for Bush to switch their vote and instead vote for Gore, and used this issue to try to steal George Bush's legitimacy

Manipulative, biased news media reports featuring Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and other Democrat operatives calling for public protests claiming that George Bush and the Republicans stole the election; failure to report competently and accurately on the election lawsuits and court opinions


There. Now that we both got our biased websites quota for the day, can we move on?

the NAACP sued Harris and the gang for the black purge, and won. The state threw up its hands immediately and said, ‘You got us! We’ll put these people back as soon as we can.’ We’re still waiting.


It was already proven in court... your "President" is a theif and a liar and I can't belief you back him.

Nope Kwangy..... Greg Palast has documented facts... you have put up a list that has nothing to back it up... good try though.

Stupid hanging chads and stuff, i got sick of that bullshit last election, especially since my candidate didn't win.

I don't know about electronic voting though because electronics can come with many glitches.

also I fully support taking the Dems to court for any injustice they have done as well, and would applaud the conviction if true.

Unfortunately the Republicans have the mindset that its okay as long as they can get away with it.

Nope Kwangy..... Greg Palast has documented facts... you have put up a list that has nothing to back it up... good try though.

Really. Interesting, so far I've jut seen accusations. No, I'm not going to buy the book. Although not all of the accusations need back-up. The fact of the matter is, Florida was called early, for example.

Stupid hanging chads and stuff, i got sick of that bullshit last election, especially since my candidate didn't win.

I don't know about electronic voting though because electronics can come with many glitches.The funny thing is that, despite the bad rap that the hanging chads got, that was a system that actually failed pretty well. Not as well as, say optical scan ballots where the intent of the voter is much easier to ascertain, but it failed better than any electronic machine with no backup could ever possibly fail.

That's the key here--as many have pointed out, you'll never have a foolproof machine. There will always be the possibility for malicious actions or for mechanical failure. The key is that you need to plan for what happens when something goes wrong. Act on the assumption that you'll have something screw up and then go from there. If we're determined to have electronic voting machines--and it appears we are--then let's at least have a system that can work in the event that something screws up. Any good computer person always tells you of the need for backups, after all.

Winning the Election – The Republican Way: Racism, Theft and Fraud in Florida
The Weekly Dig, Boston, MA
Tuesday, April 22, 2003
E-Mail Article
Printer Friendly Version

by Liam Scheff



When future historians want to know what happened to America in 2000, they’ll read Greg Palast’s The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. The book follows the paper trail of perjury, deception and incompetence left by the Bush family, and the billionaires who fund them, as they trample through the world – from mining disaster cover-ups to the California energy scandal to the pre-9/11 intelligence black-out that let a handful of Saudi terrorists slip past the NSA, FBI and CIA.



The book also uncovers inside documents on the IMF and World Bank, Pat Robertson‘s unholy money-schemes, and the co-opted US media that won‘t report what the rest of the world gets on the front page.



The book opens with the crime that keeps on stealing – the 2000 presidential election. George Bush lost the popular election by 500,000 votes, but won the electoral vote by winning hotly contested Florida, the state that tipped the scales, and the state where his brother Jeb is governor. His tiny 500-vote win there was accompanied by a torrent of hanging chads and unhappy voters, who claimed their votes were stolen. Last week Palast came to Boston to promote the new edition of The Best Democracy… I asked him exactly what he uncovered.



What really happened in Florida?



Five months before the election, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris ordered the removal of 57,700 names from Florida’s voter rolls on grounds that they were felons. Voter rolls contain the names of all eligible, registered voters. If you’re not on the list, you don’t get to vote.



If you commit a felony in Florida, you lose your right to vote there, and you‘re “scrubbed” from the rolls. You become a non-citizen, like in the old Soviet Union. This is not the case in most other states; it’s an uncivilized vestige of the Deep South.



My office carefully went through the scrub list and discovered that at minimum, 90.2 percent of the people were completely innocent of any crime – except for being African American. We didn’t have to guess about that, because next to each voter’s name was their race.



When I questioned Harris’ office about the high percentage of African Americans on the scrub list, they responded, “Well, you know how many black people commit crimes.”



But these people weren’t felons, so why were they scrubbed?



The Florida Republicans wanted to block African Americans, who largely vote as Democrats, from voting. In 1999 they fired the company they were paying $5,700 to compile their felony “scrub” lists and replaced them with Database Technologies [DBT], who they paid $2.3 million to do the same job. [DBT is the Florida division of Choicepoint, a massive database company that does extensive work for the FBI.]



There are a lot of Joe Smiths in the Florida phonebook. DBT was hired to verify which Joe Smith was a felon and which was not. They were supposed to use their extensive databases to check credit cards, bank information, addresses and phone numbers, in addition to names, ages, and social security numbers. But they didn’t. They didn’t use one of their 1,200 databases to verify personal information, nor did they make a single phone call to verify the identity of scrubbed names.



So where did DBT get their data?



From the Internet. They went to 11 other states’ Internet sites and took names off dirt-cheap. They scrubbed Florida voters whose names were similar to out-of-state felons. An Illinois felon named John Michaels could knock off Florida voter John, Johnny, Jonathan or Jon R. Michaels, or even J.R. Michaelson. DBT matched for race and gender, but names only had to be similar to a certain degree. Names could be reversed, and suffixes (Jr., Sr.) were ignored, but aliases were included. So the felon John “Buddy” Michaels could knock non-felon Michael Johns or Bud Johnson Jr. off the voter rolls. This happened again and again.



Although DBT didn’t get names, birthdays or social security numbers right, they were very careful to match for race. A black felon named Mr. Green would only knock off a black Mr. Green, but not a single white Mr. Green. That’s how DBT earned its $2.3 million.


Why didn’t DBT use their own databases?



They didn’t, because the state told them not to.
Choicepoint vice-president James Lee was grilled by a Congressional committee, headed by Cynthia McKinney, and he admitted everything, but said DBT was following state directives. Florida state officials told DBT to knock off voters by incorrectly matching them with felons.



Congresswoman McKinney led this commission to her own peril. Choicepoint is in her Atlanta district. She was destroyed in the last election by fabricated quotes and a vicious propaganda campaign.



Is this the only way votes were stolen?



No. There were 8,000 Floridians who had committed misdemeanors, but were counted as felons. Their votes were scrubbed. Katherine Harris’ office illegally scrubbed people who’d served time in other states, then moved to Florida, and Jeb Bush’s office illegally barred these people from registering to vote at all.



The biggest wholesale theft occurred inside the voting booths in black rural counties. In Gadsden County, one of the blackest in the state, thousands of votes were simply thrown away. Gadsden used paper ballots which are read by an optical reader. Ballots with a single extra mark were considered “spoiled“ and not counted. The buttons used to fill out the ballots were set up – with approval from Bush and Harris – to make votes appear unclear to the machine. One in eight ballots in Gadsden was voided by the state.



The same ballots were used in Tallahassee County, which is mostly white. There only one in 100 votes was “spoiled.” What made the difference? In Tallahassee, ballots were read on the premises, and if they were marked incorrectly, voters were sent to revote until they got it right. In the black counties, the votes were trucked off immediately. There were no machines on site. Voters weren’t told that their votes were spoiled, and they certainly weren’t permitted to re-vote.



When Ted Koppel investigated voter theft in Florida, he concluded that blacks lost votes because they weren’t well educated, and made mistakes that whites hadn‘t. He didn’t even bother to ask how the machines were set up. This is the kind of reporting we get in America. In Britain, this story ran 3 weeks after the election, when Gore was still in race. It was in the papers and on TV. In the US, it was seven months before the Washington Post ran it, and then it was only a partial version. After the election, Gadsden County replaced its voting commissioner. In 2002 they only lost one in 500 votes. So you can say blacks in Gadsden got smarter in one way – they elected a black elections chief.



What happened to Choicepoint?



Bush is handing them the big contracts in the War on Terror; immigration reviews, DNA cataloging, airport profiling, and their voting systems are being rolled out across the country.



It wasn’t reported in mainstream press, but the NAACP sued Harris and the gang for the black purge, and won. The state threw up its hands immediately and said, ‘You got us! We’ll put these people back as soon as we can.’ We’re still waiting.


http://weeklydig.com/dig/content/2846.aspx


Don't act like the Dems didn't do things to rig the election (cigarettes for votes, disregard absentee ballots (traditionally Republican), etc.)

With the proper security system I think electronic voting is less suseptable to cheating. Of course that system is pretty expensive, but so it hiring thousands of people to hand count ballots, so...

Got any proof, Holbrookia? Didn't think so.