The Globalization of Electronic Election Theft

[Graham]

http://www.hack247.co.uk/2006/11/02/american-election-hacker-testifies  /

[chek]

[suspecta]

This is sensational news but will it make most Americans question their election results?

At least it's a great bit of proof that it really does happen - whip it out to back up any argument with someone who just can't bring themselves to believe it really happens.

Suspecta

[chek]

[suspecta]

I've just found something quite disturbing. I put the name Clinton Eugene Curtis into Google and this cane up:

Clinton Curtis - Demopedia (which is actually the Democratic Underground)
Recently there have been several accusations against this corporation by Clinton Eugene Curtis. All of the allegations are 100% FALSE! ...
demopedia.democraticunderground.com/index.php/Clinton_Curtis - 14k - Cached - Similar pages

If you look at the linked website, the words 'All the allegations are false!' come up low down on the page in a 2-line passage quoted from 'yangenterprises.com'

Recently there have been several accusations against this corporation by Clinton Eugene Curtis. All of the allegations are 100% FALSE!! An official statement will be forthcoming. Thank you for your concern and God Bless America.

So why, when I just typed the name Clinton Eugene Curtis into Google did the yang enterprises passage come up on the Google page?

It means that when you type the Curtis' name into Google you see the 'all the allegations are false!' passage without even having to load up the page.

Yang Enterprises were the firm that hired Curtis when all this happened.

I guess somebody from Yang must have rigged something here with the help, inadvertant or otherwise, of Google.

It's also revealing that there is no mainstream news coverage of this story. You can only despair how uninformed the US public must be if they don't look at non-mainstream internet news sources.

Suspecta

[chek]

[Mark Gobell]

The Globalization of Electronic Election Theft

http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2007/2585

By Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman
The Free Press
Friday 11 May 2007

From Ohio and California to Scotland and France, the disputes surrounding electronic voting machines have gone truly global.

E-voting machines have already been extensively studied and condemned by a wide range of expert committees, commissions and colleges, including the General Accountability Office, the Carter-Baker Commission, Johns Hopkins University, Princeton University, Stanford University and others. Rigging of a recount in Cleveland has resulted in two felony convictions. The failures of e-voting machines have been the subject of numerous documentary films, including the aptly titled HBO special "Hacking Democracy."

Now the secretaries of state in Ohio and California are subjecting e-voting to still more official review. Ohio's Jennifer Brunner has announced she'll seek bids to conduct independent studies of both touch-screen machines, which record votes electronically, and optical scanners, which tabulate paper ballots electronically.

Brunner has already removed the entire board of elections of Cuyahoga County (Cleveland) in part because of a major fiasco caused by new electronic machines in the state's 2006 primary election. Voting rights activists vehemently opposed the $20 million purchase, but it was rammed through by Board Chair Robert Bennett and Executive Director Michael Vu.

The machines then caused long reporting delays. Vu resigned under pressure from the board. Bennett then resigned - along with the rest of the board - under pressure from Brunner. Bennett chairs the Ohio Republican Party, works closely with White House advisor Karl Rove, and was instrumental in delivering Ohio's decisive votes to George W. Bush in the 2004 presidential election. Two felony convictions have so far arisen from what prosecutors call a "rigged" recount that occurred that year in Cleveland, under Bennett's supervision.

The specifics of Brunner's investigation, which she wants done by September, are not yet public. But the newly elected Democrat says she intends to "fill in the gaps" on studies of Diebold, ES&S and Hart InterCivic machines whose vote tallies were key to giving Bush a second term. The conservative Columbus Dispatch has already predicted that the results of the investigation "likely will disappoint conspiracy theorists."

California's new Secretary of State Deborah Bowen will begin her study May 14, and wants it done by late July. An interagency agreement with the University of California will use three "top-to-bottom review teams" with about seven people each to inspect documents, previous studies, computer source code and a penetration attack to test system security. Cost is estimated at $1.8 million to be covered by system vendors and the Help America Vote Act. Systems from Diebold, ES&S, HartIntercivic, Sequoia and InkaVote of Los Angeles will be examined.

Other states are also re-evaluating their electronic voting systems, and fierce controversy is raging nationwide over a federal bill from Representative Rush Holt (D-NJ) which institutes certain voting reforms but allows the use of electronic machines to continue.

Now the issue has spread worldwide. Widespread cries of theft and fraud erupted in Ukraine, just before the US 2004 election. A forced re-vote ousted the "official" winner.

In Mexico, leftists contend the recent presidential election there was stolen just as Bush did it in the US, with some of the same personnel pulling it off.

Now similar cries are coming from Scotland and France. May 3 elections in Scotland using new electronic counting systems resulted in as many as 100,000 votes being classed as "spoilt papers." (About 90,000 such ballots from Ohio 2004 remain uncounted to this day).

Complex methods of tabulating and weighting the Scottish votes yielded "chaos." Several vote counts were suspended. In some races the tally of rejected ballots was greater than some candidates' winning margin. "This is a temporary interruption to one small aspect of the overall process," says a spokeswoman for DRS, the company responsible for the vote counting technology.

The language in France has not been so polite. A watershed presidential election has just been won by Nicolas Sarkozy, a blunt right-wing Reagan-Bush- style extremist over the socialist Segolene Royal. Sarkozy is a hard-edged authoritarian whose intense anti-immigrant rhetoric matches his support for the American war in Iraq and his avowed intent to slash France's social service system, including a public health program widely considered among the best in the world.

Like the balloting in Ukraine, the US, Scotland and Mexico, Sarkozy's victory was marred by angry, widespread complaints about dubious vote counts whose discrepancies always seem to favor the rightist candidate. Throughout France, the cry has arisen that the conservatives have done to Segolene Royal what Bush/Rove did to John Kerry.

In the not-so-distant past, other elections were engineered by George H.W. Bush, head of the Central Intelligence Agency and father of the current White House resident. During the Reagan-Bush presidencies, in the Philippines, Nicaragua, El Salvador and other key third world nations, expected leftist triumphs somehow morphed into rightist coups. "CIA destabilizations are nothing new," said former CIA station chief and Medal of Merit winner John Stockwell in 1987. "Guatemala in 1954, Brazil, Ghana, Chile, the Congo, Iran, Panama, Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Uruguay - the CIA organized the overthrow of constitutional democracy."

The recent trend to privatizing vote counts, with corporations claiming "proprietary rights" to keep their hardware and software covert, has added a new dimension to an old tradition. The recent "e-victories" in the US and France have significantly tipped to the right the global balance among the major powers. So while Ohio and California conduct their studies of electronic voting, the whole world will be watching.


---------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------
Bob Fitrakis's forthcoming book, "The Fitrakis Files: Cops, Coverups and Corruption," is at http://www.freepress.org/, where this article first appeared. Harvey Wasserman's "Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth, A.D. 2030," is at http://www.solartopia.org/.

[chek]

There really is no doubt about it that democracy is as fragile as a piece of paper, but we dare not give up that piece of paper.
The results if we do are all too predictable.

I'd also suggest the slogan 'An Electronic Vote is No Vote'

I have never supported capital punishment and find it morally repugnant, but I do think that systematic vote fraud should join high treason as one of the remaining offences that penalty still apples to.

[John White]

[gruts]

that really sucks!

however, one problem with recounts is that they tend to be carried out by the same people who have failed to count the votes properly in the first place. the ohio election workers who were jailed for vote-rigging in the 2004 presidential election were actually caught fixing the recount rather than the initial count....

http://www.bradblog.com/?p=4266

[John White]

Theres a thread here about this too, with a lot more info coming to light

http://www.davidicke.com/forum/showthread.php?t=17940

Just another peice of the big picture

[TonyGosling]

Hilary is making history - with a little help from her friends. If she's anything like Thatcher, Britain's first woman CEO, America's in for a rough ride.

It strikes me that the US is going into the phase that we in Britain went into in 1997 - manipulate the nation into the hands of a thoroughly infiltrated and compromised pseudo-left.

Meanwhile David Cameron has still not said a word about his NeoCon fascist Orange Order think tank, Policy Exchange.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4YZ5l3ACUo

[IanFantom]

I know that PayPal have a reputation for doing this sort of thing, but I have no idea whether the motivation could be criminal, political, or whatever. So I asked a colleague who follows this sort of thing more closely than I do. He wrote:

[gruts]

it looks like the re-count is going ahead....

"NH Contest Update: Kucinich Pays, Count to Begin; Republican Howard's Funds Bottlenecked at Bank Now Delivered to, Accepted by NH SoS!"

http://www.bradblog.com/?p=5563

[Thermate911]

Ditched Paypal 3 years ago and insisted they remove all my details - still awaiting the outcome of an FOI request to them... Not a pleasant company - beats me why people put up with this 'convenience'.

If you must shop online why not ask your vendors to support WorldPay (Bank of Scotland based) as well?

Recount? Ron Paul sure made the right decision to keep out of it, IMO.

This whole voter mess 'should' have been sorted out post-Ohio at the latest. It's almost as if they want to be enslaved...

[John White]

[outsider]

[outsider]

[TonyGosling]

I am informed directly by the Granny Warriors that PayPal did in fact freeze the funds earmarked for the Recount Fees! So, now you know who to blame for the failure to get a recount of the New Hampshire vote count. PayPal. The application for a recount of the New Hampshire vote required a deposit of $55,600 to the New Hampshire Secretary of State no later than 3:00 P.M. this afternoon, January 15th. A huge and successful effort by the Granny Warriors raised the money and they ordered the transfer to the Secretary. However, at the very last moment, PayPal FROZE THE ACCOUNT and did not transfer the money. The deadline for payment of the deposit passed and the recount application was rejected for lack of payment....
http://news.bostonherald.com/blogs/news/hub_20/?p=17&srvc=home&positio n=recent

[TonyGosling]

So this Paypal fraud was to ensure an insider got to call the recount? Is Kusinich's record unimpeachable? 'Scuse the pun


Link

NH Recount Finds Vote Count Errors

By Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet. Posted January 17, 2008.

So far the errors highlight problems with electronic voting, but don't overturn Clinton's surprise victory.

Election integrity activists in New Hampshire are finding all kinds of problems with the electronic vote count in last week's presidential primary, after a first day of recounting the Democratic vote. But the problems so far have not changed the outcome of the race that Hillary Clinton won.

According to an extensive report by Brad Friedman, editor and publisher of the BradBlog, which tracks the election integrity community, there have been numerous errors -- small and large -- that the recount, a process where paper ballots that were originally scanned by computer are now counted by hand, has turned up.

These include: electronic tallies that were off by several votes, paper ballots the were not read by electronic scanners (550 in one town), ballots that were not read because the voters used the wrong kind of marking pen. He also reported that some election records are missing, notably computer memory cards.

Election integrity activists from across the country have converged in New Hampshire for the recount, seeing it as an opportunity to showcase the shortcomings of electronic voting systems -- and possibly explain Hillary Clinton's surprise victory in the New Hampshire primary. They were drawn to New Hampshire after noticing that Barack Obama won in precincts counted by hand while Hillary Clinton won in the computer-tallied precincts.

Dennis Kucinich's presidential campaign requested and paid for the recount.

The activists have said that New Hampshire election officials, who used a Diebold optical scan system in 80 percent of the state -- where hand-marked paper ballots are scanned by computer to be counted -- should have audited the machine tallies on Election Night. While some New Hampshire precincts did that, it was not a widespread effort required by state officials.

Curiously, the activists' work may help build a case for a new bill to be introduced in the House today by Rep. Rush Holt, D-NJ, that would provide $600 million for election officials to replace paperless electronic voting machines with the same kind of optical scan system used in New Hampshire, but only if those jurisdictions conduct mandatory audits of the vote totals -- which is what New Hampshire is doing now.

Ironically, in New Hampshire the problems of electronic voting can be seen and tracked because there is a paper audit trail. In the upcoming South Carolina primary, where the state uses paperless electronic voting systems, there will be no independent audit trail to verify the vote.

[outsider]

[TonyGosling]

Just raising the possibility - I'm no Ron Paul devotee - I'm suspicious of all candidates Outsider.

[outsider]

[rodin]

I sent this email to Black Box Voting

http://www.blackboxvoting.org/contact.html

The greatest injustice is being done not to Ron Paul but to those voting for him because they believe, rightly or wrongly, that he is America's last hope. I think it would be viable to test a sample of precints collecting numbers and signatures as proof of who actually voted. No Ron Paul voter would be other than proud to put their name to their candidate.

I think if this was done an amazing discrepancy might be revealed, of such a magnitude that it may generate a tide of indignation strong enough to overcome the blatant obfuscation by the mainstream press and government agencies on this issue. In short, it may spark the revolution Ron Paul's campaign talks about. Perhaps one that will sweep Mr Paul along with it. Indeed, if the vote fraud becomes widely appreciated for what it is, the tool of a dictatorship, perhaps you, the people, will arise and overthrow it. And not rely on one elderly man to do it for you.

In Communist societies it is not who votes that counts in determining election results. It is who counts the votes.

Stalin said that.

Stalin's proteges are all over America now.

Take care

rodin

EDIT more links

http://goldismoney.info/forums/showthread.php?t=224690

http://goldismoney.info/forums/showthread.php?t=224538

[Thermate911]

Whatever his motives or abilities it's hard to argue, in principle, with this from Ron Paul, IMO...

[outsider]

A Philadelphia Inquirer article on Kucinich:

http://www.alternet.org/stories/74268/

(I edited my post above on Ron Paul, as I was far too harsh on him)

[TonyGosling]

Hacking Democracy - the movie - well made documentary - how does America count its votes????

"If.... when people see what's really going on there's no way we will allow this to continue"


Link

[gruts]

bev harris is a star....

http://www.blackboxvoting.org/

[Keith Mothersson]

[Keith Mothersson]

[b]PRE-ELECTION BRIEFING ON 4 VERY REAL SETS OF DANGERS TO THE US ELECTION [Please help network to journalists etc as appropriate]

Since Florida 2000 I have been following with horror the 'failings' in the US electoral systems, brought to light by a large and extremely impressive non-partisan 'election integrity movement'. [/b]

One great sadness has been the degree to which the mainstream media in the US but also here have contented themselves to ignore the elephant of election theft in the room, when they 'cover' (interesting word that) the 'elections in the world's greatest democracy'.

Please good people may it be different this time! Please talk to your editors and ask them to ensure you sufficient time to do in-depths research of the many ways in which this election could be stolen or 'legally'-filibustered or over-ridden. And to assign you a sufficient budget to contact some of the many extremely well-informed election-integrity press-spokespeople who staff the third corner of this THREE-CORNERED FIGHT. Don't just rehash Reb and Dem handouts!! Don't just interview Rep and Dem spokespeople!!

Don't know the contacts, phone numbers? - start here:
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/presskit.html

In a recent Guest article for Mike Smithson's highly regarded PoliticalBetting.com I identified three main ways in which Obama could still be frustrated even if, as seems likely, he has much greater popular support in the US:

a) the 'Jim Crow' voter-suppression struggle to purge and intimidate pro-Democrat demographics;

b) the 'Boss Tweed' struggle to fix the vote counts, greatly aided by secret software run by pro-Republican companies;

c) the struggle to manufacture events, polls and narratives which somehow explain or spin plausibility for
either a surprise McCain come-back -
or a Republican loss, but only narrrow, so that a huge landslide is miraculously prevented .... -

in either case in ways not-discernible to impartial and scientific post-electoral analysis, either by recounts (no ballots, faulty audit trails) or by e.g. psephological examinationof the entrails, e.g. of the cross tabs on exit polls (2004/2006).

My scenario of how, despite his large poll lead, Obama may still not make it to the White House is accessible here:

http://politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2008/10/25/what-do-we-t hink-of-the-keith-motherssons-scenario/#comment-823762 - and in a series of replies to critics beginning at Comment 84, see especially Comment 90.

I then received a couple of very cogent (and complementary) replies - outlining a fourth line of struggle McCain has to win - from colleague, Paul Lehto, a leading election integrity lawyer in the US, who has asked me to do what I can to circulate his briefing to UK media, in the hope that this time those who steal elections will find themselves 'called' on it by knowledgeable democrats in other parts of 'the West' and the world.

Paul argues that the Republicans have been raising unwarranted fears and legal cases about 'voter fraud' (retail misregistration, etc by the little people) as a way to distract from the real danger of wholesale election theft by the big people (nearly always Republicans in recent decades) - and that moreover they will aim to fight in the courts to get Ohio and some other states excluded form January's Electoral College determination of who will be the next President.

Paul's first comment went up on Political Betting as Comment 93, and I am hopeful that my posting of his follow-up briefing will also go up there, but in case it doesn't, please read on, either before or after tackling the above - thank you very much, and best wishes for helping to truly practice your important profession of truth telling on Nov 4 and in the followng days and weeks!

As Paul shows the very future of Democracy is at stake.

Keith Mothersson
Campaign for Visible Ballots
01738 783677
07815 653389

PAUL LEHTO'S LEGAL, PHILOSOPHICAL AND TECHNOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF THE USURPATION OF DEMOCRACY IN THE US

There are many US voices on the presidential election, going back years now and intensifying as we approach the election of 2008, training us all to think (intentionally or not) that we can not afford or tolerate another "Florida 2000" or survive a "constitutional crisis." This is a huge pressure on the public mind, and it operates most strongly within any drawn out post-election legal battle of exactly the type I've been predicting will make the US race "close" when nothing else can, in order to have the battle end prematurely and to have process circumvented, which by definition is before full justice can be done.

Indeed, given the Bush v. Gore decision's direct effect of terminating the 2000 presidential election during the recount phase of the election (a subject on which I wrote a royalty-free chapter in "Loser Take All" one of the best-selling books on Elections and Political Parties in the USA according to Amazon.com sales rankings) this is not just evidence but proof that post-election legal struggles end up with actual and premature terminations of process. In the case of Bush v. Gore, the statute that supposedly dictated that premature termination, 3 USC sec. 5's "safe harbor" statute was merely a "safe harbor" in which electors would not be subject to challenge during the tallying process for the Electoral College in the House and Senate in January, but not in any way an authorization to terminate a process provided for by state law. It was simply an explanation offered for that premature election termination. Yet, it was certainly no excuse or justification for that termination of the presidential election, because in any republic or democracy the voters are sovereign, and the very question of "what did the voters really say" in the election of their servants can't be terminated by the servants themselves via a congressional or any other kind of statute, without the legal and democratic absurdity of the servants becoming the de facto masters, turning our freedom's on their head.

At bottom, the very definition of any free people is the ability to kick the bums out whenever they want, especially if the bums are criminals or so misguided as to think they can override the ultimate will and power of the people. This most fundamental of freedoms is what the American Declaration of Independence termed the *inalienable* right to "alter or abolish" the forms of government has subsequently been so widely adopted as to make it into many national constitutions around the world as well as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It's a direct function of the universally accepted principle, except in dictatorships, that the will of the people and the consent of the governed is the one and only legitimate source of power.

But, just when we need that freedom the very most, to kick out a criminal incumbent election official or corrupt politician, is when we are denied that freedom in the most striking two ways:

(1) We are denied that freedom by premature terminations of process, such as Bush v. Gore's election termination, and the congressional election contest I litigated in California's 50th Congressional District in which the Congress swore in one of their friends to return to Congress only 7 days after the hotly contested "bellwether" special election in June 6, 2006, with over 68,500 votes still left uncounted on the FIRST count, with the subsequent legal claim made by the selected rather than elected Congressman that the Constitution itself prohibited California state courts from having any power to look into it, much less recount the election. International election monitors from the OSCE (without any effort on our part) took note of the case as significant to democratic elections, but the national US media did not cover it, despite request. See page 27 of doc at http://www.osce.org/item/23567.htmland see also http://www.bradblog.com/?p=3353

The case was ultimately declared "moot" in January after the New Congress took office, even though the lawsuit never sought to change who sat in congress, it sought the truth of the election via recount, etc. See http://www.votelaw.com/blog/archives/005134.html

2. Even more fundamentally, and undeniably denying the people the right to vote when we need it the most -- to remove criminal incumbents -- is the reality of invisible, secret vote counts on computerized vote counting equipment. This is true whether or not the secret software counts are protected in the US (as vendors and election officials sign private contracts that claim them to be) under the intellectual property doctrine of "trade secrecy", because even with "open source" software, there's still the problem of invisibility and more importantly the assertion that there is inadequate time for the kind of forensic and impossible to understand (for the public) investigation of the truth of the election. Trade secrecy property rights, if upheld in a future real and published precedent, would mean (and in operation today DOES mean) that private corporate intellectual property rights prevail over the truth-seeking process of courts in the most important conceivable context for seeking the truth: The truth of an election for President or Congress.

One example is the (non-precedential) ruling of a trial court judge in the FL-13 congressional election contest in 2006, where 18,000 or so "undervotes" mysteriously appeared, but this large undervote was found only in the one of the three counties in that district that was strong for the reported 2nd place finisher, in a race election officials reported/admitted to be only a few hundred votes apart. If President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's definition of fascism has any weight anywhere, in light of the FL-13 ruling that intellectual property of corporations is more important than the truth of the public's will in the election, these are ominous times for freedom in the United States of America. The very heart and soul of freedom and democracy is the count of the vote, and the governmental units in the USA and other countries have purported to not just "sell out" this heart and soul, but to pay billions of dollars for corporations to take it.

"The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it comes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group…" President Franklin Delano Roosevelt

It is difficult to understate the gravity of the problem here, yet the media seems unwilling to take on the entire elections establishment for at least "blowing it" and the corporate vendors at the same time. This is why I've asked for foreign media to cover this, whether mainstream or independent or bloggers. At the very least, reporters in the US are counting on election officials for access to inside "scoops" on election results, and risk burning bridges by telling the greater truths here. Thus, the truth must be told both "underground" and in foreign media.

Anyone can contact me at Paul Lehto (Juris Doctor), PO Box #1, Ishpeming MI 49849 (906) 204-2333 or [url]lehto.paul@gmail.com[/url] THANK YOU.


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