Diebold voting machines in California

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Ghball () aol com
Date: November 28, 2005 9:39:53 AM EST
To: dave () farber net
Subject: Fwd: [dtnna] Diebold voting machines in California

For IPers in California (and elsewhere)

Geoff Ball



Geoff Ball, Ph.D.
Geoff Ball & Associates
"Enabling people to work together in groups"
164 Main Street, Room 210, Los Altos, CA 94022
650-941-1497 (phone); 650-941-1498 (fax)
ghball () aol com www.geoffballfacilitator.com
and SmartGroupsWork.com

From: Dan Lorimer <Lorimer () Meer net>
Date: November 27, 2005 10:58:43 PM EST
To: dtnna () yahoogroups com
Subject: [dtnna] Diebold voting machines in California
Reply-To: dtnna-owner () yahoogroups com


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Dear Friends,

Tomorrow is an essential day to preserve YOUR right to a fair ballot
process.  Calif's Republican Secretary of State, Bruce McPherson, must
hear from us by tomorrow with our concerns about the easily hackable
Diebold voting machines.  Please read the info below and make a call or
send an e-mail MONDAY.

If we can stop them in California, people in other states, like Ohio,
will gain momentum in their battle to preserve voting rights, too.
This is as in important as the civil rights effort was in its day.
PLEASE take a minute to act!

With appreciation,

Dan Lorimer

From: "GrassrootsWest.org" <info () grassrootswest org>
Date: November 27, 2005 4:47:06 PM PST
To: lilienstein () earthlink net

GrassrootsWest.org
Our Republican Secretary of State Bruce McPherson, has given California
citizens through tomorrow (MONDAY, Nov. 28) to submit public comment
regarding his proposed certification of Diebold voting machines. If you
want to prevent your votes from being counted by secret software,
running on unreliable machines owned by a right wing corporation, then
take action TODAY.

Call, fax, or email to Secretary of State's office before 5 pm Monday
and let him know what you think of this attempt to thwart democracy:

    •   Call: (916) 653-6814 (press 6, then 3) (Monday, 8 am - 5 pm)
    •   FAX: 916 653-3214 (anytime till 5 pm Monday)
    •   Email: VotingSystemComment () ss ca gov
Background info: Five Reasons NOT to Certify Diebold:
1. Secret software - How can elections be fair and transparent when the
public cannot examine the source code for the software that counts the
votes? Without this assurance, programmers can put in hidden
"backdoors" or simply write shoddy software. Diebold will NOT share its
source code.

2. The GEMS Defect - Reported by Bev Harris (of BlackBoxVoting.otg) and
Dr. Herbert Thompson, and independently confirmed by the security
consultant firm Compuware, the GEMS Defect concerns the central vote
tabulating database. By exploiting this defect a citizen team was able
to remotely upload, download and execute files with full system
administrator privileges. Furthermore, the GEMS software comes with a
criminal pedigree. One of its authors, Diebold consultant Jeff Dean,
was convicted of planting "backdoors" in his software and using a "high
degree of sophistication" to evade detection.

3. Stuffing the Electronic Ballot Box with Diebold Memory Cards -
Finnish computer expert Harry Hursti, in cooperation with the elections
administration of Leon County, Florida, has demonstrated in real-world
voting conditions that executable code on the memory cards integral to
the operation of Diebold optical scanners and touchscreens can be
quickly manipulated to change vote counts without detection. For a full
report visit:
www.blackboxvoting.org/BBVreport.pdf

4. Unauditable Absentee Ballots on Diebold Optical Scanners - Diebold's
central count scanners are unable to write backup data to memory
storage, instead passing all vote counting directly to the notoriously
insecure GEMS tabulator. No "poll tapes" or secondary source of data is
retained, and there is no way to check whether the GEMS security defect
was exploited without obtaining the GEMS vote data files. Diebold
refuses to release these files.

5. Diebold Continues to Perjure and Violate Election Laws - Records
obtained by Black Box Voting show that Diebold executives lied to the
Arizona Secretary of State, the Cuyahoga, Ohio, County Board of
Elections, and to hundreds of elections officials throughout the U.S.
about the existence of specific defects. Most notoriously of all,
Diebold lied to the State of California in 2003 about illegally
installing uncertified voting software in all 17 counties where Diebold
had contracts.

For a full list of reason to NOT certify Diebold machines visit
www.califelectprotect.net/7ReasonsNOTtoCertify.pdf

November 14, 2005

BRAD FRIEDMAN

11.13.2005
The Staggeringly Impossible Results of Ohio's '05 Election


With so much going on, few have noticed the extraordinary outcome of
last Tuesday's election in Ohio where the crooked state that brought
you -- by hook and by crook -- a second term for George W. Bush...

  As usual, the Free Press' heroic [journalists] Bob Fitrakis and  
Harvey
Wasserman are on the case. Their article on what happened on ballot
issues 1 through 5 last week is A MUST READ for anybody who still gives
the slightest damn about whatever democracy might be left in America.
I'll try to summarize here briefly. There were five initiatives on the
ballot... Issue 1 was a controversial proposition for $2 billion in new
state spending. The Christian Right was opposed (because some of the
new funds might go to stem cell research), but otherwise, the
Republican Governor Taft's Administration (he recently plead guilty to
several counts of corruption) was pushing it hard, alongside
progressives in the state.

The Columbus Dispatch's pre-election polling, which Fritrakis and
Wasserman describe as "uncannily accurate for decades", called the race
correctly within 1% of the final result. The margin of error for the
poll was +/- 2.5% with a 95% confidence interval. On Issue 1, the
Dispatch poll was right on the money. They predicted 53% in favor, the
final result was 54% in favor.

But then came Issues 2 through 5, put forward by  ReformOhioNow.org --
a bi-partisan coalition pushing these four initiatives for Electoral
Reform in the Buckeye State largely in response to the shameful '04
Election...

On those four issues... the final results were impossibly different --
and we mean impossibly! -- from both the Dispatch's final polling
before the election and all reasoned common-sense. Take a look:

ISSUE 2 (Allow easier absentee balloting)

PRE-POLLING: 59% Yes, 33% No, 9% Undecided
FINAL RESULT: 36% Yes, 63% No


ISSUE 3 (Revise campaign contribution limits)

PRE-POLLING: 61% Yes, 25% No, 14% Undecided
  FINAL RESULT: 33% Yes, 66% No

ISSUE 4 (Independent Commission to draw Congressional Districts)
PRE-POLLING: 31% Yes, 45% No, 25% Undecided
  FINAL RESULT: 30% Yes, 69% No

ISSUE 5 (Independent Board instead of Sec. of State to oversee
elections)

PRE-POLLING: 41% Yes, 43% No, 16% Undecided
FINAL RESULT: 29% Yes, 70% No


What could possibly explain such unheard of differences between the
Dispatch's poll and the final results?

{here's a hint: ]  This was the year that Ohio, under the encouragement
and mandates from the Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth
Blackwell, rolled out new Electronic Touch-Screen Voting Machines in 44
of its 88 counties...41 of them employing the same Diebold Touch-Screen
Machines that California ... refused to certify when 20% of them failed
this summer in the largest test of its kind ever held.

These were also the very same Electronic Voting Machines which a recent
GAO Report confirmed to be easily hackable.

Will the absurdly skewed results from last Tuesday's Ohio Election
finally light a fire under the media -- either nationally or just in
Ohio alone -- to look into what the hell is going on here?! We remain
hopeful...if not optimistic.

  The Free Press article is a must read, as mentioned, but we'll share
their closing thoughts here on the possible reasons for the wildly
unexplained discrepancy between the final polling and the final results
which, as they posit, are due to either a completely inexplicable
breakdown of the Dispatch's historically accurate polling methods
wildly beyond the margin-of-error for all initiatives except Issue
1...or...somebody hacked that vote count:

  If the latter is true, it can and will be done again, and we can
forget forever about the state that has been essential to the election
of every Republican presidential candidate since Lincoln.

And we can also, for all intents and purposes, forget about the future
of American democracy.

November 14, 2005



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