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What The F**K?
By Matt Margolis | August 7, 2004
When 13 Democratic members of the U.S. Congress asked United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan to send election monitors to the U.S. this fall, the move outraged many Republicans and other proponents of national sovereignty.
When those same 13 Democratic members of Congress were turned down by Annan, they took their request to Secretary of State Colin Powell – again to the shock of many Republicans and those who warn about foreign entanglements.
This is bull sh*t.
Topics: In The News |
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August 7th, 2004 at 9:09 pm
I don’t like the idea either, Matt. I think I reacted in much the same way. I can only surmise that it’s the Bush Administration’s way of proving that we’re not the party of poll corruption and voter fraud. I agree it’s ridiculous to think that foreigners could, in any way, meddle in our sacred elections (well, they’re near-holy to me).
Just remember, the state election authorities in Florida have already announced that such observers are not to be allowed access to the voting process and, in any case, they would have to remain at a distance of more than 50 feet from the polls.
So, by that above bit of info, I gather that it’s only Florida’s polling places that will be monitored.
August 7th, 2004 at 10:38 pm
this smells of donkey poop.
August 8th, 2004 at 8:34 am
On October 29, 2002, George W. Bush signed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA).
Anybody here understand what’s behind this new law?
Liberal Democrat requesting permission to come aboard.
-Chicago43
August 8th, 2004 at 6:06 pm
Haven’t read through it, nor was I aware of its existence. For more information, the HAVA page is here:
HAVA: The Help America Vote Act of 2002
August 8th, 2004 at 6:13 pm
The point behind HAVA is to replace the punch ballots. Though I’m not sure with what. Hopefully, not one of the buggy electronic voting machines that leave no paper trail.
August 8th, 2004 at 7:27 pm
I hate eVoting myself…
August 8th, 2004 at 9:16 pm
We have been using electronic voting in my state now for a few elections including the recent primaries. It has all gone very smoothly. I do believe the idea of a printout of your vote to you at the end might be beneficial, however we never had a transaction to keep before either. But can you imagine the nightmare of people forgetting to take them, etc. I think people are worried that somehow a physical copy of a record is somehow more accurate or secure or something. I think FL proved the fallacy in that. With proper security and redundancy, an electronic vote in my mind is much more preferable.
August 8th, 2004 at 9:21 pm
And please don’t get into the paranoid electronic vote tampering approach. Volunteer election officials sitting around holding punch cards up to the light trying to decifer someones intent is about as looney as it gets. We know there will be some fallout, etc…there always has been. No matter what you do some numb-nut is going to claim that they were confused or that a certain way is discriminatory or god knows what. I am just thankful that our forbears had the wisdom to establish a representative republic and not a true democracy. Mob rule sucks, can you even imagine where we would be right now if we had used the popular vote instead of the electoral college and Al ‘wild man’ Gore were leading us?!? Shudder, hurl, eccch….bad taste!
August 8th, 2004 at 10:18 pm
On e-voting, here’s the problems people have.
- Diebold voting machines don’t leave a paper trail: This isn’t overtly criminal in and of itself. But they don’t meet many state voting codes, and states shouldn’t buy/use them. It could be EASILY remedied by installing a printer and adding a bit of code, but hasn’t - why?
- Diebold voting machines have been clearly DOCUMENTED to be cleanly hackable. Internal memos have been leaked (just google “Dieblod memos”) showing results can easily be altered, without leaving a trace. This was in place during the 2000 election, where more than one Repbulican edged out an upset.
- The head of the company said he was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.” In and of itself, it’s just one millionaire fundraising for another. But with the other irregularities, it looks bad.
- Diebold claims to have resolved the hacking problems, but (last I checked) were silent as to how they fixed them. Nor have they taken the ridiculously simple step of adding a “PRINT” button.
August 8th, 2004 at 10:59 pm
Somebody asked “what the f***k?”
Okay, here’s what’s happening over in Volvo driving, tofu eating lefty land. Me bring’um big news from over hill, me come in peace. Our side is, how should I put this… increasingly nervous about the following possilibilties.
A. A repeat of the voter purges that happened in Florida. The new law requires a Katherine Harris in every state, purging suspected felons from voting rolls, and not being too precise about it.
B. The new computer voting machines that have no paper trace, no method for VOTER self verification of correct vote. Some of these machines could spit out a paper trail, but that would just be a copy of what is already on the memory card.
Deibold’s FTP site is not secure, the quality of the source code itself is of suspect quality. Some of the machines used in Georgia had no encryption at all and could be reset manually. Hold on to yer hats cowboys there’s more. Here’s a quote from Rob Behler who served as Diebold’s Warehouse Manager in Atlanta.” Some of the voting machines had been sent out as demos, and somebody broke in and stole 9 or 14 of the machines and one of the servers I think.”He says the vote counting programs in the stolen computers could have been completely reconstructed by reverse engineering and then employed to jimmy the election.
SOURCE: http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040517&s=palast
SOURCE: http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040816&c=1&s=dugger
So heres the deal, I am presenting the content of both A and B as assertions, not as facts. I am committed to playing fair. The sources are from THE NATION magazine, admittedly left leaning. I have a healthy skepticism of the info I get even from my own folk, and I would urge you all to take everything you hear on Fox News with a big bucket of salt. Want to take O Reilly’s or Hannity’s assertions out for a test drive? the bloggers over at Air America would be glad to help you out. Main stream media ain’t coming near this, so please feel free to chime in if something doesn’t add up.
So , what IS true is that we are scared, and people will do almost anything when they are scared. That is the answer to the “what the f***k?” question. Kerry already has a team of 2000 lawyers sharpening their pencils, and ready to challenge any voting system that can’t leave a voter verifiable paper trail. 2000 lawyers?, another recount situation? lord help us all, and if the lord can’t help we might need kofi after all. The conspiracy theory crowd is thinking that the hanging chads were all just a set-up to get us into computers so that the evil radcons could really fix things good this time. With W leaning over Jeb on the airforce 1 saying “ Were gonna take Florida, I guarantee it.” its hard to argue sense into them.
So there’s what’s happening over the hill.
We all want what’s best for America, we just differ on what best is.
-Chicago43
August 8th, 2004 at 11:45 pm
Chicago43, I would think we all agree on being scared and wanting what’s best for our country, but greatly differs on what scares us and what we believe is best. Our approach to keeping our “values” doesn’t seem to be in the same ball park.
August 9th, 2004 at 12:35 am
I think the UN election monitors could learn a lot about election fraud by monitoring this upcoming election. Send them to Detroit and let them see the Machine at work, or view the dead voting the straight Democratic ticket in St. Louis, to name a couple of examples.
tweell
August 9th, 2004 at 6:51 am
This entire thing is offensive and insulting to every American. That’s to say nothing of how it undercuts our image abroad, and our pro-democracy message. What, we can’t even run an election in our own nation? It’s not like we’ve had the last 225 years to get it right.
August 9th, 2004 at 8:40 am
I will again state…there IS NO fool proof method. Even with fill in the dots paper ballots. There are many examples in those elections where votes are thrown out because there were two dots filled out on the same line, there was one dot filled out for one candidate and the other was written in on the write in line, etc. There was about a 3% fallout when all is said and done in FL in 2000 which is about average (in some states higher). Statistically these fall outs are evenly divided across the typical voting percentages and DO NOT change the results. That is why nobody ever seriously challenges them. The challenge in 2000 had way more to do with the Dems wanting to create some voter fraud issue they could harp on incessently than finding the truth. They STILL say the election was stolen even though there was a FULL and definitive recount of the FL vote by the NYT, et all. and it showed GWB winning FL no matter how you counted it.
August 9th, 2004 at 3:51 pm
Ed,
The counting of votes, (and recounting in this case) is one issue. The purging of suspected felons from voting roles is another. We can come back around to the count and re-count issue which you are speaking about. I know that the view on your side is that were a few hanging chads, there was a count, then a re-count, then the supreme court stepped in and put and end to all the nonsense about recounting. So why don’t we just get over it allready? Because that is not the whole story of what happened. Are you unaware that the purging happened? (before the voting ever took place), or are you saying that you disagree with the claim that the purges happened. Greg Plast is an independent investigative reporter who has worked on both issues for at least the last four years and the leading authority for presenting our case. There is a mountain of evidence on this. Here is one article…
“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.”-by Liam Scheff
SOURCE :http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=217&row=2
August 9th, 2004 at 5:01 pm
Chicago43, I am disappointed. Cynthia McKinney is a complete nut job. I live in Atlanta and she is completely unstable, the things that come out of her mouth are completely outrageous. She is an unabashed anti-semite and stated flat out that Bush planned the 9/11 attacks to profit his ‘oil buddies’. She is just another race baiter profiting on the ill informed.
Greg Palast is anything but independant. He is an American hating Brit and his brand of tabloid journalism is honestly not fit to use as toilet paper. So this guy in Britian was able to expose this massive fraud when the US Department of Justice found nothing. Sound a little suspicious to you?
The only people I know that give either McKinney or Palast the time of day are extreme conspiracy theory wackos. Please do not quote things like this from some of the more Liberal sites without doing a background check on them.
The next thing I know you will be quoting Michael Moore!
August 9th, 2004 at 5:46 pm
Ed,
Hmm.. okay,
So I guess you are saying that the purges never happened. Okay, we can start the conversation from there. But first, I am willing to re-examine our sides version of the truth.
I honor your request to limit posting from left leaning sources in the future. That’s fair.
Not planning any side trips to Michael Moore. It might be fun though.
-Chicago43
August 9th, 2004 at 8:06 pm
Chicago43, here is a really good article from the LA Times in Nov. of 2001 after the big recount was done. The results are very interesting, but the upshot is that Bush still won using the couting rules (agreed to by both sides) at the time.
[url]http://www.latimes.com/la-111201recount.story
However if more liberal rules were applied especially for overcounts Gore would have had a slight edge. There are just so many variables that it is quite frankly not definitive either way.
My opinion is that if a voter cannot even figure out a ballot (this is not rocket science) than do we really want their vote on who should be president? Me personally….no I do not. And honestly that is why we have a representative republic instead of pure democracy.
August 10th, 2004 at 12:39 am
I think we should bring in the U.N. to monitor the election, so the next time the Bushy bunch steals the election, they might be caught. Then we could put the jerk in jail were he belongs. Watch the price of gas! Economic recovery my tutu. Homland security…where? My country tis of thee… My country’s full of slease with corprate subscidies of thee I screem. Land were the children die, and politicians lie they raped our mountainsides and ruined our seas.
August 10th, 2004 at 12:31 pm
[i]This entire thing is offensive and insulting to every American. That’s to say nothing of how it undercuts our image abroad,[/i]
No, our current [i]administration[/i] is undercutting our image abroad, and has been doing so for quite some time. Step outside the box of insularity for a minute and consider that this might just be a [i]smart[/i] move with respect to our “image abroad.”
August 10th, 2004 at 1:38 pm
I’m Not Voting In November
That’s it. The camel’s back is broken.
George Bush is allowing the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe to “monitor” the elections of our free and sovereign nation. Simply outrageous. WorldNetDaily reports:When 13 Democratic membe…
August 10th, 2004 at 6:13 pm
This seems more for show than real in any sense. These UN monitors will just be spectators with no power whatsoever. And I don’t think those who oppose this are truly angry because they want to protect the sovereignty of nations. Its more of an instinctive reaction and a form of political relativism. This kind of scrunity would not be applied to any nations we have partially curtailed the sovereignty of.
This is what happens when you follow a leader too dogmatically, sort of like when Clinton finally signed the welfare reform bill… traitorous bastard.
August 11th, 2004 at 2:03 am
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