Moscow Times piece on American electronic voting machines

[Oilwellian]

<snip>
It's a shell game, with money, companies and corporate brands switching in a blur of buyouts and bogus fronts. It's a sinkhole, where mobbed-up operators, paid-off public servants, crazed Christian fascists, CIA shadow-jobbers, war-pimping arms dealers -- and presidential family members -- lie down together in the slime. It's a hacker's dream, with pork-funded, half-finished, secretly programmed computer systems installed without basic security standards by politically partisan private firms, and protected by law from public scrutiny. It's how the United States, the "world's greatest democracy," casts its votes. And it's why George W. Bush will almost certainly be the next president of the United States -- no matter what the people of the United States might want.

The American vote-count is controlled by three major corporate players -- Diebold, ES&S, and Sequoia -- with a fourth, Science Applications International Corporation, coming on strong. These companies -- all of them hardwired into the Bushist Party power grid -- have been given billions of dollars by the Bush Regime to complete a sweeping computerization of voting machines nationwide by the 2004 election. These glitch-riddled systems -- many using "touch-screen" technology that leaves no paper trail at all -- are almost laughably open to manipulation, according to corporate whistleblowers and computer scientists at Stanford, Johns Hopkins and other universities.

The technology had a trial run in the 2002 midterm elections. In Georgia, serviced by new Diebold systems, a popular Democratic governor and senator were both unseated in what the media called "amazing" upsets, with results showing vote swings of up to 16 percent from the last pre-ballot polls. In computerized Minnesota, former Vice President Walter Mondale -- a replacement for popular incumbent Paul Wellstone, who died days before the vote -- was also defeated in a large last-second vote swing. Convenient "glitches" in Florida saw an untold number of votes intended for the Democratic candidate registering instead for Governor Jeb "L'il Brother" Bush. A Florida Democrat who lost a similarly "glitched" local election went to court to have the computers examined -- but the case was thrown out by a judge who ruled that the innards of America's voting machines are the "trade secrets" of the private companies who make them.

Who's behind these private companies? It's hard to tell: The corporate lines -- even the bloodlines -- of these "competitors" are so intricately mixed. For example, at Diebold -- whose corporate chief, Wally O'Dell, a top Bush fundraiser, has publicly committed himself to "delivering" his home state's votes to Bush next year -- the election division is run by Bob Urosevich. Bob's brother, Todd, is a top executive at "rival" ES&S. The brothers were originally staked in the vote-count business by Howard Ahmanson, a member of the Council for National Policy, a right-wing "steering group" stacked with Bushist faithful.

http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2003/09/19/120.html

[DBoon]

1. Not like the Russians

have any personal experience with rigged elections (sarcasm).

[Oilwellian]

2. The irony is dripping

<eom>

[Brucey]

4. But this story should be told to the sheeple in the US.

[RC]

6. The Russians should know, but the question is

What are our presidential candidates going to do about this? Or do they think this is politics as usual?

[Old and In the Way]

3. Thanks for posting!

What I don't understand is why Diebold, ESS, et al, aren't in agreement with the need for papertrails? It certainly would clear up any concerns and since when doesn't a company want to increase it's revenue stream with added printer profits?

Sad that we need to read this on a mediasite in a former Communist country, but maybe they, more than most complacent American's, understand the threat that this issue presents to our democracy.

[LearnedHand]

5. And how ironic...

...that the news posted in the former Soviet Union is more "believable" than what we read in our own press. Never thought I'd see THAT day.

[sspiderjohn]

7. Why aren't OUR journalists writing about this?

nm

[hedda_foil]

8. I believe that Chris Floyd is an American.

He also writes for Counterpunch. And his pieces are always right on.

[RC]

9. Because,

their masters are bought and paid for?

[StClone]

10. Bush Lies to our face

Think about what they do in private. That is why I give more than mild credence to a Moscow Times article about voter theft in the USA.