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issue of this report being far from objective and hardly complete.
(Here's my letter)....yeah I got carried away :)
Dear Mr. Koppel,
I watched you today on CSpan and listened to your question and answer session at the University in regards to your career as a journalist. My opinion of you has always been high and you were someone I listened to with respect. Your discussion about how a journalist’s job was to report the facts making sure to represent the story as it stood, not the ”fed angle given” struck me as a key piece of what the true purpose of journalism is.
Tonight, as usual I turned on Nightline and was rewarded by discovering that you, a journalist of the mainstream media that I held in high regards was going to do a story about the 2004 election and fraud. You made my day…until you started to speak.
First off, I am not one to jump on conspiracy bandwagons nor am I a poor loser. I’m a normal everyday American woman who upon studying the facts has decided that the 2004 election was corrupted. Whether the results would have made a difference in the outcome and to what degree in the absence of corruption is not the point as it stands now. Four years ago, many of us saw the same situation develop, Mr. Bush claimed the Presidency and we were told to relax and let it be for the good of the country. We were told it would be repaired. We were told Bush won. Well, we relaxed and it was NOT for the good of the country in my opinion. It was NOT repaired and GORE was the winner.
Four years later, here we are. I have to ask you, did you honestly look into the questions regarding Ohio? I was insulted to not even hear a mention of John Conyers and the members of the Judiciary Committee that have spent COUNTLESS hours investigating what went on in Ohio. During the forums he has held in both Washington and Ohio he collected over 1000 depositions. His website has a copy of the report he compiled and the letters between him and Mr. Blackwell who has chosen to do nothing but show contempt, lack of any professionalism and outright disrespect towards Representative Conyers’.
Have you read the letters? The complaints? Have you looked into Mr. Blackwell’s behavior during the recount of the votes? His recent communication soliciting funds for his campaign to run for Governor? You need to. I challenge you to take 24 hours, by yourself to truly look at this issue. Talk to Representative Conyers, look into the voting machines and their owners, read the computer expert opinions, watch the film of what it was like in SOME areas in Ohio, why were there unused machines in a warehouse and less machines in some key Democratic areas then the two years prior…I could go on and on and on. . Imagine,,, what is we are right? Imagine the implications for our Democracy.
Mr. Blackwell spoke about the need for a large number of people to have conspired to have “fixed” the election and rationalizes that since the election boards consisted of both Democrat and Republican members it would be a ridiculous notion. It is a fact, not a theory, not a possibility but a fact that our Voting machines are such that just one person has the ability to decide what countless votes say. Did you know that?
The electronic voting systems used in the United States, both optical scan and DRE (Direct Recording Electronic), have well documented severe and unresolved security and accuracy flaws that are not being remedied by election procedures. The very machines that count MOST of our votes count votes in accordance to how they are told to count them. Machines are wonderful because the do whatever we as humans tell them to.
The problem is, we are not allowed to KNOW what and how each machine has been told to count. It could have been told to add 3 votes to the Democratic Presidential Candidate for every 1 Republican presidential candidate vote or any reversal and numerical variance you can imagine.
A major problem is that the source code (The form in which a computer program is written by the programmer.) is proprietary thus rendering the program (which is responsible for calculating national election results) immune to any formal auditing or any other scrutiny past that of an order by a Grand Jury. The lack of visibility into how the machines that tabulate our votes actually do that is worrisome to say the least. I don’t know about you but I would really like to know not only WHO programmed my machine to count but what method of mathematics its been programmed to count by!
Okay, lets say we solve this “secret code” problem. What happens when a machine communicates its results? What assures us that at this point, when the machine is “open” that our votes remain the same? I could tell it to do anything without any repercussions. No, I’m not paranoid. It is not my ignorance or superstition that brings me to this conclusion but rather my knowledge of how computers work.
Being a Democrat, I have an additional concern in regards to at least 80% of the votes counted in the United States being counted by machines owned by Republican Party supporters. A gentle example hoping to shake us in to awareness is: Walden O’Dell, chief executive of Diebold, In August 2003 announcing that he had been a top fund-raiser for President George W. Bush and had sent a get-out-the-funds letter to Ohio Republicans. I would think that this egregious example of blind allegiance to the Republican party (or any party for that matter) by the CEO of a company that is responsible for tabulation of a large portion of votes in this country would beleaguer the heart of any person, be they on the left or right side of the aisle who believes that this country's fate should be determined by the voice of the masses, and not the top one percent of the population. This is just one example of the many unethical relationships between the people controlling the voting machines and the people governing our nation. Look into the ownership, board of directors and PAC contributions of the machines that count our votes.
You report made light of and belittled my concerns. It showed a narrow opinion in regards to what happened in Ohio, which I have come to expect from most news programs and am able to chalk up to them being lazy or biased. I don’t bother to watch most of them any longer. It was because it was YOU that I was so saddened.
Sincerely,
xxxxxxx
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