Posted by Melissa G (ERD news)
HAVA and the Rush to Poor Judgment;; A Scam to Replace More Trustworthy, Older Technology Voting Machines with Hackable Computerized "Vote Theft" Machines
by Vickie Karp
http://www.opednews.com 8/20/05
If you liked the Orwellian-named “Clear Skies Initiative”or the “No Child Left Behind” Act, you should really love the “Help America Vote Act”, another farce brought to you by our esteemed leaders in the White House and Congress.
How was HAVA created and what is its purpose? Here’s some history:
If someone took a poll today among average Americans on the street and asked them what was the most memorable snafu regarding the 2000 Presidential election, my bet is that overwhelmingly the response would be: the “hanging chad” debacle in Florida.
The media’s coverage of hanging chads created one of the most widespread and effective smokescreens ever devised to fool the American people into believing that chads were the reason for all the hub-bub in Florida, which ultimately led to the Supreme Court selecting our President-- rather than allowing the state to continue to count ballots and determine the real winner of that election.
But hanging chads and the problems that they caused pale in comparison to the REAL reason for the election screwup: intentional matching of over 50,000 minority voters’ names with a list of convicted felons in such a way as to effectively (and illegally) disenfranchise them. The state gave specific instructions to the company executing the voter roll purge to assure that accuracy was not important. These non-felon voters’ ballots would likely have gone to Gore, giving him a clear margin of victory. All this was spearheaded by then - Secretary of State Katherine Harris, who doubled as head of the state campaign to elect Bush. (No conflict of interests there.) The plan began implementation in 1999, a year before the election. While happy voters slept in their beds, Harris plotted to remove their most valued right as American citizens—and she succeeded.
http://www.wivb.com/Global/story.asp?S=3745530&nav=0RapdYb7