Your electronic vote in the 2010 election has just been bought

[Emit]

Your electronic vote in the 2010 election has just been bought
by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman
September 24, 2009

Unless US Attorney General Eric Holder intervenes, your electronic vote in 2010 will probably be owned by the Republican-connected ES&S Corporation. With 80% ownership of America's electronic voting machines, ES&S could have the power to shape America's future with a few proprietary keystrokes.

ES&S has just purchased the voting machine division of the Ohio-based Diebold, whose role in fixing the 2004 presidential election for George W. Bush is infamous. (http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2004/03/diebolds-political-machine)

Critics of the merger hope Holder will rescind the purchase on anti-trust grounds.

But only a transparent system totally based on hand-counted paper ballots, with universal automatic voter registration, can get us even remotely close to a reliable vote count in the future.

For even if Holder does void this purchase, ES&S and Diebold will still control four of every five votes cast on touchscreen machines. As the US Supreme Court seems poised to open the floodgates on corporate campaign spending, the only difference could be that those who would buy our elections will have to write two checks instead of one.

And in fact, it's even worse than that. ES&S, Diebold and a tiny handful of sibling Republican voting equipment and computing companies control not only the touchscreen machines, but also the electronic tabulators that count millions of scantron ballots, AND the electronic polling books that decide who gets to vote and who doesn't.

Let's do a quick review: ...

Cont'd at:http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2009/3543

[flamingdem]

1. We need to stay 110% on top of this and PUSH starting now

Thanks for the information. Please keep posting on this issue!

[ClayZ]

2. K and R

Bookmarked!

[Patchuli]

3. Not in California! We get paper!

Thanks to our heroine, Debra Bowen, Secretary of State for California!:kick:

[demodonkey]

6. Deb Bowen is great but that paper is COUNTED by ES&S... you need meaningful audits too.

Paper ballots are worthless without strong, handcounted (and publicly observed) meaningful audits.

Support the election integrity organization of your choice.

[Patchuli]

7. Oh I do and have for the past five years or so!

I do know it was accurate in my county. First time it went completely blue in years! :kick:

[Patchuli]

8. Oh I do and have for the past five years or so!

I do know it was accurate in my county. First time it went completely blue in years! :kick:

[obliviously]

4. All votes should have a paper reciept for safety.

I trust no one!

[Stevepol]

5. As Reagan said, "Trust but verify."

It's not that you don't trust people. You realize that people are people. Out of 10 people, one is a saint and one is a crook or a potential crook. This rule holds world-wide and always will hold.

Suppose somebody said to you that you could control the outcome of an election and there would be no way you could be found out? Absolutely no way. Would you be honest or would you rig the election?

You come to a traffic light that's red, but it's 1:00 in the morning and nobody is anywhere even close. You're on your own. Do you blast on thru or do you wait until the light changes?

If a vote changes, and you're not there to see it, did it actually happen?

If enough people believe they have a democracy, does that mean that they actually have a democracy?

Our democracy is a placebo, a faith-based democracy and nothing more right now.