>Two observations:
>
>1. Fighting any perceived compromises in the vote tallying system
>peddled by Diebold & Co is rather easy - all it takes is to ask the
>voters to request absentee ballots. Absentee ballots do leave a paper
>trail and subvert the paperless electronic system. And they are
>perfectly legal and do not require any action on the part of the
>so-called "elected representatives."
Joe W replies: Absentee ballots are not a practical solution and are biased toward middle and upper class voters anyway.
>2. Focus on the real or perceived dangers of the electronic vote
>tallying obscures the fact that US elections are already a farce - they
>are mostly a public ritual similar to those in x-Soviet countries design
>to create a perception that the ruling clique has a popular mandate.
>How the votes are tallied is irrelevant because the system is rigged
>elsewhere: in the selection of candidates, in the preponderant influence
>of corporate interests, and in the turning the elections process into
>silly celebrity contests...(snip)
Joe W. replies: I did not say to '*focus* on the real or perceived dangers of the electonic vote tallying', I pointed out the very real, not merely perceived, dangers of electronic vote tallying - and said that they present a new, additional danger on top of machine politics which you discuss above as though pointing out something absent in my original post which specifically talked about political corruption. We cannot afford a complacent or blase attitude about this issue. It is very real and I think it is incumbent upon citizen activists to try to address it.
Joe W.
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0310/S00211.htm
The Diebold Memos' Smoking Gun Volusia County Memos Disclose Election 2000 Vote Fraud
By Alastair Thompson
http://www.blackboxvoting.com Read The Book…Support The Cause - Pre-Order Your Copy Today
"DELAND, Fla., Nov. 11 - Something very strange happened on election night to Deborah Tannenbaum, a Democratic Party official in Volusia County. At 10 p.m., she called the county elections department and learned that Al Gore was leading George W. Bush 83,000 votes to 62,000. But when she checked the county's Web site for an update half an hour later, she found a startling development: Gore's count had dropped by 16,000 votes, while an obscure Socialist candidate had picked up 10,000--all because of a single precinct with only 600 voters." - Washington Post Sunday , November 12, 2000 ; Page A22
Yes. Something very strange happened in Volusia County on election night November 2000, the night that first Gore won Florida, then Bush, and then as everybody can so well remember there was a tie.
Something strange indeed. But what exactly? In the above report ( click for full version), written days after the election, hotshot Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank goes on to attribute the strange 16,022 negative vote tally from Volusia's precinct 216 to an apparently innocent cause.
"…. faulty 'memory cards' in the machines caused the 16,000-vote disappearance on election night. The glitch was soon fixed," he wrote.
But thanks to recent investigations into Black Box Voting by Washington State writer Bev Harris we now know this explanation is not correct. In fact it is not even in the ballpark.
According to recently discovered internal Diebold Election Systems memos, Global Election Systems' (which was later purchased by Diebold) own technical staff were also stumped by the events in Volusia County/
In Chapter 11 of her new book "Black Box Voting In the 21st Century" released early today in .PDF format at Blackboxvoting.com and here at Scoop Ms Harris observes.
"If you strip away the partisan rancor over the 2000 election, you are left with the undeniable fact that a presidential candidate conceded the election to his opponent based on [results from] a second card that mysteriously appears, subtracts 16,022 votes, then just as mysteriously disappears." Working in parallel with Ms Harris Scoop has also been inquiring into the events on election night in Volusia county. Much of the material that follows is similar to that which appears in Chapter 11 of her book.
The starting point in this shocking discovery about election 2000 came in a series of internal Diebold ES technical support memos.
The following is an abbreviated version of the exchange concerning the peculiar events in Volusia county. For the purposes of research the exchange is included in full as an Appendix to this report (APPENDIX TWO). The discussion took place in early 2001 as an audit was underway in Volusia county into the events.
_________________________________________________________________ Fretting that your Hotmail account may expire because you forgot to sign in enough? Get Hotmail Extra Storage today! http://join.msn.com/?PAGE=features/es