Special Elections…
Twenty interesting facts about recent elections:
- Two voting companies, Diebold and ES&S, count 80 percent of all votes in the United States.
- The vice-president of Diebold and the president of ES&S are brothers, Bob and Todd Urosevich.
- There is no federal agency with regulatory authority or oversight of the US voting machine industry.
- Republican Senator Chuck Hagel used to be chairman of AIS (now known as ES&S).
- Chuck Hagel won in a surprise landslide victory, with 85 percent of the votes cast in the 1996 vote tallied by AIS machines.
- Senator Chuck Hagel was on a short list of George W. Bush’s vice-presidential candidates.
- Diebold’s new touch screen voting machines have no paper trail of any votes, unlike all the ATMs, checkout scanners, and ticket machines they manufacture.
- Diebold is based in Ohio, a key electoral battleground.
- None of the international election observers were allowed in the polls in Ohio.
- A voting machine in Mahoning County, Ohio recorded 25 million negative votes for John Kerry.
- Diebold employed 5 convicted felons as consultants and developers to help write the central compiler computer code that counted 50% of the votes in 30 states.
- Diebold consultant Jeff Dean was convicted of planting back doors in his software.
- One memo from Lana Hires of Global Election Systems, now part of Diebold, complains, “I need some answers! Our department is being audited by the County. I have been waiting for someone to give me an explanation as to why Precinct 216 gave Al Gore a minus 16,022 [votes] when it was uploaded.”
- Another, from Talbot Ireland, Senior VP of Research and Development for Diebold, refers to key “replacement” votes in Volusia County as “unauthorized”.
- The voting tally error shifted the momentum of the news reporting and nearly led Gore to concede.
- All of the voting machine errors detected and reported in Florida went in favor of Bush or Republican candidates.
- The governor of the state of Florida, Jeb Bush, is the President’s brother.
- Poll tapes and ballots were thrown out in the trash in Volusia County, Florida.
- John Kerry lost every precinct in New Mexico that had a touchscreen voting machine, regardless of ethnicity, social class, or party affilition.
- Diebold claimed their audit log “can’t be altered by any human.” Yet, a chimpanzee was able to delete votes within an audit log.
“The voting tally error shifted the momentum of the news reporting and nearly led Gore to concede.“
In the 2004 election? Man, I know poiticians are sometimes slow to make decisions, but that must set some record!
“One memo from Lana Hires of Global Election Systems, now part of Diebold, complains, “I need some answers! Our department is being audited by the County. I have been waiting for someone to give me an explanation as to why Precinct 216 gave Al Gore a minus 16,022 [votes] when it was uploaded.” “
So, should I be more concerned that the software is rigged so someone is getting minus votes, or that it’s rigged wrong and the negative votes are going to someone not even in the race in 2004?
My mistake on the title. Lack of sleep tends to lead to errors. Some slack, please.
Of course. But if you don’t let me pick on the little nits I’m really not going to have much to complain about.