6-16-07
Rigged Voting About
to Become the Law of the Land
Little George is supposed to be the
moral compass of the United States. He has not said one word concerning vote
fraud. What kind of moral compass is our President who has not said a word about
rigged elections? Should we take his cries for Democracy in Iraq, Iran, and
here, there and yonder when his silence is working against fair elections and
Democracy in the United States? If Little George is not concerned about Democracy
in the USA, and Democracy is completely dependent upon fair elections, then
Little George is not really concerned about Democracy in Iraq or any country
on the planet. By the way, the heart of the US
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales complaint is he replaced prosecutors to
help Republicans in vote fraud cases.
It
is 10:10 PM Wednesday June 13, 2007 and news of Sunni Al Queda bombing Shiite
al-Askariya mosque in Samarra has been posted on www.antiwar.com. The Neocon
led USA has been financing and arming Saddam Hussein's Sunni al Queda. The President
even had the gall to say Iran was arming alQueda. Would Iran arm alQueda who
just blew up one of Shiite Iran's most Holy Shrines? Lies. By the way I have
said Saddam Hussein was not hanged and is working for the Neocons to induce
Iran to attack oil facilities in the Mid East and expand the war and his Sunni
attacking and bombing one of the Shiites' most Holy Shrines is something Saddam
Hussein has done before and this bombing is proof to me Saddam Hussein is alive
and well working for the Neocons. The bombing of Shiite al-Askariya mosque in
Samarra is horrible because the Mid East will probably explode and HR811 will
be forgotten and passed and the President will be given power to decide who
is put in Congress. Oil will go through the roof and the
Federal Reserve Fraud inflation and interest rates will go through the roof.
By the way, some of the most talented men in the military were sent back home
recently and I believe the Pentagon deliberately sent them home so that the
most talented Officers would not be around to deal with the blowing up of Shiite
al-Askariya mosque in Samarra situation. So the military is opening the
door for Iran to attack the United States. All this during 120 degree heat of
the Mid East. This has been planned by the Neocons for a long time and is no
accident.
Read this article on rigged elections
by Ellen Theisen, and see if you agree with my assessment that it tells us DRE
computer vote machines to record and count our votes can and are being rigged
and the HR 811 cure is more of the same, it promotes DREs to rig elections,
and worse. Ms. Thiesen explains seven of the bill's severe failures.... The
seventh really got my attention, because it is the same problem which is the
root of our banking system problem which some call the Federal
Reserve Fraud . The Federal Reserve Fraud is the
biggest problem on the planet today. The world has a choice. Stop the Federal
Reserve Fraud or the planet dies. Second is like unto it. DREs are cowardly,
un American, and easy to rig. The world has a choice. Stop using DREs or the
planet lives under communi$m.
In HR 811 the President appoints
the members of Election Assistance Commission (EAC). This is beyond horrible.
HR 811 gives the President the power to name the members of the Commission and
then the Commission the authority to be the guardian of Democracy. This is the
same as giving the President the power to name the members of Congress. When
the President takes control of the Commission charged to count the votes, he
is given a blank check to name the members of Congress - Democracy ends and
our votes are totally and completely meaningless. DREs guarantee we live in
a communi$t police state and Democracy is dead and gone.
Many Americans know coward thugs
owned by the Federal Reserve Fraud run this country
and rig the election process for the benefit of the Federal
Reserve Fraud , and do not vote. Around 10 percent of Americans who are
eligible to vote, vote in most elections. With the President naming the people
on the Commission who rule over vote counting, 0, zero percent of the American
people's vote will count in all elections. 98 percent of the members of Congress
run unopposed. This degree of communi$m, 98 %, is not good enough for the Rothchilds
and Rockefellers, so they came up with their latest cowardly scam - President
names the members of Election Assistance Commission (EAC).
Since comrade Little George wants
to be able to name the members of the Election Assistance Commission (EAC),
and the EAC will have the power to rig elections, then it follows that every
one of our brave soldiers who dies in the line of duty is dying so comrade Little
George can name the members of all governments on the planet. This is communism.
If comrade Little George wants rigged elections, communi$m, for the United States,
then Little George wants rigged elections, communi$m, in Iraq, Afghanistan,
and in every country the USA invades. Unknowingly, by deception, our brave soldiers
are being manipulated to fight and die for communi$m.
Who is behind comrade Little George
and the members of Congress who are eliminating fair elections when they give
the President the power to name the members of the Election Assistance Commission
(EAC). The owners of theFederal Reserve Fraud. We also
must have term limits for the members of Congress.
What is the answer to fair elections?
Not an Election Assistance Commission (EAC) whose members are named by the President.
No. We need to go back to hand marked in ink paper ballots counted by optical
scan with any voter in any precinct having the right to call for a hand count
in his/her precinct. HR 811 equates an easily hacked smoke and mirrors touch
computer screen generated ballot which can, are and will be programmed to elect
those the owners of the Federal Reserve Fraud want
elected, with a hand marked paper ballot which can be kept for recounting which
allows the people to decide who is elected. Do you want the owners of the Federal
Reserve Fraud, who have cowardly stolen trillions from the American people
and used these trillions to develop and spread AIDS, Hepititis viruses, war
and communi$m, to pick the members of Congress, or do you want the people to
pick the members of Congress?
From Ms. Theisen's article.
7) The dysfunctional Election Assistance
Commission (EAC) is made permanent.
Reports from the Government Accountability
Office reveal that the
Election Assistance Commission is incompetent, behind schedule by
years, and derelict in their duties. Recent news articles regarding
their suppression and subsequent altering of a Voter Fraud report,
along with their undisclosed disapproval of the CIBER voting system
test lab, has shown that the EAC is partisan and secretive. The
process by which the 2005 federal voting systems standards were
developed show that the agency is unduly influenced by the interests
of voting system manufacturers. Yet, HR 811 puts these
four
Presidential appointees in charge of more duties than those
they've
inadequately handled so far, makes the EAC a permanent
agency, and
provides it with permanent funding.
Some of us have had the pleasure
of getting to know Ellen Thiesen and/or
to appreciate her work in New Mexico after 2004, with VotersUnite and in
her work to produce VotePad. Ellen has written a lengthy criticism of HR
811 (posted on BradBlog today) which follows. I would appreciate any
comments/criticisms of this analysis. Bernie
PS If you haven't previewed David
Earnhardt's "Uncounted" yet, do so
soon. It is excellent.
--------------
BLOGGED BY Ellen Theisen ON 6/10/2007 9:22PM
Rush Holt's HR 811 Does More Harm than Good
A Leading Election Integrity Advocate Speaks Out Against 7 Serious
Failures in the Latest Holt Election Reform Bill ...
Guest blogged by Ellen Theisen, Co-Director
of VotersUnite.Org
<http://votersunite.org/>
(This is the first of a two-part
series. Tomorrow: An excerpt from
the author's companion article, "Senator Feinstein's Election Reform
Bill: A Constitutional Heresy," describing even graver concerns
about S. 1487, a bill recently introduced in the Senate.)
Once we have legitimized that "ballots"
need not be counted and have
endorsed the practice of secret vote-counting, how is it that we are
a democracy?
In September of 2003, when I was
working with VerifiedVoting
<http://verifiedvoting.org/>, Greg Dinger, Keone Kealoha, and I
coordinated the first national activist effort in the current grassroots
election integrity movement. We had a calling campaign to get more
co-sponsors for Representative Rush Holt's (D-NJ) election reform bill,
then called HR 2239. In two months, the number of co-sponsors more than
doubled -- from 29 to 61. After the disastrous November 2003 Fairfax,
Virginia, election, we rejoiced when Republican Representative Tom Davis
(R-VA) signed on and the bill became bipartisan. By the end of 2003,
there were 94 co-sponsors.
But Rep. Bob Ney (R-OH) was chairman
of the House Administration
Committee, and the bill never even got a hearing. Nor did Holt's
subsequent version of the bill in the 109th Congress, HR 550. But this
year's bill in the 110th, HR 811, has been marked up in committee and is
expected to soon come to the House floor for a vote. This should be a
time for celebration for me, but it's not.
After more than three years of supporting
election reform bills
introduced by Representative Rush Holt, I am saddened to see the many
severe flaws in the version of HR 811 as it was passed out of committee
last month. This year's bill had serious flaws when it was introduced in
January. Primarily, it failed to accommodate a nearly unanimous
agreement among citizen activists and computer scientists who have
watched election disasters over the past three years -- the agreement
that electronic voting machines (DREs) should not be used in U.S.
elections. I worked with many people to try to get an amendment
requiring a paper ballot, one that was actually to be counted, for every
vote cast. To my mind, that one significant improvement would have been
worth tolerating the other flaws.
But the bill that was passed out
of committee still allows for
invisible, unverifiable, electronic ballots on DRE touch-screens as the
official ballot for the all-important initial count where electronic
voting systems are used. Adding a "paper trail" to those machines
makes
no real difference. Voters still can't verify the electrical charges
that make up the ballots that are counted on Election Night by the DRE.
In addition to other flaws that remained
in the bill as it came out of
committee, some changes removed valuable safeguards from the bill, and
other changes introduced new problems. (Both versions of the bill can be
viewed by inputting "HR 811" at the government's legislation search
engine, Thomas.gov <http://thomas.gov/>. The complete text of the
current version is here
<http://thomas.loc.gov/home/gpoxmlc110/h811_rh.xml>. )
In my opinion, HR 811 will cause
more problems than it will solve.
My primary objection is the extreme
shift in the concept of "democracy"
that the bill institutes legally. Specifically, it gives a federal stamp
of approval to "ballots" that will never be counted, and it endorses
secret vote-counting.
Let me explain seven of the bill's
severe failures....
1) Under HR 811, some "ballots"
don't have to ever be counted.
The foremost flaw in HR 811 (both
the introduced version and the
version passed out of committee) is that the bill amends the Help
America Vote Act (HAVA) to allow for "paper ballots" that will never
be used for anything at all, not for the initial count and not for
any audit, since most HR811-mandated audits will count only 3% of
those ballots, in some cases, and in some cases, as many as 10% of
the them.
The very first requirement listed
in HAVA [Section 301(a)(1)(A)(i)]
is that all voting systems "permit the voter to verify (in a private
and independent manner) the votes selected by the voter on the
ballot before the ballot is cast and counted."
Since voters can't see inside the
inner workers of the compuer, they
cannot verify their electronic ballot before it's cast and counted,
so this legal requirement of HAVA is presently violated wherever
electronic voting machines (DREs) are used. But instead of enforcing
the requirement, HR 811 legitimizes the violation. Although a DRE
system with a so-called "voter-verified paper ballot" would permit
the voter to verify a paper record supposedly representing their
vote, the paper record is not the ballot that is cast and counted.
While that is now the case in many jurisdictions, no state or
federal law, yet, defines those non-counted records of the vote as
"ballots." We've had some wiggle-room for democracy, and HR 811
takes it away by declaring uncounted paper records to be "ballots."
2) Secret vote-counting is endorsed.
One of the committee changes that
removed an important value in the
bill is the "disclosure" section. That section has now become a
reversal of the original Holt position. Holt's 2003 bill said simply:
No voting system shall at any time
contain or use undisclosed
software. Any voting system containing or using software shall
disclose the source code of that software to the Commission, and the
Commission shall make that source code available for inspection upon
request to any citizen.
As originally introduced in 2006,
Holt's HR 811 version was even
stronger:
source code, object code, executable
representation, and ballot
programming files [shall be made] available for inspection promptly
upon request to any person.
The position is very clear, a simple
mandate for public disclosure,
without any exceptions or conditions. But the current HR 811, as
rewritten in committee, takes four and half pages to describe the
"disclosure," and if you unravel the terms and conditions, you
discover that public disclosure is prohibited, rather than required
(unless a state passes new disclosure laws of their own and amends
their current trade secret laws specifically to get around this
mandate.)
HR 811 now endorses secret software
for secret vote-counting -- the
antithesis of democracy.
People say, "oh well, who would
examine the software and find errors
and malicious code anyway?" But that's not the point. The point is
that a government claiming to be democratic should not endorse
secret vote-counting.
Once we have legitimized that "ballots"
need not be counted and have
endorsed the practice of secret vote-counting, how is it that we are
a democracy?
And there are still more serious
problems with the bill as well...
3) Audits are inadequate and contain
an invitation to tamper.
The bill requires what it calls "audits."
But many experts who have
researched election audit methods agree that the model in HR 811
will not be effective or provide confidence. Furthermore, the
precincts to be selected "randomly" and audited "without advance
notice" can be announced long before the audits actually start --
thus enabling tamperers to fix up the ballots in the chosen precincts.
America has a long and sordid history
of ballot tampering. With
electronic voting, wholesale theft may be just a matter of a few
well-placed keystrokes. The prize of controlling government spending
is bigger than ever. Attempts to steal elections will continue, and
the audit provisions in HR 811 won't even present a serious obstacle.
4) The "ban" on electronic
communications and networking is incomplete
and convoluted.
The ban on wireless communications
is confusing and unenforceable.
In contrast, Holt's first bill, HR 2239, said simply:
No voting system shall contain any
wireless communication device at all.
That was a good start, and the latest
bill should have banned ALL
communications and networking capability. (What difference does it
make to tamperers if they use a cell phone or land line or Internet
connection, or even telegraph as they did in the old days? If you
aren't convinced, read Pokey Anderson's "Even a Remote Chance?".
<http://www.votersunite.org/info/EvenARemoteChance.asp>
Instead, the new HR 811 gives a convoluted
mandate:
No voting system shall contain, use,
or be accessible by any
wireless, powerline, or concealed communication device, except that
enclosed infrared communications devices which are certified for use
in the voting system by the State and which cannot be used for any
remote or wide area communications or used without the knowledge of
poll workers shall be permitted.
What does the exception for "infrared
communications devices" mean,
and how would poll workers know about any hidden communications
devices? They wouldn't. This new provision is incomprehensible to
the ordinary person ... and it's unenforceable.
HR 811 is even ambiguous about Internet
connections. The title of
the section sounds promising, "Prohibiting Connection of System or
Transmission of System Information Over the Internet." But the text
of the section does not refer to a SYSTEM at all, but just a DEVICE.
So it appears that while a voting device such a DRE touch-screen
voting machine may not be connected to the Internet, the
all-important central tabulator computers (which hold the final
tallies) can be connected to the Internet -- an invitation to dial
in and change the results.
5) The impossible is required.
HR 811 requires all configuration
files used in any voting system to
be certified by the State and escrowed with the U.S. Election
Assistance Commission (EAC).
The problem is that ballot configuration
files are different for
every precinct in every election; some counties have thousands of
precincts; some states have hundreds of counties. And there might be
a window of a few weeks, just before the election, for the State to
certify the tens of thousands of configuration files to be used in
an election.
Is it possible? No. It's no more
possible than it is to conduct
adequate pre-election testing on the thousands of DREs in use in
some counties, which is why they simply aren't tested before an
election.
6) Massive voter disenfranchisement
caused by broken machines will
remain in 2008 and beyond.
An excellent provision in HR 811
when it was introduced was a
requirement for emergency paper ballots to be available in case
machines break down -- as they always do, and as we saw week after
week during the 2006 election cycle. Recent elections have seen
untold numbers of registered voters turned away from the polling
place because the DREs broke down or malfunctioned. So, having
emergency paper ballots on hand is absolutely essential.
But that provision is no longer present
in the current official
version. (Oddly, it was still in the version approved by the
committee, and the question remains why it is no longer in the
official version destined to go to the floor.)
Instead, the bill now requires that
paper ballots be offered to any
voter who wants one. This provision would allow voters to choose
paper ballots when the machines are broken -- or for any other
reason. That's good. However unlike the original provision, this
option won't take effect until 2010, and it won't ever apply to
early voting, even after 2010.
Further, there is no explicit requirement
for those paper ballots to
be counted on Election Night with all other reported results from
DRE systems, etc. The state of California has a similar provisional
for voters to request a paper ballot if they prefer. And in
violation of the intent of that provision, some elections officials
in the state announced they would not even begin to count such
ballots until the Thursday following the election. Results reported
on Election Night --- the all important ones reported in the news
and establishing the "winner" in everyone's minds --- would be
skewed to represent the results of those who trust the use of DRE
voting machines.
So, with new equipment required in
a huge number of precincts across
the country, 2008 is certain to see more of the same
disenfranchisement that the original HR 811 was intended to halt.
And this current version of the bill does nothing to address the
disenfranchisement that broken voting machines will cause in early
voting -- ever.
7) The dysfunctional Election Assistance
Commission (EAC) is made permanent.
Reports from the Government Accountability
Office reveal that the
Election Assistance Commission is incompetent, behind schedule by
years, and derelict in their duties. Recent news articles regarding
their suppression and subsequent altering of a Voter Fraud report,
along with their undisclosed disapproval of the CIBER voting system
test lab, has shown that the EAC is partisan and secretive. The
process by which the 2005 federal voting systems standards were
developed show that the agency is unduly influenced by the interests
of voting system manufacturers. Yet, HR 811 puts these four
Presidential appointees in charge of more duties than those they've
inadequately handled so far, makes the EAC a permanent agency, and
provides it with permanent funding.
The flaws in this bill are more damaging
to democracy than the good
that might come of the minimal safeguards it could provide for our
elections in 2008 and beyond.
I have not addressed every problem
with the bill. But these seven
problems are sufficient to convince me that this bill is not just
"imperfect." In my opinion, the flaws in this bill are more damaging
to
democracy and our future election process than the good that might come
of the minimal safeguards it could provide for our elections in 2008 and
beyond. So, far from celebrating that a Holt election reform bill will
finally come to the floor for a vote as I might have been back in 2003,
or even 2005, I am now filled with sadness. This bill should never be
passed as it is currently written.
Tomorrow, I'll discuss Sen. Feinstein's
"election reform bill" S. 1487,
a bill so dangerous, HR 811 pales by comparison.
[Non-text portions of this message
have been removed]
Do you think Hillary Clinton or the
other first string contenders for US President are going to discuss the faults
of HR811? What has rigged elections given the world? Inflation. Harry Reid has
put the corn farmer in the gasoline business to deliberately trigger inflation
in the grocery store. Little George has invaded Iraq, he is now siding with
Saddam Hussein's Sunni communi$t$ against non communi$t Iran, and tripled the
price we are paying for gasoline. Accident? No way. All deliberate inflationary
moves to send interest rates to 30% and decimate the American people financially
and put us in a communi$t police state. The least expensive, least dangerous
way to expose and stop the Federal Reserve FraudNew
World Order scams designed to take away our freedom and destitute us financially
is to contribute to Randy Crow for President. What is less scary? Putting your
head on the Federal Reserve Fraud guillotine or putting
$25.00 or your credit card for my political campaign?
