10)
Paperless E-voting Machines (Ney
& Abramoff)
Fresh
disasters at the polls -- and new evidence from an industry insider -- prove
that electronic voting machines can't be trusted
The
primary author and steward of HAVA was Rep. Bob Ney, the GOP chairman of the powerful U.S. House
Administration Committee. Ney
had close ties to the now-disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff, whose firm received at least $275,000 from
Diebold to lobby for its
touch-screen machines. Ney's
former chief of staff, David DiStefano,
also worked as a registered lobbyist for Diebold,
receiving at least $180,000 from the firm to lobby for HAVA and "other
election reform issues." Ney
- who accepted campaign contributions from DiStefano and counted Diebold's then-CEO O'Dell among his constituents -
made sure that HAVA strongly favored the use of the company's machines.
Ney also made sure that Diebold and other companies would
not be required to equip their machines with printers to provide paper records
that could be verified by voters. In a clever twist, HAVA effectively pressures
every precinct to provide at least one voting device that has no paper trail -
supposedly so that vision-impaired citizens can vote in secrecy. The provision
was backed by two little-known advocacy groups: the National Federation of the
Blind, which accepted $1 million from Diebold
to build a new research institute, and the American Association of People with
Disabilities, which pocketed at least $26,000 from voting-machine companies.
The NFB maintained that a paper voting receipt would jeopardize its members'
civil rights - a position not shared by other groups that advocate for the
blind.
Sinking
in the sewage of the Abramoff
scandal, Ney agreed on
September 15th to plead guilty to federal conspiracy charges - but he has
already done one last favor for his friends at Diebold. When 212 congressmen from both parties
sponsored a bill to mandate a paper trail for all votes, Ney used his position as chairman to prevent the
measure from even getting a hearing before his committee.
Meet
Mr. Republican: Jack Abramoff
The Secret History of the Most
Corrupt Man in
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/9519825/meet_mr_republican_jack_abramoff
So
this is it, finally. By the time this magazine hits the newsstands, Jack Abramoff -- right-wing megalobbyist and great feckless shitwad of our new American century
-- will be but a tick of the geological clock away from The End. There will be
no rack, no stoning, no scorpion-filled sand pit, no bucket of fire ants. Just a sanitary plea
agreement and a single blow of the gavel, and "Casino Jack" Abramoff will disappear for a few
years of weightlifting and Talmudic study.
En route to his day of reckoning, Abramoff
really did travel each and every right-wing highway, from Jo-burg in the old
days to the Bush White House. But he's being sentenced for only the last few miles
of that trip. It's almost an insult to a criminal of Abramoff's caliber that the charge he'll go to jail
for is a low-rent wire-fraud scheme committed in a pickpocket capital like
The other charges are a little more respectable. He took tens of millions
from Indian tribes that sought relief from
It's that last bit that made Abramoff
a national celebrity, the poster boy for the way the Bush administration does
business and the most feared name around in a Washington political society that
is still waiting with bated lizard breath for the other shoe to drop. To most
Americans, Jack Abramoff is
the bloodsucking bogeyman with a wad of bills in his teeth who came through the window in the middle of the
night and stole their voice in government. But he was much more than that. Abramoff was as much of a symbol
of his generation's Republican Party as Ronald Reagan
or Barry Goldwater was of his.
The Effect of Computers on the Integrity of Vote
Tabulation
by Chuck Herrin
www.solarbus.org/election/cd/test/documents.html
Chuck Herrin is a Republican computer security expert who is
hired by Fortune 500 companies to hack into their computer systems to detect
and correct security flaws. After the 2004 election, he gave a presentation to
His website provides two demonstrations where he shows "exactly how easy it would be to break into Diebold's GEMS software, which is the software used to tabulate regional voting results. This software runs on regular Windows machines and counts the votes from multiple precincts that may have used the new voting machines or optically scanned ballots, including absentee ballots. It is responsible for the accurate reporting of tens of millions of votes cast using these different types of ballots."
More information: Chuckherrin.com.