No legitimacy for fraudulent elections
From the editor: This is an e-mail from Democrats.com…the subject was “No legitimacy for fraudulent elections” and I thought…Finally! they are going to acknowledge our sham elections caused by electronic voting machines! Of course as you read you quickly learn that isn’t the topic, but maybe the US could send Darfur’s brutal regime “our” voting machines. That way, we could stop slaughtering the people trying to vote in Darfur and the Darfur regime can still get the “election” results they want! (That’s what “our” government has been doing since 2000 and obviously it works, and the people can have the great feeling of thinking their vote counts and no one gets hurt!) Just an idea!
Dear sherry,
Next week Sudan will hold an election that has already been discredited by violence against journalists, activists, and candidates opposed to the genocidal government of Omar al-Bashir.
Please join the Save Darfur Coalition in urging President Obama to lead the world in rejecting Sudan’s sham election.
Bob Fertik
Diebold Voting System Sported ‘DELETE’ Button
Hat tip: RAW STORY
Wednesday March 4, 2009
Election observers already distrustful of the electronic voting machine manufacturer Diebold will have more reason to be wary now.
“Following three months of investigation, California’s secretary of state has released a report examining why a voting system made by Premier Election Solutions (formerly known as Diebold Election Systems) lost about 200 ballots in Humboldt County during the November presidential election,” Kim Zetter reports for Wired.
Zetter continues, “But the most startling information in the state’s 13-page report (.pdf) is not about why the system lost votes, which Threat Level previously covered in detail, but that some versions of Diebold’s vote tabulation system, known as the Global Election Management System (GEMS), include a button that allows someone to delete audit logs from the system.”
As for the missing ballots, Wayne Hanson at govtech.com notes that the report indicates a “Deck Zero software error — which can delete the first group of optically scanned ballots under certain circumstances — caused 197 ballots to be inadvertently deleted from Humboldt County’s initial results in the November 4, 2008, General Election. The results were corrected when the error was discovered.”
At Brad Blog, John Gideon observes, “The report is amazing in that it reveals why our voting systems are failing. The issues with the GEMS software go much deeper than just the fact that the system may lose votes. The state also found readily apparent violations of the federal voting system standards. These violations seem to have been ignored by federal test labs, by the National Assoc. of State Election Directors (NASED), and their consultants who qualified the voting system for use, and by-passed CA Secretaries of State and their consultants.”
Wired’s Zetter notes, “The California report states that the ‘clear’ button, along with other problems with the auditing logs as well as the software flaw that caused the system to lose votes in Humboldt County (see below for more information on that flaw), should have been red flags to the testing laboratories that certified the system and should have been sufficient to ‘fail’ the system and prevent it from being used in any federal election.”
