Why is George Bush smiling these days? The Oct. 23rd NY Times portrays him as being upbeat and confident that the GOP will sweep the midterm elections in a few short weeks.
He reportedly told his father to stop worrying and all the negative talk. Ken Melman seems to be talking only happy talk these days. What gives? He must get the same poll data that we all have privy to. Does he believe that Karl is going to pull some kind of mutant rabbit out of his ...er...hat?
Maybe he knows something that we don't.........
On Oct. 20th, The Baltimore Sun broke the story of the about Cheryl Kagan, an ex Democratic legislator and long time critic of the Diebold voting system recieving an anonymous package containing the computer code that ran the voting computers in 2004 with an unsigned note criticising the election board and demonstrating that the security of the system faces grave threats.
Mike Morrel, a computer scientist from John Hopkins University tested the disks and said that they looked as if they came from Diebolds testing labs and said if it was true, they have failed in protecting the system. "If it's from Diebold, it's like Coca Cola having their secret recipe stolen and then not learning their lesson" he said.
The governor of Maryland has advised voters to ask for paper ballots if they have any doubts about the security of the system.
DOUBTS? DO WE HAVE ANY DOUBTS?
ABC News is running a story about the system being hacked on line and how easy it is to do.
Todays Bradblog has a very alarming piece about the Illinois Integrity Project reporting that they were aboe to go on line and hack into the Diebold data base and actually access the records of voters and the codes to change their address and eligibility status.
Here are just a few actual problems reported in the last few uses of the system all over the country:
Machines "malfunctioned" in Texas and 100,000 votes mysteriously appeared.
In California, directions for voters with vision problems were only available in Vietnamese.
In Maryland, screens repeatedly froze and memory cards went missing.
As Maryland Republican Gubernatorial Candidate and present governor, Robert Erlich put it, "I don't care if we paid a half billion dollars or one billion! If it's going to put the election at risk, there's no price tag for a phony election or fraudelent election."
Electronic voting was supposed to be the solution that made voting secure and more efficient. We were led to believe that a safe system had been developed which would have made Democracy an easy click away! Instead, billions of dollars were funneled inot a Corporation with proven right wing ties to test a system on the US Voters which in its most innocent interpretaion is FAILED TECHNOLOGY! To my mind, this represents something much more than innocent, this is an attempt to hijack the election system. If it is so easy for outside investigators to hack into the system and discover flaws, how can we trust the ones who developed it and are enriched by it to not exploit them?
What does George Bush know that we don't. One thing he never possessed was a poker face!
2 comments:
Patrick,
A good and timely blog segment. People should be prepared for mass demonstrations in the streets if the election results are the exact opposite of what the double-digit disapproval poll ratings are showing now for the Republican Party. If this shows to be the case, the U.S. has officially degraded into a true Third World Country.
It all makes me nostalgic for the punch cards we used to use here. Before 2000, I don't remember really hearing about a lot of problems with them. The rush to "Help America Vote" seems to have aided the "Help Politicians Cheat" cause more than anything.
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