Election Issues

Whereas an election is the legal process by which We, the People, transfer power to our governmental representatives; and

Whereas, current electronic voting technologies have been shown to be unreliable, insecure and unverifiable; and

Whereas, electronic voting technologies which do not include a permanent paper ballot of record provide no means to verify results reported by elections officials, through recounts or other legal means; and

Whereas, citizens are denied oversight of the software used in electronic voting and counting machines; and

Whereas, the use of proprietary (secret) software in our elections amounts to a secret vote count; and

Whereas, publicly-funded testing and certification of software and hardware of electronic voting systems is shrouded from public oversight; and

Whereas, current election procedures violate "chain of custody" laws thru the use of removable and/or remotely accessible memory cards, which now constitute the official ballot box; and,

Therefore, Be It Resolved that there is no basis for confidence in any election held under these conditions; and

The Exit polls said he won, but the "official" tally took his victory away.  His supporters found they were scrubbed off voter rolls.  Violence and intimidation kept even more of his voters away from the polls.  Hundreds of thousands of ballots supposedly showed no choice for president -- like ballots with hanging chads.

And the officials in charge of this suspect election refused to re-count those votes in public.  Everyone knew full well a fair count would certainly change the outcome.

You've heard this story before:  Gore 2000.  Kerry 2004.

But Lopez Obrador 2006 is made out of very different stuff than the scarecrow candidates who, oddly, call themselves "Democrats."

For six years now, I've had this crazy fantasy in my head.  In it, an election is stolen and the guy who's declared the loser stands up in front of the White House and says three magic words:  "Count the votes."

The 2004 presidential contest between Democratic challenger Senator John Kerry and the Republican incumbent, President Bush Jr., amounted to another stolen election. This has been well documented by such investigators as Rep. John Conyers, Mark Crispin Miller, Bob Fitrakis, Harvey Wasserman, Bev Harris, and others. Here is an overview of what they have reported, along with observations of my own.

Some 105 million citizens voted in 2000, but in 2004 the turnout climbed to at least 122 million. Pre-election surveys indicated that among the record 16.8 million new voters Kerry was a heavy favorite, a fact that went largely unreported by the press. In addition, there were about two million progressives who had voted for Ralph Nader in 2000 who switched to Kerry in 2004.

Yet the official 2004 tallies showed Bush with 62 million votes, about 11.6 million more than he got in 2000. Meanwhile Kerry showed only eight million more votes than Gore received in 2000. To have achieved his remarkable 2004 tally, Bush would needed to have kept all his 50.4 million from 2000, plus a majority of the new voters, plus a large share of the very liberal Nader defectors.

Lopez Obrador is saying in Mexico what the Democratic Party should have been saying in the United States since November 2000: WE DO NOT CONCEDE. And no Democrat should ever again be nominated for any public office without first pledging to guarantee a full and thorough recount, as is being attempted in Mexico.

We do not yet know the final official outcome of the Mexican presidential election. We do know the vote casting and counting have been plagued with some of the same kinds of intimidation, theft, fraud and electronic manipulation that have become the staples of Rove-run elections here in the United States.

The Mexican outcome is hugely important for a wide range of reasons. The Mexican presidency in the hands of a leftist like Lopez Obrador would have a major effect on the immigration issue currently being used by the Bush/Rove Republicans to whip up racist division and diversion. A leftist victory would also underscore the sea change in Latin American politics being led by Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and other populists rising from the southern grassroots.

A group of civic organizations filed a lawsuit today seeking to overturn restrictions on voter registration in the state of Ohio. The requirements laid out by the state drastically limit the ability of civic groups to register new voters and threaten individual registration workers with felony charges for minor mistakes handling forms. The rules will limit voter registration, unnecessarily exclude eligible voters from the election process, and suppress the vote in Ohio.

The complaint filed today in United States District Court, Northern District of Ohio, raises several concerns with House Bill 3 and the rules and procedures set forth by the Secretary of State, including:

• In the past, citizens working to register voters were able to turn in the completed forms to a civic group or church that would review the forms for accuracy, turn them into the registrar, and follow up later to make sure the voter was actually registered. Now, workers collecting voter registration forms would be forbidden from doing that and would be subject to felony charges if the forms were to be handed in late or not directly to registrars' offices.

States and local jurisdictions did not take sufficient action to mitigate risks.

Black Box Voting has provided the following to VoterAction.org for its litigation. This will become a public record via the litigation filed by Lowell Finley. Because public officials who have received the unredacted reports have failed to take this risk seriously and arrange for appropriate mitigations, and because Black Box Voting believes this information is of critical public interest for pending litigation and citizen actions, we are releasing it publicly now.

HERE'S AN INFORMAL SYNOPSIS OF THE UNMITIGATED RISKS IN THE DIEBOLD TSX:

A huge risk to the integrity of elections is a contaminated bootloader. Here's why: If you own the bootloader, you own the machine. The source code for the TSx, along with the technical data package, have been publicly released since 2003. Estimates are that it would take approximately three months for a reasonably skilled programmer to design a working malicious bootloader.

You cannot clean a maliciously designed bootloader with the mitigations performed so far by state officials (replacing programs via memory cards).

The Ohio media has imposed a near-complete wall of censorship against the Buckeye Green Party, even though it has now qualified for the statewide fall ballot. Though small in number, the Greens could prove decisive in the epic struggle for the governor's mansion, which in turn could determine the next president of the United States.

The governor's race here is particularly crucial because the Republican nominee is none other than J. Kenneth Blackwell. In 2004, Blackwell became the second Republican Secretary of State to administer a decisive statewide election while simultaneously serving as co-chair of that state's Bush-Cheney campaign. Katherine Harris did it first in Florida 2000, and was rewarded with a safe Congressional seat. She is now running for the U.S. Senate.

Blackwell hopes to cash in by grabbing the Ohio governor's mansion. It's a position from which he could play a decisive role in determining who will win in 2008. No Republican candidate has ever won the White House without carrying Ohio. Only John Kennedy has done it for the Democrats.

"True power lies not with those who cast the votes, but rather with those who count the vote." -- Joseph Stalin

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Columbus,Ohio-The secretary of state’s office notified Green Party candidates Bob Fitrakis and Anita Rios that they have successfully been certified to appear on the November 2006 statewide general election ballot in the race for Governor/Lt Governor. The Fitrakis/Rios team will appear as Independent candidates on the November ballot.

The Ohio Green Party voted to endorse Bob Fitrakis and Anita Rios for Governor/Lt. Governor during their convention last February. Bob Fitrakis is an attorney, an award winning journalist and a professor of political science. He earned his law degree at the Ohio State University Moritz School of Law and his Ph.D. in Political Science from Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan.

Anita Rios is a longtime union activist and community organizer with a background in mental health. Anita is the former chair of the Green Party National Committee. She grew up one of eight children to parents who were Mexican American migrant farm workers.

There are good reasons why the Lord wrote down the Ten Commandments on stone tablets and not on a computer chip. He didn’t want Moses choosing just his favorite six.

The sun had not set on Election Day when The San Jose Mercury News gave us the good news: “No Major Glitches Reported with Electronic Voting Machines .”

I was glad to hear that! But I had a question for the Mercury and all the other papers that had repeated this happy news, “How do you know?” Exactly what tests of the computer processors did you conduct, what electronic log audit did you review, what paper trail did you follow? Exactly how, my journalist comrades, did you conclude that the new touch-screen voting machines recorded the vote as voters intended?

If the computers are hacked, if the central tabulators in far-off locations are messed with, what exactly did you expect to see—smoke rising from the computer tabulators? A siren going off with a metallic voice screeching, I’ve been hacked! I’ve been hacked!?