Jon Stokes: E-Voting 2007: Another Rigged Election?!

According to a report on NPR's All Things Considered Sunday nite http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6439414
the Republican electorate is starting to wake up and smell the coffee and in a fair election might hold onto both Houses of Congress. (Is it possible the New Yorker was right -- gerrymandering did it?)

Needless to say, this won't be a fair election, probably much less fair than any of the previous elections going back to 2000. Who knows: the GOP may increase their majority!! Depends on how piggish Rove gets, I suppose.

After you read the first three paragraphs below you may or may not want to delve into the details. If so, you've a treat in the extensive discussion provided by Jon Stokes.

I haven't noticed the liberal media watchdog group FAIR tackle this issue. I gather they're behaving like good boys and girls and treating the theme of stolen elections as if it were just another conspiracy theory.

On Democracy Now's (11.6.06) review of the election, there was virtually no mention of fraud. Conducted with a NYT reporter, Amy Goodman focused on problems and glitches with evoting, voter suppression, etc., mirroring major media reporting with no hint of a Rove inspired (and directed?) national program to maintain GOP majorities.

The only thing I can think of doing is contacting your favorite media outlet and let them know you'd like them to cover the issue, despite what Howard Dean and John Kerry are going to say.

Ronald
http://desip.igc.org
***

Thanks to FH for passing this along.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061101-8131.html

Primary and early e-voting problems point to gathering storm

11/1/2006 5:42:14 PM, by Jon Stokes

As we move toward the November mid-terms, we're beginning to a more detailed and depressing picture of exactly what we're up against as a nation in less than a week: two major new reports from independent research groups detail the myriad security breaches, and procedural and technical problems in the 2006 Ohio primaries; stories from early voting in Texas indicate that the paperless DREs in at least two counties may have a partisan bias; another major new report from the University of Connecticut details a whole raft of security vulnerabilities in Diebold's optical scan voting machines; finally, BlackBoxVoting.org has released "push this, pull here" instructions for multiple voting on a Sequoia DRE, no hacking skills necessary.

None of this news bodes well for the November mid-terms, which are less than a week away. In fact, what the reports described below indicate is that voters will flock to the polls to vote on fragile, untested alpha systems that, when they break, cannot be fixed by the on-site poll workers; the votes that are recorded cannot be adequately verified by a post-election audit, even if a voter-verified paper "receipt" is printed by each machine and saved by the county; and individual counties may or may not have the technical capacity to actually carry out the task of tabulating all of the electronic results (forget about the paper receipts!) from all of the machines in a coherent and reliable manner.

In sum, people will show up on November 7th at many precincts across America, they will select items on a touch-screen, a lucky few of them will see a paper record of their choices (correctly marked or not) scroll by under a glass, and they will return home having participated in a bit of high-tech political theater that may or may not amount to a bona fide election.

If you think that I overstate things just a bit here, then by all means, read on.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061101-8131.html