Voting in the US

[Nowhere]

20 facts (?)

Is this true?

edit: grammar

[MultimediaMan]

I saw this in the Enquirer and the Star, along with the Tinfoil Hat Specials...

Do your own research and you will find None of those assertations are true.

[cjolley]

I saw this in the Enquirer and the Star, along with the Tinfoil Hat Specials...

D

o your own research and you will find None of those assertations are true.

This one certainly is true:

4. The chairman and CEO of Diebold is a major Bush campaign organizer and donor who wrote in 2003 that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."

I don't know about the others off hand.

Actualy several of them are true.
I don't have time to enumerate right now, being as I am at work.

[KRSESQ]

#1: true (Wikipedia)


#3: true.

#5: indeterminate but compelling.

Hagel still owns more than $1 million in stock in McCarthy & Co., which still owns a quarter of ES&S.

The firm, which is privately held, began as a company called Data Mark, which was founded in the early 1980s by Bob and Todd Urosevich. In 1984, brothers William and Robert Ahmanson bought a 68 percent stake in Data Mark, and changed the company's name to American Information Services (AIS). Then, in 1987, McCarthy & Co, an Omaha investment group, acquired a minority share in AIS.

In 1992, investment banker Chuck Hagel, president of McCarthy & Co, became chairman of AIS. Hagel, who had been touted as a possible Senate candidate in 1993, was again on the list of likely GOP contenders heading into the 1996 contest. In January of 1995, while still chairman of ES&S, Hagel told the Omaha World-Herald that he would likely make a decision by mid-March of 1995. On March 15, according to a letter provided by Hagel's Senate staff, he resigned from the AIS board, noting that he intended to announce his candidacy. A few days later, he did just that.

He went on to defeat popular former governor Benjamin Nelson by a considerable margin.

#6: Under investigation (old news item - no immediate update).

In a disclosure form filed in 1996, covering the previous year, Hagel, then a Senate candidate, did not report that he was still chairman of AIS for the first 10 weeks of the year, as he was required to do.

#7: True. From the July 10, 2000 issue of Businessweek Online:

In his four years in the Senate, he has won some enthusiastic friends--and an army of enemies. But his blunt talk, pro-business record, and foreign-policy credentials have captured the attention of Texas Governor George W. Bush and rocketed Hagel onto the list of contenders for the Republican Vice-Presidential nomination. ''I know he's on the short list,'' says Fredric V. Malek, a longtime Bush family friend and now chairman of the venture-capital firm Thayer Capital Partners. That worries Hagel's foes, some of whom already are sharpening their knives. Yet even if Bush eventually looks elsewhere, his flirtation with Hagel has only reinforced the perception that the maverick Midwesterner is a comer on Capitol Hill.

#8: True. From Online Journal:

So, for those states and counties who think they're dodging the bullet by not buying (or not using) the highly insecure and error-prone touchscreen voting machines (which will process 28.9 percent of all votes this year), a huge threat still remains—computerized ballot scanners. They will count 57.6 percent of all votes cast, including absentee ballots.

#9: True.

#10: True.

Rather than go down the entire list (as some of us has work to do!) here is a link to the same list with hyperlinks for verification, most to legitimate sources and some to sources on the fringe of the tinfoil-hat domain. (note: the monkey video in #16 apparently is no longer posted.)

Kevin

[cjolley]

Just so everyone will know what we are talking about:

20 Amazing Facts About Voting In The United States
By Bob Rowe
1. 80% of all votes in America are counted by only two companies: Diebold and ES&S.

2. There is no federal agency with regulatory authority or oversight of the US voting machine industry.

3. The vice-president of Diebold and the president of ES&S are brothers.

4. The chairman and CEO of Diebold is a major Bush campaign organizer and donor who wrote in 2003 that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."

5. 35% of ES&S is owned by Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, who became Senator based on votes counted by ES&S machines.

6. Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, a long-time friend of the Bush family, was caught lying about his ownership of ES&S by the Senate Ethics Committee.

7. Senator Chuck Hagel was on a short list of George W. Bush's vice- presidential candidates.

8. ES&S is the largest voting machine manufacturer in the US and counts almost 60% of all US votes.

9. Diebold's new touch screen voting machines have no paper trail of any votes. In other words, there is no way to verify that the data coming out of the machine is the same as what was legitimately put in by voters.

10. Diebold also makes ATMs, checkout scanners, and ticket machines, all of which log each transaction and can generate a paper trail.

11. Diebold is based in Ohio.

12. Diebold employs 5 convicted felons as developers. These are the people who write the voting machine computer code.

13. Diebold's Senior Vice-President, Jeff Dean, was convicted of 23 counts of felony theft in the first degree.

14. Diebold Senior Vice-President Jeff Dean was convicted of planting back doors in his software and using a "high degree of sophistication" to evade detection over a period of 2 years.

15. None of the international election observers were allowed in the polls in Ohio.

16. California banned the use of Diebold machines because the security was so bad. Despite Diebold's claims that the audit logs could not be hacked, a chimpanzee was able to do it! (See the movie at http://blackboxvoting.org/baxter/baxterVPR.mov.)

17. 30% of all US votes are carried out on unverifiable touch screen voting machines with no paper trail. 18. Bush's Help America Vote Act of 2002 has as its goal to replace all machines with the new electronic touch screen systems with no paper trail.

19. All -- not some -- but all the voting machine errors detected and reported went in favor of Bush or Republican candidates.

20. Major statistical voting oddities (odds on the order of 250 million to 1!) -- again always favoring Bush -- have been mathematically demonstrated by experts.

[Dr Mordrid]

That should read 80% of computerized voting machines are made by Diebold and ES&S.

The vast majority of votes are not done on computerized voting machines but mechanical with some electronic counting. These include some combination of mechanical voting machines, punchcards and machine countable paper ballots (fill in the box with markers).

Starting in 2003 California led a parade of states making illegal voting machines that give no reciept or recording a paper trail.

As for the basic process: precinct workers do the initial count which then gets called into city hall and passed on to the county election commission and up the line with a paper trail. Machines are sealed after the polls close and reps. of involved all parties can be present to challenge voters during the vote or the totals after. Any losing candidate can petition for a manual recount after the vote is certified.

Where things get distorted is where local party machines, usually Democratic, run the whole shebang.

Examples are the outright attempts at fraud in St. Louis, Missouri, the Tri-cities in Minnesota and some Florida cities.

In Missouri a Dem. senator was elected under a "cloud". Once the truth came out that person ended up being a one-termer.

In Minnesota it got really bad with relatives of a tri-cities Dem. party official getting convicted of cutting the tires on Republican party "get out the vote" vans. They went to jail.

In Florida they were trucking nursing home patients with alzheimers to the polls where their caretakers, many of them Dem. party activists, would "help" them vote. Guess who for?

This kind of practice goes way back as regards Democratic machine politics. It was Mayor Daly who delivered enough dead people to the polls in Chicago to swing Illinois and get Kennedy elected in 1960. In New York City this was developted into an art form way back in the 30's.

In 70's and early 80's Detroit similar fraud was long suspected by independent investigators of the Coleman Young administration, but they could never prove it. They did, however, tie his neice to "White Boy Rick", a cocaine trafficker. She was also at one time married to another drug kingpin; Johnny Curry.

Later Youngs police commissioner was sent to Federal prison for embezzling $2.4 million. WBR was sentenced to life in prison. Young retired and died a few years later.

Dr. Mordrid

[cjolley]

As for the basic process: precinct workers do the initial count which then gets called into city hall and passed on to the county election commission and up the line with a paper trail. Machines are sealed after the polls close and reps. of involved all parties can be present to challenge voters during the vote or the totals after.

There are differences in this depending on the state.
Becky is a Precinct Judge here and it is not quite the same.
The counts are posted at the poling place and the paper ballots taken back to the County Election Board.

Oklahoma uses scanner type paper ballots throughout the state.

They work very well and leave a paper trail.

Any losing candidate can petition for a manual recount after the vote is certified.

Not if it's an electronic voting machine with no paper trail.

PS. Starting in about a week and a half "Democratic machine politics" is going to seem penny-anti and quaint when Jack Abramoff starts to squeal.

[Dr Mordrid]

Don't get to happy about Abramoff. He was an equal opportunity corruptor, dealing with members of both parties. Democrats with ties to Abramoff include;

Former Rep. Thomas A. Daschle (D-South Dakota and former House majority leader), Rep. Harry Reid (D-Nevada and current house minority leader), former Rep. Richard Gephardt (D-Missouri and former house majority leader) and seven Democrat operatives now serving on the lobby team at the law firm Greenberg Traurig....for starters.

Also on Abramoff's list was Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy (D-Rhode Island and yes, one of those Kennedy's). From 1999 to 2000 Kennedy chaired the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and during that period received $128,000 from Abramoff's lobbyists.

Dr. Mordrid

[cjolley]

Don't get to happy about Abramoff. He was an equal opportunity corruptor, dealing with members of both parties.

Well, if that thought keeps you happy through Christmas, I say why not.

[Dr Mordrid]

What, that list isn't impressive enough? BOTH parties were touched by Abramoff, making this more of a crying shame than a political advantage for anyone.

Dr. Mordrid

[cjolley]

The K-Street project is about to be exposed.
All the rest of that is chicken feed.

PS I hasten to add that if some Dems have been on the take and get caught up in this, I say good riddance to them too.
Washington has become breath takingly corrupt, and needs to be cleaned up.

PPS http://www.buffalonews.com/editorial...22/1048664.asp

...
This week, President Bush said Abramoff seemed to be "an equal money dispenser . . . giving money to people in both political parties."

Historically, tribal money had been going to Democrats almost exclusively. Abramoff changed that.

The lobbyist directed one tribal client to make hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign donations. A list, obtained by the Associated Press, earmarked $90,000 for the Republican Party, none for Democrats.

Of the hundreds of thousands of dollars that Abramoff directed the tribe to donate to congressional campaigns, the Republican-Democrat breakdown was 11-to-1.

[Dr Mordrid]

And in another aspect of US electoral politics comes this;

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20051222/D8EL8GCG9.html

Bottom line: a big population shift to the red states, and even some current blue states will be going red next time....Michigan for one. As it is R's have both houses and all but one executive office, and with the job Gov. Granholm has been doing she's a one-termer. FBI's also investigating her main supporter and political mentor.

Dr. Mordrid

[cjolley]

Bring Out Your Dead

[Umfriend]

News here is some Dems but mostly Reps are expected to be involved. DeLey or something is a big fish?

LOL @ cjolley

[Wombat]

DeLay is a big fish, big ****ole. Even though he's indicted he insists on running things.