EAC - Voluntary Voting System Guidelines

Name : | Rachel Garner
Organization : | N/A
Post Date : | 9/30/2005
General Comments
Comment : | (Quoted by Rachel Garner, who submitted this comment.) PREVIOUS NEWS ITEMS WHO'S LYING? According to Salon.com, Diebold Election Systems, now denies that a program patch was ever applied to the Georgia voting machines: "We have analyzed that situation and have no indication of that happening at all." Well okay. But did everyone in the Georgia Secretary of State's Office imagine this last-minute voting program fix? According to the Baltimore City Paper, Diebold now claims that the "old Global Elections Systems [FTP] site has been taken down because it contained old, out-of-date material." Well okay. But at least three files were put on that site as recently as January 16, 2003. Find out what happened to the files on the FTP * Find out about the lawsuits * Look at the conflicting stories. [click here] GEORGIA: 22,000 VOTING MACHINES GOT A PROGRAM FIX, RIGHT BEFORE THE ELECTION (Did anyone look at the source code?) No. No One Certified the Patches * No One is Explaining the Files called "rob-georgia" It's time for Georgia citizens to demand answers. Not PR office answers this time, but specific answers, under oath, fetched by subpoena, exposed to the full depth and breadth of discovery procedures. [MORE: 22,000 Program Fixes] HAGEL TRIES TO MUSCLE THE HILL INTO KILLING ETHICS VIOLATIONS STORY * HE MAY SEEK THE PRESIDENCY IN 2008 Jan Baran, perhaps the most powerful Republican lawyer in Washington D.C., and Lou Ann Linehan, Senator Chuck Hagel's Chief of Staff, walked into The Hill and tried to pressure Alex Bolton into killing his story on Hagel's ethics violations. "Alex told me that this is something that has never happened before, in all his time covering Washington politics," says Bev Harris, who spoke with Bolton the day the story came out. The story concerned Hagel's failure to disclose his positions with, and ownership in, the USA's largest voting machine company. Hagel for President? Hagel's campaign has purchased the domain names "hagel2008.com" and "ChuckHagel2008.com" (see domain names). His aspirations to higher office have been known to insiders for some time * earlier, the domain name "Bush-Hagel2004.com" was purchased, but it has now been released. "Sen. Chuck Hagel thinks he's capable of being an effective president and says he isn't afraid of the scrutiny that comes with a White House bid," says an AP report (posted at The Independent.com News). Hagel was head of the Private Sector Council for George H.W. Bush. Shortly afterward, he took over as Chairman of ES&S, (then called AIS), the company that built, programmed, and supplies the technicians for every one of the voting machines that counted Hagel's votes. Around the time that Hagel worked with the first Bush administration, an attorney named Jan Baran was General Counsel for the George H.W. Bush campaign. Baran then became General Counsel for the Republican National Committee, and is currently one of the most powerful election lawyers in America. On January 28, 2003, Baran and Linehan tried to push The Hill's Alex Bolton into killing his story about Hagel's misrepresentations on his FEC documents; when Bolton stood up to them, they told him to soften the story. Bolton refused. [More] SECURITY FLAW DISCOVERED AT DIEBOLD ELECTION SYSTEMS Walk right in, sit right down. Replace vote-counting files with your own. Recently, technicians and programmers for Diebold Election Systems, the company that supplied every single voting machine for the surprising 2002 results in the state of Georgia, the company that is preparing to convert the state of Maryland to its no-paper- trail computerized voting, admitted to a file-sharing system that amounts to a colossal security flaw. [More on security flaw] HAGEL ADMITS TIES TO VOTING MACHINE COMPANY On October, 10, 2002 Bev Harris, author of the upcoming Black Box Voting: Ballot-Tampering in the 21st Century, revealed that Republican Senator Chuck Hagel has ties to the largest voting machine company, Election Systems & Software (ES&S). She reported that he was an owner, Chairman and CEO of Election Systems & Software (called American Information Systems until name change filed in 1997). ES&S was the ONLY company whose machines counted Hagel's votes when he ran for election in 1996 and 2002. The Hill, a Washington D.C. newspaper that covers the U.S. national political scene, confirmed her findings on January 29, 2003 and uncovered more details.