Our Votes

We all know that we have been denied a truthful, honest election. Some Americans don’t care, as long as their Political Party gets into power.

The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which all other rights are protected.To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery..”
~Thomas Paine~

The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
~Fifteenth Amendment Constitution of the United States~

Until and unless we demand that the Elections in this country are properly and lawfully held, we will not be a free people.

“Maryland, where I live, uses Diebold DREs, which are an ideal opportunity for cheating,” said Dr. Avi Rubin, Technical Director, Information Security Institute, Johns Hopkins University. “In fact, you couldn’t come up with a better opportunity for cheating. There’s no ability to audit or recount, and the entire process takes place inside the computer, which is not transparent.”

Earlier this year, Congressman Rush Holt (D-NJ) submitted a bill, The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2005 (HR 550), to the House Administration Committee. The bill requires a paper audit trail at the federal level. But Holt has not been able to get the chairman of the committee, Congressman Robert Ney (R-OH), to schedule a hearing on it all year long.

“Congressman Ney will not schedule a hearing on the bill, so it remains in limbo,” confirmed Pat Eddington, Holt’s press secretary.

Even the bipartisan federal Carter-Baker Commission Report could not nudge Ney. Set up to review the entire electoral process and co-chaired by former president Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker, the report strongly endorses the need for a paper audit trail.

In lieu of the refusal of some at the federal level of government to address the issues surrounding the legitimacy of electronic voting procedures and work toward safeguarding American elections, Verified Voting turned to state governments. Since its founding, Verified Voting has helped 26 states establish state legislation that requires a paper audit trail in e-voting machines, and 14 states have requirements pending, according to verifiedvoting.org.

However, paper receipts only begin to address the complexity of electronic voting problems. The most serious concern among computer scientists studying the problems is the “Trojan Horse,” a computer code that can be programmed to hide inside voting software, emerge in less than one second to change an election, then destroy itself immediately afterwards, going undetected.

“Anyone who has access to the softwarean insidercould easily insert a Trojan Horse into the software,” said Barbara Simons, a past president of the Association for Computing Machinery and a retired IBM researcher who is co-authoring a book on the risks of computerized voting. The problem is that the Trojan Horse cannot be detected unless the software is inspected continuously as in every second for its presence.
The privatization of the US voting process means the public lacks access to, or the ability to inspect, election software, as well as information about or even the names of the computer programmers who created it. Private companies and e-voting vendors flatly state that their election systems must be kept confidential as exclusive property right products, and therefore refuse to release their software source code for inspection by independent third parties. They claim that to do so would violate their right to copyright secrecy and would open the door to rivals who could steal their products. But some wonder what else vendors might be trying to hide. For instance, according to information reported on www.blackboxvoting.org, a non-partisan, nonprofit consumer protection group that is conducting fraud audits on the 2004 elections, Diebold, one of the e-voting vendors, hired ex-felons, who were convicted in Canada of computer fraud, to program election systems software.

With the old lever machine method of voting, election fraud could only be committed on a local, or possibly a regional basis without high risk of getting caught. But now it would take only one well-placed programmer creating malicious code to rig a national election. “How do you know what software is running on Election Day?” asked Simons. “You could easily add a last-minute software patch to do something on Election Day, [and that would] then immediately erase itself.”

Software bugs can also be programmed undetected. “Buggy software is an important problem in computer security,” said Stanford University’s Dill. “A huge number of problems we have are due to computer software buffer overflows, which overwrite computer functions to get control of the machine.” Computer buffer overflows are a standard way for Trojan Horses to take control of a computer and make changes to it, while leaving no evidence behind. {Source}

We must demand that we do away with the “Touch-Screen” voting. It can not be trusted. Canada votes on paper ballots and hand counts each and every one of them.

We have turned our Elections into Fast Food franchises. We have to know the results instantly. How many weeks did it take for the results to be known in the 1800’s? Even if it took a week to hand count the votes, would we be damaged? Or is part of this driven by the media’s need to have instant results? Or is it the ability to control the outcome.

THOSE WHO CAST THE VOTES DECIDE NOTHING
THOSE WHO COUNT THE VOTES DECIDE EVERYTHING.
~Joseph Stalin~

Anyone concerned about the Black Box Voting machines, which do not have a paper trail, should vote only by absentee ballot. That’s the only way to have a paper trail right now. This was sent out by the Republicans in Florida, to the Republican registered voters.

The companies which have sold these to the states, have the ability to have a paper trail, most of them are already used for ATM transactions, and you can print a receipt for those, so there is no reason that we don’t have that on our voting.

List of groups which are researching and fighting for our Right to fair elections here

DONATE TO ONE OF THESE GROUPS! Dont waste your money on any candidate who did not stand up to the Alito and Robert’s nominations. Do not donate any money or time to any Senator or Congressman who voted for the Patriot Act in March 2006. It is a waste of your money and just keeps the same old, same old in power. Donate money to one or more of these groups which are fighting for every American their Right to vote and have that vote counted. Donate your money to one of ten Senators who voted NO to the Patriot Act. That is the only way that we will have a fair fight at bringing this country back from the brink.

When you receive a plea for money from the DNC or individual elected officials, if they have not fought for our Election Rights, deny them the money. Write or call them and tell them unless they start fighting for this fundamental Right, that you will not support them and will instead give your money to one of these organizations which are doing their work.

Many see the close relationships between election commissioners and election systems vendors as overstepping certain ethical boundary lines. Huge profits are to be made by election-system vendors and they court election officials accordingly. “They wine them and dine them,” said Dill. “Election officials have known the election systems vendors longer than they’ve known the computer scientists. And there’s a revolving door. A good career path for an election official is to go work for a vendor.”