Electoral fraud: could it happen here?

[Bull]

I got this in an e-mail recently. Given the recent electoral fraud in Ukraine it certainly gets one thinking about the possibility of something similar (albeit more sophisticated) here in North America. This link contains some references for the various allegations made below. We'll probably never know whether this is truth or paranoia, but it does offer some food for thought.

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Twenty amazing facts about voting in the US

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 U.S. 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. Republican Senator Chuck Hagel used to be chairman of ES&S. He became Senator based on votes counted by ES&S machines.

6. Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, long-connected with the Bush family, was recently 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 U.S. and counts almost 60% of all U.S. 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 employed 5 convicted felons as senior managers and developers to help write the central compiler computer code that counted 50% of the votes in 30 states.

13. Jeff Dean, Diebold's Senior Vice-President and senior programmer on Diebold's central compiler code, 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 behacked, a chimpanzee was able to do it!

17. 30% of all U.S. votes are carried out on unverifiable touch screen voting machines with no paper trail.

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

19. The governor of the state of Florida, Jeb Bush, is the President's brother.

20. Serious voting anomalies in Florida - again always favoring Bush -- have been mathematically demonstrated and experts are recommending further investigation.

 

[Hedonist7]

I wouldn't be surprised if they used these machines during the next US elections scheduled for Jan 27 in Iraq

Although, it is not like they really need them: No-one anti-American would dare run in these elections.

Since he was removed from office illegally – during an illegal act of war, we should ask the UN to demand to have Saddam's name added to the Iraqi’s ballots - and if elected, help them oust the occupying invaders.

(yes - I am kidding - but made you think, didn't I...)

http://www.fair.org/extra/0404/caucuses.html

 

[luckydog71]

Bull those are great points and even if only half of them are factual it is still scary. Unfortunately there is no good solution. Hand counted votes are still subject to fraud. Do some research on the vote count in Illinois for the Kennedy/Nixon race major, voter fraud, unless dead people rose from the grave on Nov 2

It goes beyond just mistakes in counting:

- There are 3 counties here in WA that 8400 more votes were cast in the gubernatorial race than there were registered voters. How does that happen? With all of the irregularities I never heard once from either side, who is to blame for these mistakes? Find them and fire them.

- Canada has some unfairness built into the system that is legal. The number of MP's from each province is not based entirely on population. Some provinces are guaranteed so many MP's regardless of the population.

- The US also has similar issues. In all but 2 states if a party gets the greatest number of votes they get all of the Electoral College votes. So if you win CA by 51% you get a huge number of presidential votes, out of proportion to the way the population votes. Hardly fair.

It is hard to know what the right way to count votes is. Neither Canada nor the US has a popular vote for the country leader.

 

[BushPilot]

"Neither Canada nor the US has a popular vote for the country leader." -LuckyDog71


Canada doesn't have a country leader, in the American President/ Commander-in-chief sense. In a parliamentary system, the party rules, not the Prime Minister. Some PMs, though, have been successful in concentrating party power within their own offices, as was done by Jean Chretien. Anyways, that's why we can't ever have a direct vote for PM, like the US presidential elections, without having to nuke our entire political system and starting again from scratch.

 

[BushPilot]

I still like the idea of hand counting votes, as we do in Canada. Regulating the voter rolls and making sure that only eligible voters vote is simple enough to do when elections are overseen by an independant body, but if there is ever a dispute, all you have to do is pull out the box with all the ballots in it and count it again. No need to question whether the computer cheated, or not.

 

[daddywarbucks]

Electorial Fraud!!

You don't have to look any further than BC's neighkbor to the south.

The Democrats lost the election for Govenor. Th election was so close that there had to be aq re-count. The democrqts lost again. They then paid for another recount. This time they had King County (Seattle) slow down their vote count. Each time another county reported that the Republican won, Guess what, King County some how found more votes for the democrat.

Friday it was reported that King County had 3500 more votes than they had signatures of people that voted. (In the state of
Washington, you must sign in to vote.)

Yet the democrat "won" by 142 votes.

It also came out, that King County mailed ballots to people serving in the armed services to overseas addresses only 5 calendar days prior to the election. The majority of this vote would have been for the Republican.

As far as the machines used in voting, the Democrat Machine that controls Philly, sent out machines with over 25,000 votes already cast for Kerry.

The Democrats learned well from their past leaders:

Mayor Daley in Chicago whose moto was vote early and often.

LBJ who was reported to have sent an aid back to the grave yard because he didn't write down all of the names. His reason was that every dead person's vote counts.

DWB

 

[dittman]

it would be fun to have a parlimentrian type system to see bush or as far as that goes any president have to put up with question time would be good for the system.

Anybody that knows anything about our system knows that the feds have absolutely nothing to do with state or local elections, or as far as that goes even in a fed elections it is still run by the counties, and we in washington have seen how creative they can be.

 

[luckydog71]

Grendaxle, I based my comments on a search and turn up Rule 2: Minimum Number of MP's Per Province .

However that is minutia. The bigger point was neither country has a popular vote to elect it’s leader. I do not support a change here that would result in a popular vote election, but it also provides too many opportunities for manipulation of the system and it diminishes votes in certain regions.

I know you will find this surprising, but I voted for Bush in Washington State. My vote had absolutely no bearing on the number of electoral votes Bush received.

In Canada the problem is Ont. and Que. determines the Prime Minister. BC could elect a conservative in every district and it would not affect the outcome.

The US constantly claims the winner is not legit. That happened in 2000 with Bush. It happened this year with the WA State governor.

We need to develop a better way of electing our politicians. “Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” is now just something said by a dead guy (Lincoln).

What ever form of government, a democracy or a republic, we have lost the accountability of our politicians to the people who elect them. In the US they yield the power of trillions of dollars. Every one of those bucks comes straight from my pocket (you should see the size of my pockets), but they use it like it was theirs. Even the disaster in SE Asia, the US government did not give 350 million dollars, the people of the US did. The US government was nothing more than the transfer agent.

If I wired Jodie $500 as an advance for our appointment, would she expect Western Union to knock on her door, or would she think they were just the transfer agent and the money actually came from me.

 

[timec]

I wouldn't be surprised if they used these machines during the next US elections scheduled for Jan 27 in Iraq

Although, it is not like they really need them: No-one anti-American would dare run in these elections.

When is a farce a fraud?

Let’s see - Sunni Arabs are going to boycott the election and no one really knows who the actual candidates are as the candidate lists aren’t being made public for fear of assassination.

There’s this ever present Bush administration spin that presumes to a resulting secular government being elected --- in the face of many Shia Iraqis being driven to vote with various fatwas from Sistani and the sort. Secular

But the election must proceed without delay – in spite of the continuing daily bombings --- cause Bush freedom is on the march!

 

[timec]

We don't really need electoral fraud in Canada.....we have the government controlled press making sure that the deck is stacked in the Liberals' favour.

well for once we seem to agree on something --- the sooner Conrad Black and his sad sack Hollinger rag sheets are put out to pasture the sooner we'll see a more "fair and balanced" Canadian press

 

[BushPilot]

"well for once we seem to agree on something --- the sooner Conrad Black and his sad sack Hollinger rag sheets are put out to pasture the sooner we'll see a more "fair and balanced" Canadian press" -timec


The major problem in both Canada and the US is the continuing relaxation of media ownership laws. The more the government relaxes the laws that were in place to prevent the monopolization of media outlets, the less real information is available to the public. In both countries, TV stations, radio stations, newspapers, etc. are being bought up by a few giant media conglomerates. This allows tycoons such as Conrad Black, Izzy Asper, or Rupert Murdoch to decide what we can or can't hear about the events happening around us. Not enough people in our societies recognize this and take the time and effort to seek out alternative news sources. Therefore, we have an ignorant population that suffers from a diminishing ability to differentiate between spin and truth. In my opinion, no one person or entity should be allowed to own more than one outlet in any given medium in any single market. In the newspaper market, then, we'd be left with a number of publications each representing different positions on the political spectrum. People could then read what both the pinko commies were saying about a particular event, then read what the right wing fascists were saying about the same event, then get a centrist view. Somewhere within there, we'd be able to discern some semblance of the truth and we'd all be better off. But then again, that's just me talking.

 

[LonelyGhost]

1. Only Quebec is guarenteed a minimum number of seats, the rest are determined by the Census of the Population.

2. Since Que and Ont represent about half of Canada's population, then they get half the seats.

3. Registration of voters in Canada is now voluntary through the submission of our annual tax returns. This allows a voter to keep his/her contact information on the voter registration list up-to-date.

4. Individuals hired to work for Elections Canada are subject to fines or even jail time for committing fraud -- this is true of many federal goverment employees though it is an option seldom exercised by the government (they would all get fired!).

The problem with most systems is that there is too much 'prok-barrel' politics happening ... we now have legislation that putatively regulates who can contribute how much to any party or candidate as well as a lobbyist registration system, but neither seem to be enforced.

 

[westwoody]

I really like the idea of senate reform for Canada based on the US model, where every province and territory should get equal representation in the senate. The senate as it stands now is a farce, everybody bitches about that asshole Adrienne Clarkson and here we have a whole room full of assholes appointed for LIFE, or 75. At least Luckydog can vote a senator out of office, Canadians can't.
The senate would not be a carbon copy of the House of Commons where there is representation based on population. Equal representation for every province and territory is a couterbalancing idea. The whole idea of Canada and Quebec being two nations is just more political pandering, they are a province just like all the rest, and deserve no more and no less.

 

[dittman]

I have heard this argument before about relaxing the rules on media ownership. I dont think I agree. If a person is willing to get off there asses and do the research that is nessasary and read books and magazines other then the main stream media they can find out the facts about anything they want and become informed and stay informed. You just have to know that if your watching , listening or reading the mainstream media there is going to be a bias.

 

[BushPilot]

Yes, it would be great if everyone made the effort to read books and magazines in an effort to maximize their knowledge of unfolding events. However, as it is, TV, radio, and newspapers are the only forms of up to date news (not everyone has access to the internet) that everyone can get their hands on. If all the newspapers and TV and radio stations are owned by the same guy, it is too easy to shape the truth to fit an agenda. Then the 'news' ceases to be that and starts to become propaganda.