Does your vote count?

Not if you vote for the wrong candidate. I mailed in my absentee ballot Tuesday evening as I know many, many other people did as well. How are those absentee ballots counted OVERNIGHT so that Wendesday morning there are conclusive winners in one parties favor? Why immediately annouce Cantwell's and Larsen's "win" as if all votes are counted? They were reported as winners - that the election was over and wrapped up.

Ok, it's time for...

*Elections Cover-up*
*The concise excerpts from media articles below reveal major problems with the elections process. *This is not a partisan matter. Fair elections are crucial to all who support democracy. *Few have compiled this information in a way that truly educates the public on the great risk of using electronic voting machines.
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CNN News, 9/20/06
http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/09/19/Dobbs.Sept20
Voting Machines Put U.S. Democracy at Risk
Electronic voting machines...time and again have been demonstrated to be extremely vulnerable to tampering and error. During the 2004 presidential election, one voting machine...added nearly 3,900 additional votes. Officials caught the machine's error because only 638 voters cast presidential ballots. In a heavily populated district, can we really be sure the votes will be counted correctly? A 2005 Government Accountability Office report http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d05956.pdf on electronic voting confirmed the worst fears: "There is evidence that some of these concerns have been realized and have caused problems with recent elections, resulting in the loss and miscount of votes."

New York Times,/ 9/5/06
In Search of Accurate Vote Totals
A recent government report http://bocc.cuyahogacounty.us/GSC/pdf/esi_cuyahoga_final.pdf details enormous flaws in the election system in Ohio's biggest county, problems that may not be fixable before the 2008 election. Cuyahoga County...recently adopted Diebold electronic voting machines that produce a voter-verified paper record. Investigators compared the vote totals recorded on the machines after this year's primary with the paper records produced. The numbers should have been the same, but often there were large and unexplained discrepancies. The report also found that nearly 10 percent of the paper records were destroyed, blank, illegible, or otherwise compromised.

*MSNBC/Associated Press, 9/13/06
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/14825465/
Princeton Prof Hacks E-vote Machine
A Princeton University computer science professor added new fuel...to claims that electronic voting machines...are vulnerable to hacking. In a paper http://itpolicy.princeton.edu/voting posted on the university's Web site, Edward Felten and two graduate students described how they had tested a Diebold AccuVote-TS machine they obtained, found ways to quickly upload malicious programs and even developed a computer virus able to spread such programs between machines. They designed software capable of modifying all records, audit logs and counters kept by the voting machine, ensuring that a careful forensic examination would find nothing wrong.

USA Today//Associated Press, 7/13/06
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-07-13-evoting_x.htm
Electronic Voting Machines Under Legal Attack
Lawsuits have been filed in at least nine states, alleging that the machines are wide open to computer hackers. New York University's Brennan Center for Justice released a one-year study http://www.brennancenter.org/programs/downloads/Full%20Report.pdf
...that determined that the three most popular types of U.S. voting machines "pose a real danger" to election integrity. More than 120 security threats were identified, including wireless machines that could be hacked "by virtually any member of the public with some (computer) knowledge." Lowell Finley http://www.voteraction.org/teambios.html: "We had dozens of affidavits from voters in New Mexico who said they touched one candidate's name, but the machine picked the opponent."

*/Washington Post/, 6/28/06
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/27/AR2006062701451.html
A Single Person Could Swing an Election
A team of cybersecurity experts [concluded] that it would take only one person, with a sophisticated technical knowledge and timely access to the software that runs the voting machines, to change the [election] outcome.

*/New York Times,/ 5/30/06
Block the Vote*
States are adopting rules that make it hard, and financially perilous, for nonpartisan groups to register new voters. New rules for maintaining voter rolls...are likely to throw off many eligible voters. Florida recently reached a new low when it actually bullied the League of Women Voters into stopping its voter registration efforts. Colorado recently imposed criminal penalties on volunteers who slip up in registration drives.

*/Newsweek,/ 5/29/06
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12888600/site/newsweek
Will Your Vote Count in 2006?*
A report http://www.bbvdocs.org/reports/BBVreportIIunredacted.pdf by Finnish security expert Harri Hursti analyzed Diebold voting machines [and] found unheralded vulnerabilities. Experts are calling them the most serious voting-machine flaws ever. It requires only a few minutes of pre-election access to a Diebold machine to open the machine and insert a PC card that...could reprogram the machine to give control to the violator. It's even possible...to trick authorized technicians into thinking that everything is working fine, an illusion you couldn't pull off with pre-electronic systems.

*/Wall Street Journal/, 5/12/06 http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB114739688261250925-q5rh2ocioxu6mgjmS6bZPCZL0HY_20060610.html, Reversing Course on Electronic Voting*
Some advocates of a 2002 law mandating upgrades of the nation's voting machinery now worry the overhaul is making things worse. Proponents of the Help America Vote Act are filing lawsuits to block some state and election officials' efforts to comply with the act. In Indiana, an ES&S [major voting machine supplier] employee alerted local-election officials that another ES&S worker had installed unauthorized software on the machines before the election. That and other disputes led to a multimillion-dollar settlement.

*/New York Times,/ 5/12/06
New Fears of Security Risks in Electronic Voting Systems*
Officials in Pennsylvania and California issued urgent directives...about a potential security risk in their Diebold Election Systems touch-screen voting machines. "It's the most severe security flaw ever discovered in a voting system," said Michael I. Shamos, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon. Diebold issued a warning...saying that it had found a "theoretical security vulnerability." A professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University...after studying the latest problem [said] "I almost had a heart attack."

*/Washington Post/, 3/26/06
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/25/AR2006032500805.html
Election Whistle-Blower Stymied by Vendors*
Ion Sancho is...elections supervisor in Leon County, Fla. Last year, [he] helped show that electronic voting machines...would allow election workers to alter vote counts without detection. Sancho may be paying an unexpected price for his whistle-blowing: None of the state-approved companies here will sell him the voting machines the county needs.The trouble began last year when Sancho allowed a Finnish computer scientist to test Leon County's Diebold voting machines. Diebold will not sell to Sancho without assurances that he will not permit more such tests, which the company considers a reckless use of the machines.

*/New York Times/, 9/12/04
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/12/opinion/12sun2.html?ex=1252728000&en=dda9313c18e02663&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland
On the Voting Machine Makers' Tab*
Some of electronic voting's loudest defenders have been state and local election officials. Many of those same officials have financial ties to voting machine companies. Officials from Georgia, California and Texas argued that voter-verifiable paper trails...are impractical. Former secretaries of state from Florida and Georgia have signed on as lobbyists for Election Systems and Software [ES&S] and Diebold Election Systems. When Bill Jones left office as California's secretary of state in 2003, he quickly became a consultant to Sequoia Voting Systems. His assistant secretary of state took a full-time job there. The list goes on.

*MSNBC/AP, 8/23/04
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5762054/from/RL.4
Secretive Testing Firms Certify Nation's Vote Count Machines*
The three companies that certify the nation's voting technologies operate in secrecy, and refuse to discuss flaws in the machines. Federal regulators have virtually no oversight over testing of the technology.

*/New York Times,/ 1/31/04
http://www.WantToKnow.info/040131nytimes
How to Hack an Election*
Maryland hired a computer security firm http://www.raba.com/press/TA_Report_AccuVote.pdf to test its new machines. Paid hackers had little trouble casting multiple votes and taking over the machines' vote-recording mechanisms. Diebold...rushed to issue a self-congratulatory press release http://www.companyboardroom.com/releasetext.asp?ticker=dbd&coid=106584&client=cb&release=489744 with the headline "Maryland Security Study Validates Diebold Election Systems Equipment." The study's authors were shocked to see their findings spun so positively.