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+--- Thread: Have our elections been rigged since 2000? (/showthread.php?tid=8694)
Have our elections been rigged since 2000? - KonaKane - 08-21-2011 09:57 PM
I'm not inclined to don a tin foil hat. But when this video was passed to me, I have to admit that I was chilled to my bones over it. Here is a computer programmer not only admitting but testifying that election software is rigged. Why on earth has this flown under the radar? Our democracy has been compromised, and we're fighting about how many golf vacations this president takes?
RE: Have our elections been rigged since 2000? - jaxx - 08-21-2011 10:12 PM
Wow he gave the name of the guy in FL.......Tom Feeney ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Feeney ).
People have said the 2000 and 2004 elections were rigged. Who knows.
RE: Have our elections been rigged since 2000? - KonaKane - 08-21-2011 10:18 PM
The guy named names. And I see that Barb Boxer zoomed right in on it...I wonder what came of it?
RE: Have our elections been rigged since 2000? - jaxx - 08-21-2011 10:22 PM
I just found this article:
Feeney implicated in vote fraud
Congressman sought to alter totals, testimony in Ohio case says
By Alex Babcock | December 16, 2004
Republican Congressman Tom Feeney of Oviedo asked a computer programmer in September 2000, prior to that year's contested presidential vote in Florida, to write software that could alter vote totals on touch-screen voting machines, the programmer said.
Former computer programmer Clint Curtis made the claim Monday in sworn testimony to Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee investigating allegations of voter fraud in the 2004 presidential election involving touch-screen voting in Ohio.
In his testimony, Curtis said that Feeney, then a member of the Florida House of Representative, met with Curtis and other employees of Yang Enterprises, an Oviedo software company, and asked if the company could create a program that would allow a user to alter the vote totals while using the touch-screen machine. The program had to be written so that even the human-readable computer code would not show its illicit capabilities, Curtis recalled.
http://www.seminolechronicle.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2004/12/16/41c2fdb042ea1
The wiki page mentioned the ethics committee in DC.
RE: Have our elections been rigged since 2000? - SmokyGlitz - 08-21-2011 10:37 PM
Brad Friedman did his best to promote Clint Curtis' claims about vote rigging. He made a documentary about the whole thing. Crickets.
Murder, Spies & Voting Lies (the Clint Curtis story)
(08-21-2011 09:57 PM)KonaKane Wrote: I'm not inclined to don a tin foil hat. But when this video was passed to me, I have to admit that I was chilled to my bones over it. Here is a computer programmer not only admitting but testifying that election software is rigged. Why on earth has this flown under the radar? Our democracy has been compromised, and we're fighting about how many golf vacations this president takes?
RE: Have our elections been rigged since 2000? - jaxx - 08-21-2011 10:53 PM
I hadn't heard about the documentary. Thanks.
RE: Have our elections been rigged since 2000? - Blue_Roses - 08-22-2011 01:37 AM
There was a guy named Michael Connelly who was the IT guru for Karl Rove who died in a plane crash just before he was to give a deposition on this very thing.
RE: Have our elections been rigged since 2000? - Hekate - 08-22-2011 02:08 AM
Back when Dysfunctional You was still a terrific place to learn things, I studied this issue. I hope many people watch your clip, but I'm going to have to skip it, because contemplation of the death of our democracy dumps me back into the black despair I felt then.
There's a lot of information out there if you know where to look, and there are some people who are sincerely trying to turn the tide. I recommend looking into the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Here's their Wikipedia page and their website:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Frontier_Foundation
http://www.eff.org/
http://www.eff.org/search?text=electronic+voting+machines
Also, googling for "non-renewal of Diebold and Sequoia electronic voting machine contracts" brings up a lot of info, as does "2011 status of Diebold and Sequoia electronic voting machine contracts"
When the Bushes and Supreme Court engineered a bloodless coup in 2000, the Republican Party was a well-established practitioner of old-fashioned illegal voter-suppression techniques. These are things that take no electronic magic at all and are too numerous to mention, but they work.
However, the Bush administration used the malfunctioning of badly maintained manually operated voting machines as an excuse to "help" us "modernize" by mandating the use of electronic voting machines. Incidentally, the owners of the companies that supplied them were known associates of the Bushes. Big surprise, right?
The problem with computers is that the average person thinks they are magic, and they tend to ignore the fact that they routinely crash, leaving no usable data. The average person -- including all your bureaucrats and elected officials, HAVE NO IDEA HOW COMPUTERS WORK. They're magic. So "technicians" have entered polling places to replace motherboards in the middle of election day (Riverside, CA) and late-night vote counting has miraculously turned losers into winners before our very eyes.
As Stalin is reported to have said: It doesn't matter who gets the votes, only who counts the votes.* He would have absolutely loved Diebold and Sequoia.
The media has been spectacularly unhelpful. Exit polls used to be considered an infallible means of predicting elections, but when they suddenly inexplicably failed, the media gave them up without so much as a whimper, much less a battle to determine what kind of tampering had produced such radically unexpected results.
John Kerry said he had lawyers standing by, but then he didn't fight the results in places where it could have made a difference.
Barack Obama gave me more hope than I had had in years when he responded to a concerned citizen's letter late in the campaign (about this issue) by saying NOT THIS TIME. (Again, this was reported at that other discussion board.) Thank God, I thought, he knows. I don't know what his crew did besides getting out a grassroots landslide, but we won.
I wish I knew what his administration has been doing about the problem since then. In my darkest moments I think the real powers-that-be "let" this good president win the election -- this time.
Hekate
* My version of the Stalin quote is concise, but I just had to go hunt for a citation: http://urbanlegends.about.com/od/dubiousquotes/a/stalin_quote.htm
A historical source has been found for one variant of this quote: Boris Bazhanov's Memoirs of Stalin's Former Secretary, published in 1992 and so far as I know only available in Russian.
The pertinent passage, which appears near the end of Chapter Five, reads as follows (loosely translated):
"You know, comrades," says Stalin, "that I think in regard to this: I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this — who will count the votes, and how.
RE: Have our elections been rigged since 2000? - Treestar - 08-22-2011 04:27 AM
That would explain how Republicans manage to win at all.