June 16th, 2006
Here are a few posts written elsewhere that I thought worth passing on:
- Cat and Mouse with the VA (Score One for the Cat) — Dark Wraith is one of those Veterans who received a letter from the Veterans Administration about last month’s Fubar with the laptop and all of that personal data that might or might not have gotten hijacked. He’s not just upset about the Fubar; he’s upset that that they were able to find him at all after he spent ages carefully not alerting them to address changes…
This is Exhibit Number One of what happens when the government turns into a nosy weirdo: its minions collect all kinds of personal data for whatever compelling reason they’ve concocted to make their jobs have meaning, and once they’ve got all that data, they place everyone in the database at risk, both from their own nefarious people and from those who would be able to compromise whatever security they have on the data. They take what isn’t theirs—our privacy—and they can’t have the decency to ensure even that they’re the only ones who can mess up our lives with what they’ve expropriated.
To the Veterans Administration—and knowing full well that my rage will do no good whatsoever—I say this: Stay the Hell out of my life.
To everyone else, I say this: if you’re not afraid of this government, you should be; and if you are afraid of this government, you should be more so.
Not that it will do you any good to be afraid. As far as I can tell, they’ll find you when they want to, anyway. It’s all part of the price we now pay for the security our government provides as it diligently dismisses any regard whatsoever for the right we thought we had to be left alone.
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Tags: Veterans Administration, Identity Theft, Iraq, Nouri al-Maliki, insurgents, American soldiers, amnesty, Florida, voter fraud, Voting Irregularities, Greg Palast, sexual harrassment, inhumanity, humanity
February 27th, 2006
Remember all those complaints about voting irregularities in Florida? Seems like there might have been something to it. Of course, no one in the government is doing anything about it still. I suspect neither party wants to clear up all the voting irregularities and calling attention to it will only call attention to their own participation here and there.
The internal logs of at least 40 Sequoia touch-screen voting machines reveal that votes were time and date-stamped as cast two weeks before the election, sometimes in the middle of the night.
Black Box Voting successfully sued former Palm Beach County (FL) Supervisor of Elections Theresa LePore to get the audit records for the 2004 presidential election.
After investing over $7,000 and waiting nine months for the records, Black Box Voting discovered that the voting machine logs contained approximately 100,000 errors. According to voting machine assignment logs, Palm Beach County used 4,313 machines in the Nov. 2004 election. During election day, 1,475 voting system calibrations were performed while the polls were open, providing documentation to substantiate reports from citizens indicating the wrong candidate was selected when they tried to vote.
Another disturbing find was several dozen voting machines with votes for the Nov. 2, 2004 election cast on dates like Oct. 16, 15, 19, 13, 25, 28 2004 and one tape dated in 2010. These machines did not contain any votes date-stamped on Nov. 2, 2004.
You can find the complete set of raw voting machine event logs for Palm Beach County here: http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/2197/6628.html
Note that some items were not provided to us and are ommitted from the logs.
The logs rule out the possibility that these were Logic & Accuracy (L&A) test results, and verified that these results did appear in the final totals. In addition to the date discrepancies, most had incorrect polling times, with votes appearing throughout the wee hours of the night. These machines were L&A tested, and the L&A test activities appeared in the logs with the correct date and time.
According to the voting machine assignment log, these machines were not assigned to early voting locations. The number of votes on each machine also corresponds with the numbers typical of polling place machines rather than early voting.
Many of these machines showed unexplained log activity after the L&A test but before Election Day. In addition, many more machines without date anomalies showed this log activity, which revealed someone powering up the machine, opening the program, then powering it down again. In one instance, the date discrepancy appeared when someone accessed the machine two minutes after the L&A test was completed. [“Someone accessed 40 Palm Beach voting machines November 2004″]
Hat tip to Yellow Swordfish.
Tags: Black Box Voting, Voting Irregularities, Florida, 2004 election, politics
August 11th, 2005
The Republican Party has repeatedly and pointedly disavowed any tactics aimed at keeping citizens from voting since allegations of voter suppression surfaced during the Florida recount in 2000 that tipped the presidential race to Bush.
Interestingly, while denying any conspiracy to keep possible Democrat voters from casting their ballots in both Ohio and Florida, a top New Hampshire Party official and a GOP consultant have pleaded guilty in conspiring with James Tobin, the president’s 2004 campaign chairman for New England, to interferre with the Democratic campaign. Apparently Tobin called the GOP consultant to get a telephone firm to help in a scheme to tie up the phone lines in New Hampshire to prevent Democrat campaigners from calling voters to encourage them to get out and vote on Election Day 2002. At the time Tobin was the RNC’s New England Regional Director.
Earlier this week, RNC chairman Ken Mehlman, the former White House political director, reiterated a “zero-tolerance policy” for any GOP official caught trying to block legitimate votes.
“The position of the Republican National Committee is simple: We will not tolerate fraud; we will not tolerate intimidation; we will not tolerate suppression. No employee, associate or any person representing the Republican Party who engages in these kinds of acts will remain in that position,” Mehlman wrote Monday to a group that studied voter suppression tactics.
But then again, didn’t Bush promise to fire anyone involved in leaking Plame to the press? Hard to believe the Republicans will actually follow through on such a statement when their king has set the precident to say it and not do it.
Paul Twomey, a volunteer lawyer for New Hampshire Democrats who are pursuing a separate lawsuit involving the phone scheme, said he was surprised the RNC was willing to pay Tobin’s legal bills and that it suggested more people may be involved.
“It originally appeared to us that there were just certain rogue elements of the Republican Party who were willing to do anything to win control of the U.S. Senate, including depriving Americans of their ability to vote,” Twomey said.
“But now that the RNC actually is bankrolling Mr. Tobin’s defense, coupled with the fact that it has refused some discovery in the civil case, really raises the questions of who are they protecting, how high does this go and who was in on this,” Twomey said.
Yes, how high does it go? Where does the buck stop? It does seem rather suspicious, but maybe I just love a good conspiracy story too much. Sounds to me like the tip of the iceberg. Maybe my crazy co-worker, who goes on and on about how the Ohio election was fixed and how the technology was used to do it, is right on the money. There’s a thin line between genius and insanity sometimes.
Read the rest of the story.
Tags: Republicans, vote, Democrats, Florida, Ohio, Voting Irregularities
