Narrower version.

Without free elections, little else matters. Democracy begins at home.
Please forward widely.

To see, or bookmark, this compilation with all the images:

http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/cannabisaction/message/1321

This is spreading fast on the web, and in the mass media:
News: http://news.google.com/news?q=Princeton+Diebold
Web: http://www.google.com/search?q=Princeton+Diebold

---------------------

http://www.bradblog.com/?p=3479#more-3479

Diebold's Response to Princeton Report 'Dodges' Issues, Says Computer Scientist Doug Jones

University of Iowa Professor, E-Voting Expert Calls on Company to Publicly Release Information to Back Up Response

Charges 'No Third Party Security Analyses' Have Ever 'Found Their System to be Secure'

Noted University of Iowa computer scientist and e-voting expert, Douglas W. Jones, posted a reponse via email this morning to Diebold's official reply to Princeton University's recent report, detailing the ease with which Diebold's AccuVote touch-screen voting machine may have a virus inserted into its system.

Such malicious code, the first-of-its-kind report details, could flip votes, steal an election and replicate itself from one voting machine to the next. The dirty deed could be done by a single individual with about a minute's worth of unsupervised access to a single machine or memory card, and could be designed to be undetectable to either voters or elections officials.

The mainstream media appears to have finally found this issue fit to report, after all our years of covering it here. There has been a good deal of MSM coverage over the last two days, since The BRAD BLOG broke the full story, both here and in shorter form over at Salon; some of it has � no surprise � been better than others. We'll have more on that hopefully later this evening.

In the meantime, Diebold released their predictably misleading and disingenuous response late Wednesday evening. To which Jones replied via email this morning. This is his response�

� Click here for REST OF STORY!� �

BLOGGED BY Brad ON 9/15/2006 3:19PM PT

[PRINT VERSION] [Email it to someone!] [Who's linking up] [Permalink] [12 Comments so far...]

[Categories for this item: Diebold, Election Fraud]

--------------------

http://www.bradblog.com/?p=3467

BLOGGED BY Brad ON 9/13/2006 4:43PM

HACKED: VIRUS IMPLANTED, SPREAD ON DIEBOLD TOUCH-SCREEN VOTING MACHINE!

New, First-of-Its Kind, University Study Reveals Malicious Code Can Be Easily Inserted into Voting Machine, Spread from One System to the Next, Resulting in Flipped Votes, and Stolen Elections�All Without a Trace Being Left Behind

Study Also Confirms that Voter Access Cards Can Be Created At Home to Defeat Security Protocols, Allowing Voters to Vote Multiple Times in a Single Election!

� Brad Friedman, EXCLUSIVE

� (Salon.com has posted a shortened version of the following report right here:
"Hack the vote? No problem")

A vote for George Washington could easily be converted to a vote for Benedict Arnold on an electronic voting machine and neither the voter, nor the election officials administering the election would ever know what happened. It wouldn't require a "conspiracy theory" or a "conspiracy" at all. It could be done by a single person with just a few moments of access to the voting systems.

Those new findings are detailed, and illustrated on video-tape, in a new first-of-its-kind study released today by computer scientists and security experts at Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy.

(The version of the video demo at the Princeton website is being hit hard, and thus, slow to download and view currently. We've got a quick flash version available here for your convenience, courtesy of David Edwards.)

The scientific study has revealed, for the first time, that a computer virus can be easily implanted on an electronic voting machine which could, in turn, result in votes flipped for opposing candidates. The virus, as well, could be written to then spread itself from one machine to the next resulting in a stolen election. The malfeasance would likely never be discovered, the scientists have said.

Though the concept of stolen votes via electronic voting systems has been widely regarded as theoretically possible by experts up until now, a top-secret four-month long hands-on study of an actual touch-screen voting system, by the scientists at Princeton, has confirmed the worst nightmares of elections officials and American voters�not to mention a voting machine company known as Diebold.

The BRAD BLOG has had exclusive access to the scientists and information being tested as the team's various hack attempts have been designed and carried out over the course of the study.

Working directly with a Diebold AccuVote TS touch-screen voting system, the computer scientists have been able to implant a nearly-undetectable virus onto a touch-screen voting system, managing to successfully alter a voter's ballot � after it's already been confirmed and cast � in order to flip the vote so that it is recorded for a candidate other than the one the voter had intended.

According to the study's team leader, Edward W. Felten, a professor at Princeton's Department of Computer Science, the report confirms � and records in a video-taped demonstration � that such a malicious virus could be easily inserted onto a Diebold touch-screen voting system by a single individual "with just one or two minutes of unsupervised access to either the voting machine or the memory card" used with the system to store ballot definitions and vote tabulations.

The virus, as programmed by the Princeton team, could then spread from one voting system to the next depending on the way the machine in use is configured, or the way in which votes are tabulated in any particular jurisdication.

�NO 'CONSPIRACY' NECESSARY�

"We've demonstrated that malicious code can spread like a virus from one voting machine to another," said Felten in an exclusive interview, "which means that a bad guy who can get access to a few machines � or only one � can infect one machine, which could infect another, stealing a few votes on each in order to steal an entire election."

The question of such unsupervised access to voting systems has been widely debated since access was quickly granted by an election official in Emery County, Utah to a Diebold touch-screen system last March. When the information revealed by that brief investigation [PDF] was made public just days prior to this year's primary election in Pennsylvania, elections officials were sent scrambling for last minute security mitigation procedures.

The Emery County report, arranged by election watchdog organization BlackBoxVoting.org and carried out by computer scientist Harri Hursti and the firm Security Innovation, revealed that a "feature" built into Diebold's touch-screen system could allow a malicious individual to completely overwrite the election software, operating system and computer firmware with just a minute or two of unsupervised access to the machines � no password necessary.

�NO LONGER JUST A 'THEORY'�

What sort of danger could be caused by that access, however, has been hotly debated � and largely speculative � until the revelations of the Princeton report which detail exactly how the system might be compromised by viral computer code which could change vote tabulation, replicate itself across the entire system and hide its own tracks after the election.

After news of the Emery County study was released, dozens of scientists, including Carnegie Mellon computer scientist, professor Michael I. Shamos � an examiner of electronic voting systems for the commonwealth of Pennsylvania � described the newly discovered vulnerability as "The most severe security flaw ever discovered in a voting system." The discovery sent elections officials in states across the country scrambling for temporary emergency security mitigation procedures prior to upcoming primary elections.

The debate about security for the systems grew even louder when, in California's June election (and since then other states as well) those hastily enacted security procedures were largely ignored by the administrators of the election. Diebold voting machines were sent home unsupervised overnight with poll workers in the days and weeks, prior to the election by San Diego County's Registrar of Voters.

The security breaches in the so-called voting machine "sleepovers" in San Diego County led to a contest of the U.S. House Special Election held that day between Francine Busby and Brian Bilbray to replace jailed congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham in California's 50th congressional district. The legal suit, brought to contest the reported results of the election, charged that the unrestricted access to the machines by poll workers compromised the election in addition to violating both state and federal law.

David Jefferson, a lead voting systems technology advisor for the California Secretary of State and a computer scientist at Livermore National Laboratory told The PBS News Hour just after California's primary election, that "You can affect multiple machines from a single attack, that's what makes it so dangerous." He was right.

At the time, Jefferson was speaking in the wake of the Emery County investigation. Jefferson's comments were largely theoretical back then, though shared by the bulk of the country's election systems experts. The theory, however, had never actually proven and carried out on an actual machine. The Princeton study puts an end to such speculation, showing conclusively for the first time how a single malicious person could insert a virus into a single machine which could both flip votes and then be passed from machine to machine.

"We've also found how malicious code could also modify its own tracks [afterwards] and remain virtually undetectable by elections officials," says Felten. "It wouldn't be found in the standard tests performed either before or after an election."

The Princeton study is the first such extensive, independent, publicly-released investigation of the hardware, software, and firmware of a Diebold AccuVote DRE (Direct Recording Electronic) system of the type used in Maryland, Florida, Georgia and many other states. In all, such touch-screen voting systems made by Diebold, will be in use in nearly 40 states across the country this November.

The study, which also reveals a number of other troubling vulnerabilities � including the confirmation that voter access cards used on Diebold systems may be created inexpensively on a personal laptop computer, allowing a voter to vote as many times as they wish � was released this morning in full on Princeton University's website along with video demonstrations of some of the most disturbing revelations of the report.

Though all electronic voting systems currently in use in the United States employ similar secret software to count the votes in America's public elections, Diebold Inc., of North Canton, Ohio, has long been the target of election integrity advocates since its former CEO had promised in a fundraising letter to Republican supporters that he was committed "to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes" to George W. Bush prior to the 2004 election.

A number of reports over the last several months on various aspects of the Diebold voting system have revealed startling vulnerabilities to hacking along with failures to record election results accurately. Those reports have sent federal, state and county elections officials scrambling to either deny the magnitude of the problem, or develop last minute security mitigation procedures prior to this November's mid-term election.

While previous reports have examined a limited set of vulnerabilities, this is the first such study � conducted under extraordinary security measures � to look at the entire system as a whole over an extended period.

"These are, by far, the most serious electronic vulnerabilities that have been published to date," explained Felten. "It's far more serious than even the very serious vulnerabilities that have been published" in previous studies and reports.

�IT TAKES A THIEF�

After previous studies, both Diebold officials as well as some elections officials have downplayed the significance of the type of security vulnerabilities revealed today by Princeton, claiming that normal security procedures should sufficiently ward off any such malicious attack. Though the recent examples of security breaches in the contested Busby/Bilbray race, and primary elections elsewhere this year, demonstrate that officials have little basis for such confidence.

They certainly have no scientific evidence to back up their claims that all is well.

When San Diego County Registrar of Voters Mikel Haas was asked about the security breaches in the Busby/Bilbray election and whether they might have put the election at risk, he downplayed the dangers.

Though he admitted such hacks were possible during the voting machine "sleepovers" that he allowed, he told The BRAD BLOG during an interview just after the election that he felt it "highly improbable" that anyone would do anything untoward in such a situation.

"You'd have to want to commit a felony, which knocks out most of our poll workers," Haas explained.

"I'm sure they could stick something in the system�Whether it's detectable or not, I'm pretty sure that it is. But again, you're tampering with election equipment, so it seems unlikely."

Such wishful thinking has similarly long been shared by Diebold in public statements.

Diebold spokesman, David Bear did not immediately return our call for comment, but he has, in the recent past, denied that such security concerns are notable.

"[Our critics are] throwing out a 'what if' that's premised on a basis of an evil, nefarious person breaking the law," Bear told NEWSWEEK after the march Emery County study. "For there to be a problem here," he explained to the New York Times, "you're basically assuming a premise where you have some evil and nefarious election officials who would sneak in and introduce a piece of software�I don't believe these evil elections people exist."

Unfortunately, such "evil elections people" do exist. During a radio interview I conducted with Monterey County, California Registrar of Voters Tony Anchundo prior to the November 2005 election, the 13-year election official explained, when asked which results would be official in the event that their new voting machine "paper trails" didn't match up with the machine-reported totals that, "There is obviously going to have to be some trust and faith in the elections official, or in this case, it's me."

Several months later Anchundo was charged with 43 criminal counts including charges of forgery, misapplication of funds, embezzlement, falsification of accounts and grand theft to the tune of $70,000 charged on county credit cards.

Add that misplaced "trust and faith in elections officials" to the many other cases of felony indictments for elections officials including three recently in Ohio where Cuyahoga County election workers were found to have gamed the Green and Libertarian party sponsored 2004 Presidential recount in the crucial Buckeye State.

And add to that a recent report [PDF] from the U.S. Dept. of Defense which, as Congressman Rush Holt (D-NJ) pointed out in a speech last month, "noted that a total of 1,213 public officials had been federally charged with corruption in 2004, that 1,020 of them had been convicted of corruption, and that 419 cases remained pending."

�DIEB-THROAT SAYS: 'WE PUT OUT JUNK'�

Electronic voting systems such as those made by Diebold and a hand-full of other private corporations now litter the electoral landscape across the nation as the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), passed by the U.S. Congress in 2002, kicks in in full for the first time as of this year. Major problems with the systems have been previously confirmed by independent scientists, revealing dozens of vulnerabilities and many problems and meltdowns have cropped up on the machines throughout the 2006 primary season, affecting elections in dozens of states.

Critics have charged that the systems, which are disallowed from full, independent testing and so-called "red team" hack attempts by computer security professionals at either the federal, state or county level, were rushed out by the companies in order to take advantage of the $3.8 billion in federal money made available by HAVA to encourage jurisdictions to "upgrade" their older voting systems in light of the 2000 election debacle in Florida. Ironically enough, it was a Diebold electronic system which reported some negative 16,000 votes in Volusia County, Florida on election night which then kicked off the eventual 36-day firefight surrounding the counting of the older punch-card systems in the Sunshine State back in 2000.

"We put junk out there when HAVA came out, and now they've gotten caught," explained one of the Diebold insiders who The BRAD BLOG has reported on for some time. The source � code-named "DIEB-THROAT" due to their sensitive relationship with the company � said, "They hate this, they don't want publicity. They want to run this [their election division] like their banking side. Quietly. Hoping nobody will notice."

But Americans have noticed.

Computer scientists and security experts, as well as a vocal election integrity activist community, have been reporting on, and revealing vulnerabilities in systems made by Diebold as well as ES&S, Sequoia Voting systems and Hart InterCivic for some time. The mainstream media, however, as well as the political parties � and certainly elections officials who have staked their reputations on the accuracy and security of such machines � have been slow to catch up with the extraordinarily detailed and documented threats.

�ELECTIONS OFFICIALS STILL IN DENIAL (MOST OF THEM ANYWAY)�

Study after study has found scores, if not hundreds of vulnerabilities in such systems. The Princeton study radically ups the ante in its first-hand, explicit, before-your-very-eyes hack of one such system. Even while the issue has been largely ignored over the past several years by both the media and the political parties, many of those elections officials continue to publicly deny the concerns of scientists and activists in the face of what is now a towering mountain of evidence documenting the insecurity of these systems.

Deborah Hench, Registrar of Voters in San Joaquin County, California has gone on record denying the vulnerabilities and failures of the systems even after California conducted the largest mock-election test ever held in her own warehouse, on her own Diebold touch-screen voting systems. That test, conducted in July of 2005 found that the systems failed to operate properly nearly 30% of the time.

Later, after the California Secretary of State's office issued their own scientific study [PDF], conducted at UC Berkley and finding more than 16 new vulnerabilities, Hench was, remarkably enough, quoted telling a local San Joaquin paper; "The state tested this system seven ways to Sunday�They didn't find anything wrong."

Hench furthered the denial and public misinformation when she told the PBS News Hour that a virus hacked into a Diebold voting system by a single person simply couldn't work, because "You're going to have to break into my warehouse before we deploy. You're going to have to change 1,660 units." Neither of those requirements, we now learn, are necessary according to Princeton.

Once again, the latest study proves Hench, an election official who has succeeded in encouraging her county to allocate millions of dollars for these systems, is entirely wrong.

On the other hand, there are some elections officials, such as Leon County, Florida's Ion Sancho and Yolo County, California's Freddie Oakley who have been far more honest in their public comments.

Sancho, who was forced by the state of Florida to use Diebold voting machines even after he allowed computer hackers the opportunity to test � successfully � their theoretical hack, which flipped a mock election on an optical scan paper ballot system manufactured by Diebold told an election integrity gathering last May that the public should "Trust no one," when it comes to our electoral system. "If it can't be verified, it can't be used," he told the enthusiastic crowd.

Oakley was even more to the point in an email sent to The BRAD BLOG as the "sleepover" controversy erupted after the June elections in California: "If, as a practical matter," she wrote about the Diebold electronic voting machines used in the election, they "can't be secured, then perhaps they ought not be used at all. Period."

In the meantime, there is also a notable lack of computer scientists or security experts who are willing to declare the current systems being used across the nation are a secure way to carry out our precious democracy. In two-plus years that The BRAD BLOG has been reporting on these issues, we've yet to come across a single one who is willing to declare these systems are secure and ready for prime time voting.

The Diebold voting system obtained by Princeton for use in their investigation was obtained in cooperation with the election integrity umbrella group VelvetRevolution.us. As explained in their report, the machine was "obtained from a private party." The details of that acquisition, however, reveal even more damning information about the way in which Diebold rushed these systems to market. A full report on that background, including exclusive insider details obtained by The BRAD BLOG, will be forthcoming in the near future.

While virtually all of the systems manufactured by all of the major American voting machine companies currently set for use this November have been found to be vulnerable to hacking, tampering, inaccuracy and error, various elements of the Diebold voting systems have found their way into more independent hands-on investigations than any of the other companies' systems to date. As access is gained by private individuals to machines made by the other manufacturers, more vulnerabilities on those systems as well are likely to be revealed. A recent landmark report issued by NYU's Brennan Center for Justice detailed some 120 threats to e-voting security across all such systems. So the worst is likely still ahead.

But for now, Diebold once again finds itself in the cross-hairs of election integrity advocates and computer scientists.

Said Johns Hopkins computer scientist and elections-security expert, Aviel Rubin recently � one of the original voices to declare the dangers of Diebold's systems after he analyzed source code from their voting machines which was left, by the company, unsecured on a public Internet site � "If Diebold had set out to build a system as insecure as they possibly could, this would be it."

===

Brad Friedman is an Investigative Journalist and Editor-in-Chief of the popular progressive website The BRAD BLOG (www.BradBlog.com) where he has broken enumerable stories related to election integrity issues and electronic voting machine meltdowns. He has appeared to discuss his reporting on ABC News, CNN, and CourtTV. He's a contributor at Huffington Post, and has written for Mother Jones, Hustler, Editor & Publisher, Columbus FreePress, TruthOut.org, Harvard's Neiman Foundation of Journalism and whoever else will have him. He is also the co-founder of VelvetRevolution.us, an umbrella organization of citizens groups taking on everything from Election Reform to Media Reform to the War in Iraq.

We rely on you! Please DONATE HERE! Or snail mail:
Brad Friedman, 7095 Hollywood Blvd., #594 Los Angeles, CA 90028.
Or create a monthly subscription for any amount you like on the blue form at right! -- Brad

--------------------

http://www.velvetrevolution.us

9/14/06:A VIRUS CAN BE INSERTED INTO DIEBOLD MACHINES TO STEAL ELECTIONS

Finally.... An Exhaustive Analysis Of The Diebold Machines From Top To Bottom

The Princeton Report, as it is called, has finally been released after a complete four-month analysis of a Diebold TS voting machine. A full article is on The BRAD BLOG

Here is the report, the executive summary, and a ten-minute video demonstrating how a virus can be inserted into the machine to steal an election, and how that single virus can infect other machines. This is all undetectable.

As Brad reported yesterday at Salon, "the Princeton computer scientists obtained the Diebold system with cooperation from VelvetRevolution, an umbrella organization of more than 100 election integrity groups, which I co-founded a few months after the 2004 election. We acquired the Diebold system from an independent source and handed it over to university scientists so that, for the first time, they could analyze the hardware, software and firmware of the controversial voting system. Such an independent study had never been allowed by either Diebold or elections officials."

Here is part of the Executive Summary concluding in short that these machines are dangerous and unfixable.

Malicious software running on a single voting machine can steal votes with little if any risk of detection. The malicious software can modify all of the records, audit logs, and counters kept by the voting machine, so that even careful forensic examination of these records will find nothing amiss. We have constructed demonstration software that carries out this vote-stealing attack.
Anyone who has physical access to a voting machine, or to a memory card that will later be inserted into a machine, can install said malicious software using a simple method that takes as little as one minute. In practice, poll workers and others often have unsupervised access to the machines.
AccuVote-TS machines are susceptible to voting-machine viruses � computer viruses that can spread malicious software automatically and invisibly from machine to machine during normal pre- and post-election activity. We have constructed a demonstration virus that spreads in this way, installing our demonstration vote-stealing program on every machine it infects.
While some of these problems can be eliminated by improving Diebold's software, others cannot be remedied without replacing the machines' hardware. Changes to election procedures would also be required to ensure security.

Please let your elections officials know that these machines must be discarded and that they cannot have any confidence in the results of their elections. More information will follow.

For the most recent version of this paper, answers to frequently asked questions, and videos of demonstration attacks, see: http://itpolicy.princeton.edu/voting

----------------------

http://www.bradblog.com

http://www.bradblog.com/?p=3480#more-3480

September 16th, 2006

CNN's Lou Dobbs:The Integrity Of Midterm Elections Cannot Be Guaranteed

Guest Blogged by John Gideon

On Friday's (Sept. 15) show Lou and Kitty reported on the new Princeton University study and the lawsuit in Colorado to stop the use of e-voting machines. The BradBlog reported on their inside access to the Princeton study earlier this week.

The text-transcript of tonight's segment on Lou Dobbs Tonight follows in full�

� Click here for REST OF STORY!� �

BLOGGED BY John Gideon ON 9/16/2006 5:35PM PT

[PRINT VERSION] [Email it to someone!] [Who's linking up] [Permalink] [5 Comments so far...]

[Categories for this item: Diebold, Election Irregularities, Lou Dobbs, CNN]

------------------------

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cia-drugs/message/36478

Re: Bush's Balls On The Barbi - he's BUSTED

Greg Palast, forensic economist, writing in his very entertaining book
Armed Madhouse, does a great job of proving exactly how operatives of
the oligarchy steal elections. So far they have not needed high tech
hacking. They do it primarily by plotting demographic profiles to
geography, then destroying, losing, disqualifying, or otherwise
neutralizing votes from those geographical pockets profiled as voting
Democrat.

-Bob

--- In cia-drugs@yahoogroups.com, judson witham <jurisnot@...> wrote:
>
> WAKE UP FOLKS they STOLE the VOTE
>
> This Affidavit is 18 pages long ENJOY
>
> http://web.northnet.org/minstrel/declaration.01.htm
>
> The methods employed to STEAL Liberty and Freedom have become VERY
SOPHISTICATED. Thank God for good men like Dr. Phillips. He and I have
been friends for nearly 40 years and I assure you HE DOES NOT LIE.
>
> Judson Witham
>
>
> ---------------------------------
> All-new Yahoo! Mail - Fire up a more powerful email and get things
done faster.
>

----------------------

http://blogs.chron.com/bluebayou/2006/09/its_not_easy_being_a_voter.html

September 15, 2006

It's not easy being a voter

Not these days, anyway...

Several voting-related stories have caught my eye lately.

First: a piece from Mother Jones called Just Try Voting Here, in which reporter Sasha Abramsky looks at some of the ways that people - sometimes local governments - around the US have put up barriers to keep people from voting. I'll mention a few highlights, but you really should read the entire list.

There's what Abramsky calls the "new poll tax" in Georgia:

In 2005, Georgia state legislators passed a bill requiring voters to present either a driver's license or a state-issued photo ID that costs between $20 and $35 and is available only from Department of Motor Vehicles offices. Supporters claimed this was necessary to keep people from casting votes in someone else's name, even though Georgia secretary of state Cathy Cox noted that her office had no evidence of this happening. Either way, the measure is likely to have a dramatic effect on who can vote. Two-thirds of the state's counties don't even have a DMV office; Atlanta, the state's largest city, has just one, where waits at the ID counters often run to several hours. In late June, the secretary of state issued a report finding that more than half a million active-status, registered voters in Georgia don't have valid photo IDs. Fully 17.3 percent of African American voters, and one-third of black voters over age 65, wouldn't be able to cast a ballot under the law. When the federal Department of Justice had five experts examine the ID legislation in 2005, four of them objected to it, as the Washington Post discovered. But higher-ups at Justice overruled them and the measure (pushed by conservative think tanks such as the American Center for Voting Rights) went on the books. In October of last year a judge blocked its implementation, and the law -- along with another version that offers free voter IDs -- remains in limbo as appeals continue.

To middle class voters this doesn't sound like a big deal, but if you're poor, $35 is a non-trivial sum. One wonders what the motivation for this was: it's dressed up as an anti-fraud measure, but as is noted above, there's nothing to suggest that such fraud has ever happened.

If we are going to require a government document such as an ID for people to exercise basic rights like voting, we should not charge for those documents.

Another good one: playing games with voter registration forms in Florida:

Voter registration forms are easily lost. In 2004, for example, headlines focused on a Republican National Committee contractor named Sproul & Associates, which subcontracted with a company called Voters Outreach of America that, in Las Vegas, was found destroying forms filled out by people trying to register as Democrats. Incidents like this would seem to justify a new Florida law that imposes fines of $250 to $500 per form on anyone who registers voters and doesn't immediately deliver the paperwork to election officials, with no exceptions for difficult circumstances or natural disasters. But since it was already illegal in Florida to deliberately delay handing in voter registration forms, and since the new legislation does not apply to the two main political parties, its only likely effect is to intimidate independent voter-registration organizations; the largest among them, the League of Women Voters, has stopped doing voter registration in the state altogether.

----------------------

[Court case]

http://web.northnet.org/minstrel/declaration.01.htm

DECLARATION OF RICHARD HAYES PHILLIPS

FILED IN FEDERAL DISTRICT COURT, COLUMBUS, OHIO

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, 2006, 3:15 P.M. E.S.T.

See Table of Contents See Previous Go to next page

----------------------

[Another important court case below]

http://www.technologynewsdaily.com/node/4457

The Critical Ohio E-Voting Case

Submitted by Technology News... on Thu, 2006-09-14 20:42.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has asked the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to reject Ohio's latest attempt to dismiss a critical electronic voting case -- the final legal hurdle in the path to a thorough investigation of the state's widely criticized 2004 election and much needed reform.

Last fall, EFF filed suit on behalf of voter Jeanne White against Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell and Governor Bob Taft, alleging that they had abdicated their responsibilities to protect the fundamental right to vote of Ohio residents. When White voted on Election Day in 2004, the electronic voting machine she used malfunctioned, causing her vote to toggle from one candidate to another. White's problems were not isolated: other voters reported unacceptably long lines, inadequately trained pollworkers, and voting machines that failed to record their votes correctly. Similar problems were reported in the 2005 elections and in the May 2, 2006, primary, including a chaotic election in Cuyahoga County where election officials have launched a formal investigation.

In its brief, EFF argues that the widespread and deeply rooted failings in Ohio's voting system stem from incoherent and inadequate procedures, inconsistent standards, and lack of planning and training -- all of which raise serious questions about the basic fairness of the state's elections. The suit aims to require the state to dramatically increase the security and accuracy of its voting technology and related election procedures.

The lawsuit will also provide the best chance yet to demonstrate the true "in the field" performance record of electronic voting equipment, details of which are carefully controlled by election officials and voting equipment vendors. EFF's brief was filed on the same day that researchers at Princeton University released a critical new report demonstrating the ability to manipulate results on a Diebold electronic voting machine. The study, led by Professor Edward W. Felten, found that the machine was extremely vulnerable to "vote-stealing" attacks that would undermine the accuracy of vote counts.

EFF is working with co-counsel Kerger and Associates; Zuckerman, Spaeder, Goldstein, Taylor & Kolker; and Heller, Ehrman, White and McAuliffe, LLP, as it pursues this case.

For the full appellate brief:
http://www.eff.org/Activism/E-voting/ohio/intervenorsappellatebrief.pdf

For more on the Ohio suit:
http://www.eff.org/Activism/E-voting/ohio/

For more on the Professor Felten's research:
http://www.businessweek.com/ap/tech/D8K48IU80.htm

----------------------

http://www.bradblog.com/?p=3485#more-3485

'Daily Voting News' For September 16, 2006

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org and VoteTrustUSA.Org

Diebold has now admitted that Maryland was the first state to use new 'e-poll books' and that they had no reasons yet why the machines were crashing throughout the day (three machines over 40 times in one polling place). Of course their first response is that the problem was all the poll workers and how they set-up the equipment. / Rhode Island conducted a state-wide recount for one race with the results being exactly the same as the original count. Of course, they just re-ran the memory and the recount was complete in 10 minutes. / The White House has named a new EAC Commissioner to replace Paul DeGregorio. The new nominee clearly has no qualifications for the job and her nomination actually violates the Help America Vote Act of 2002�.

� Click here for REST OF STORY!� �

BLOGGED BY John Gideon ON 9/16/2006 5:19PM PT

[PRINT VERSION] [Email it to someone!] [Who's linking up] [Permalink] [4 Comments so far...]

[Categories for this item: Daily Voting News]

----------------------

Yahoo! Groups Tips

Did you know...

Messages

September 15, 2006

It's not easy being a voter

The Critical Ohio E-Voting Case

Yahoo! My Yahoo! Mail
	Sign In New User? Sign Up
		Health - Groups - Help

Yahoo! Groups Tips

Did you know...

Best of Y! Groups

Messages

September 15, 2006

It's not easy being a voter

The Critical Ohio E-Voting Case