Important stuff in California:
Late last week, California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley said that additional security measures will be taken by county elections officials to avoid problems with computerized voting machines, whose security and reliability has been questioned in a number of recent studies. As part of the measures, counties will have to keep images of each ballot cast on record; post voting results on every machine at each precinct for public display; and prepare a voting equipment security plan for review by state officials. The directives prohibit attaching the machines to the Internet.
California is in part reacting to a finding by computer scientists hired by Johns Hopkins’ Information Security Institute, which found that Maryland’s electronic voting machines, made by Diebold Election Systems, were easy prey for hackers. Many California precincts use the same voting system. Last year, Shelley took the first steps toward ensuring accuracy by requesting that California’s electronic voter systems provide voters with a verifiable paper trail, designed to validate that votes have been recorded properly. The technology to implement a paper trail is being developed.
I hope that our own government are reading this and taking note. Forewarned is forearmed for the Irish electorate.
The government dont have the intelligence – either that or the elections will be fixed from now on –
In April, California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley banned a type of Diebold touch screen in California and took the unusual step of asking the Attorney General to investigate both civil and criminal actions against the company for fraud.
Two weeks later, Walden O’Dell, the chairman and CEO of diploid finally admitted it was a “huge mistake” for him to write — in a Republican fundraising letter — that he was committed to delivering electoral votes for Bush.
Since then, Kevin Shelley has become America’s leader in ensuring there is a paper trail to prevent voting fraud. When CNN needs a comment on election fraud, they interview Kevin Shelley.
He’s right, there should be a paper trail and strong safeguards to prevent fraud. In fact, there is not a single rational argument from the opposition, which consists mainly of diploid and other Bush operatives.
Since they can’t logically argue against fair elections, they have now started an aggressive decapitiation attack against Shelley. The strategy appears to assume that an aggressive character assassination of Kevin Shelley will slow the movement and prevent reform before the election.
By aggressive character assassination, consider shell’s hometown San Francisco Chronicle is in DAY FIVE of their front page smear campaign against Shelley. Somehow (act surprised), a bunch of documents “appeared” that suggest wrongdoing by a Shelley donor. Not surprising is the fact that there is no evidence Shelley knew of the wrongdoing or could have had anything to do with it. But with any smear campaign, you only find that out if you carefully read the whole story while the headlines suggest Shelley is guilty of the largest scandal since Watergate.
Democrats are standing with Shelley, not just for his singular focus on voting rights, but also for his long service as a groundbreaking progressive legislator. But the smears are taking their toll and are already hurting efforts to ensure a fair presidential election.
The current smear campaign is not without precedent. There have already been reports of FBI agents harassing people for speaking up against unsafe electronic voting.
We can’t let CREEP win. We can’t let the movement for fair elections slow because of these character assassination attacks. We can’t abandon the Secretary of State because of the smear.
Stooping to this level is one more reason why our votes need to count — we desperately need to get our country back on track.
If you’re wondering why they are doing this to Shelley, here are two reasons:
http://www.ss.ca.gov/executive/press_releases/2004/04_030.pdf
http://www.ss.ca.gov/elections/ks_dre_papers/diebold_report_april20_final.pdf
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http://blogswarm.blogdrive.com/archive/65.html