who will count the votes today in Ct.?

will Lamont lose by a hair?

I'm worried that the fix is in.

Please?

rigged voting is a fact

...and if we DO win a race, it's because Diebold "didn't to want to make things look too obvious" or some such tripe.

:eyes:


I'm not denying that there are voting irregularities, I'm just tired of hearing that EVERY election is fixed.

I'll stop "whining" when those machines are banned.

No link, somebody here at DU just mentioned it.

That's a huge difference from the black box machine.

worked at polls:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=132&topic_id=2762120&mesg_id=2762506

No? Then cut it out.

does it count that I lived there in the past?

does one have to live a certain amount of days in Ct. in order to speak out?

And the legislature is Democrat run. There is no fix here. I don't want to hear somebody from another state alleging a Democratic stronghold is a fixed election. It's stupid.

ragging.

The situation in Mexico is that they have a highly insecure paper ballot system, COMBINED with electronic tabulators. They seal the boxes of ballots and report false totals, then the electronic tabulation system--which the corporatist Calderon's brother has an interest in--does the rest.

In CT, they have punchcards, but how are the votes reported and TABULATED? This is, after all, the home Mr. HAVA, Christopher Dodd, who colluded with Tom Delay and Bob Ney, in that diabolical piece of legislation, by which most of the nation's election system was turned over to Bushite corporations, usng TRADE SECRET, PROPRIETARY programming code, in voting machines AND central tabulators.

MercutioATV thinks we should "stop whining" about this--about the fact that EVERY ELECTION can be rigged, and MILLIONS of votes switched by a couple of insider hackers, leaving no trace.

MercutioATV would instead like to TRUST that the Bushites HAVE NOT USED and WILL NOT USE this capability to keep Bush fascists and collusive Democrats in office. What was it FOR, then, Mercutio? Why didn't they require a TRANSPARENT election system instead?

Christ, the naivete here can be mind-boggling.

Because they made the system NON-TRANSPARENT, and we must therefore rely on INFERENTIAL evidence to gage what happened, and have been PREVENTED FROM acquiring hardcore "proof," we are supposed to HAVE FAITH that they counted all the votes?

Until all the votes are counted in public view, EVERY ELECTION IS STOLEN. THAT you can bloody well have faith in! They don't hide the vote counting for NO REASON!

Democracy 101. Ask the citizens of Stalinist Russia!

nt

You know what, leave our business up to us. You don't know what you're talking about and attacking Dodd shows that.

America Vote" Act--that evil, democracy-killing, piece of crap legislation that provided a $4 billion electronic boondoggle for Bush's buds at Diebold and ES&S, and didn't include even a "paper trail" for electronic voting (let alone a real paper ballot backup), and that permitted TRADE SECRET, PROPRIETARY programming code throughout our election system, and that failed to curb lavish lobbying of election officials and legislators, and permitted secret industry "testing" of these machines, and that FAST-TRACKED these extremely unreliable, insecure, insider hackable electronic voting systems, and their attendant culture of secrecy and corruption, from one end of the country to the other.

That's the guy. Christopher Dodd. Allied with the two biggest crooks in the Anthrax Congress, Tom Delay and Bob Ney. The Abramoff bribes were passing over Ney's desk at the same time.

Christopher Dodd was not alone in facilitating Bushite corporate control over our election system. But he was the key Democratic player.

I'm sorry, but when a Democratic Senator does something like that to the rest of us, he is no longer just your Senator, in CT. He helped to destroy our election system. He thus helped to destroy our democracy. We may never get it back. And he really, really deserves to be run out of office for it.

Dodd is a good guy, he's nearly always on the correct side of the issues and he votes his conscience. If he voted for a bill that turned out to be bad, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt. He probably thought he was helping to prevent another Florida 2000. He probably isn't knee deep in the technical problems of voting machines and didn't spend adequate time researching. Remember that the elec voting machine problems were hid in a dark corner and it took people like you and me years to call enough attention to it that it's accepted as fact now. It seems to me that you are over excited and paranoid. You might want to go have a martini and relax. Chris Dodd is my senator and I support him 100%. Go libel somebody else.

can be, and have been, manipulated by fraud-minded Bushite election officials. People have a lot of illusions about recounts. I don't know the rules in CT, but often the rules require ONLY, say, a 3% recount--IF requested by the candidate, who has to put up all the money for it--and by lawfully or UNLAWFULLY manipulating WHERE that skimpy recount occurs, fraud-minded officials can EASILY PREVENT a stolen election from being exposed.

The ONLY SECURE COUNT is the FIRST COUNT. After that--especially in the culture of secrecy that Diebold and ES&S have fostered--ballots (if there are any) can be altered or disappeared, and traces of hacking erased (if the hacks were not self-erasing).

You have to be ready with hundreds of recount volunteers and monitors. You have to be ready with hundreds of thousands of dollars TO PAY THE STATE FOR DOING ITS JOB. You have to have a good team of lawyers ready. The matter WILL go to court. Meanwhile, the war profiteering corporate news monopolies have ANNOUNCED the fascist "winners", have CONFIRMED the result with DOCTORED exit polls, and all momentum is going the other way.

And people like MecurtioATV will be chanting from the sidelines, "Stop whining!"

Recounts are not the answer. They have a slight deterrent effect--which doesn't deter Bushites. Audits are not the answer (unless you're talking a 100% audit). The only answer is FIRST COUNT TRANSPARENCY. Paper ballots, hand-counted at the precinct level, with results posted at the precinct level BEFORE any electronics are involved. Security for those paper ballots is also essential (lacking in Mexico!).

This is the system they have in Canada. It's very efficient. They do it one day. And speed should not even be a consideration--only ACCURACY, TRANSPARENCY and VERIFIABILITY.

What does it matter if it takes a week, or even a month--if it assures that the RIGHT PEOPLE are placed in office?

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

Back up a bit. Think back to, say, 2003. As the result of the HAVA $4 billion electronic voting boondoggle, the country is fast converting to electronic voting systems run by Bushite corporations using "trade secret" vote tabulation code. The sensible thing to do--the common sense thing, the good government thing--in that circumstance, with a brand new election system being put in place for 2004, never before tested out on a nationwide basis, would be to require a 100% audit of that system in the first go-round.

Not only did that never occur to anyone with a finger in the HAVA pie--including the entire Democratic Party leadership--but ONE THIRD OF THE COUNTRY was voting on PAPERLESS voting machines, so that NO AUDIT and NO RECOUNT was EVEN POSSIBLE.

NOW they're backing up, and saying, "Well, maybe--MAYBE--we should have a PAPER TRAIL," and maybe--MAYBE--these machines are a bit INSECURE!

Bad faith. Lies. Collusion. Corruption. And theft by the warmongers.

This system cannot be fixed--and WILL NOT be fixed. It must be THROWN OUT, lock, stock and barrel. No more million dollar contracts for these criminal corporations! Not for "optiscans." Not for add-on "printers." Not for nothing! Get rid of them! They are fascist Bushite operatives. And here they are:

DIEBOLD: Until recently, headed by Wally O'Dell, a Bush-Cheney campaign chair and major fundraiser (a Bush "Pioneer," right up there with Ken Lay), who promised in writing to "deliver Ohio's electoral votes to Bush-Cheney in 2004"; and

ES&S: A spinoff of Diebold (similar computer architecture), initially funded by rightwing billionaire Howard Ahmanson, who also gave one million dollars to the extremist 'christian' Chalcedon Foundation (which touts the death penalty for homosexuals, among other things). Diebold and ES&S have an incestuous relationship; they are run by two brothers, Bob and Todd Urosevich.

These are people who "counted" 80% of the nation's votes in 2004, under a veil of corporate secrecy.

Bushites have OTHER ways of stealing elections, and bulking up their false totals. This is the capper. This is the corporate coup de grace. This is how they kept Bush in office--when all momentum was going the other way, and all indicators pointed to a Bush loss--and this is how they keep an unrepresentative bunch of Bush "pod people" and collusive Democrats in Congress, and keep good Democrats out.

If Lamont, by some miracle, wins in CT--it SHOULD BE a breeze, with a 10% lead, and all momentum on his side, but we all know what's at stake, and stealth election theft operations are no doubt in progress--he will be facing a Diebold Congress, where half the Democrats might as well be Bushite Republicans on certain critical issues like war funding, and are wusses on Constitutional government.

His campaign is a miracle of democracy in action, no matter the outcome. If he wins, he WILL have an impact, and might be able to put together a coalition to pull us back from the brink in the Middle East. But the Bush junta likely has a "Gulf of Tonkin"-type incident in the works, with his name on it. Such an incident (to pull us into "Israel's war") could--and likely would--shatter any such antiwar coalition. The WEAKNESS of the Democrats, in standing against this war, tells you all you need to know about Diebold/ES&S's influence on the makeup of Congress, and why we, the people of this country--who have opposed the Iraq war FROM THE BEGINNING (56% opposed, Feb. '03), and who oppose any U.S. participation in a widened Mideast war by whopping numbers, in the 65% to 85% range!--have almost no representation in Washington DC.