Eloriel..here's an account of questionable poll watching

I'm reposting this as it dropped quite fast.

Pollwatching at Election Central
by Roxanne Jekot

I was badged as a NAACP Pollwatcher as was another member of our team. We arrived at the Election Supervisor's office at 9:00 AM and asked to observe the operation throughout the day. The employees were disconcerted by the request and we were asked to repeat it several times. 20 minutes later, the Elections Supervisor explained to us that we would not be granted access because the center was "too small and there just isn't room for you." Our response was that we would do anything necessary to stay out of the way and make ourselves unobtrusive. We also offered to have only one observer in the room at a time, trading off throughout the day. The Elections Supervisor refused every alternative and offered us a 10 minute tour, but we would have to leave.

We left the office to avoid a confrontation and went to the parking lot to contact the NAACP and our attorneys. They negotiated with the Elections Supervisor for more than 4 hours in an attempt to get access for us and were unsuccessful.

As we sat in the parking lot, we observed teams of 2 technicians taking voting machines out of the building and putting them in a car. We spoke to the technicians asking them to identify themselves (they worked for Diebold) and if they were replacing DREs at polling places. They replied that they were. During the 4 hours we were there, we saw 10 DREs moved from the building to the automobiles. It appeared they were breaking down the DREs used for early voting and using them as replacement machines. The early voting machines were in a windowed room close to where we were sitting in the parking lot.

The end result of the negotations with the attorneys was that we would not be granted access until the polls closed at 7:00 PM so we returned to our HQ location.

(more odd stuff happening)
<http://www.countthevote.org/gems_watch.htm>

Kick

I can kick this a bit and keep it up until it's picked up.

Might want to PM Eloriel as well.

:kick:

Can this be verified???

It's run by Roxanne, one of the activists that has fought the battle against e-voting for as long as anyone.

That is what I was asking.

The Diebolt tech-reps -- these guys have free and easy access and my guess is that the Poll workers are probably computer illiterate and have NO IDEA what the tech-reps are doing.

I can see how easy it would be to hack the vote -- these tech-reps are probably underpaid -- short time work -- and it would be very easy to bribe one or both to "adjust" the vote total.

There is NO WAY IN HELL that any fair election can happen ever -- until a whole lot of changes are made. Will this happen?

Note -- the voting machines were taken outside -- and out of the physical custody of the poll workers. The tech-reps had no supervision -- and were they bonded?

This description of their cavalier manner of handing the voting machines convinces me that hacking this election could have happened in dozens and dozens of ways.

This is an eyewitness account of just one way that the vote could have been corrupted at this one polling place. The people in charge may have tried to keep witnesses out -- but by forcing these poll watches to wait in the car -- they may have witnessed something bigger than rude poll workers.

Republicans don't care about the bill of rights.
Repulibcans?
Republicans: Wally O'Dell and employees and contract employees.
Republicans: Administration and Congress
Republicans: All other CEO's and stock holders of voting machine manufacturers, felons or non-felons.
Republicans: Secretary of States and poll executives and workers.

Why blame Republicans? They have a history of theft, they won when they weren't expected to, they 'won' in states and counties where Republican made machines were used. They have a 100% supported republican tv networks behind them.

The other thing it shows -

The greater number of Democrats may not do anything to condemn it.
There may not be enough people in the country to keep Republicans honest by law or monitor or lawsuit.

Unfair?

a computer programmer and is mentioned alongside Bev Harris in some articles. So, I think this is definitely legitimate. It sounds like before the election she made a bet that she could hack into a black box and that got some attention. She is mentioned in this article
http://www.mcwahtdesign.com/electionAllPresVotes.htm

All the President's Votes?
A Quiet Revolution is Taking Place in US Politics. By the Time It's Over, the Integrity of Elections Will be in the Unchallenged, Unscrutinized Control of a Few Large - and Pro-Republican - Corporations. Andrew Gumbel wonders if democracy in America can survive.
by Andrew Gumbel Published on Monday, October 13, 2003 by the lndependent/UK

last two paragraphs in this article...

The question is whether the country will come to its senses before elections start getting distorted or tampered with on such a scale that the system becomes unmanageable. The sheer volume of money offered under HAVA is unlikely to be forthcoming again in a hurry, so if things aren't done right now it is doubtful the system can be fixed again for a long time. "This is frightening, really frightening," says Dr Mercuri, and a growing number of reasonable people are starting to agree with her. One such is John Zogby, arguably the most reliable pollster in the United States, who has freely admitted he "blew" last November's elections and does not exclude the possibility that foul play was one of the factors knocking his calculations off course. "We're plowing into a brave new world here," he says, "where there are so many variables aside from out-and-out corruption that can change elections, especially in situations where the races are close. We have machines that break down, or are tampered with, or are simply misunderstood. It's a cause for great concern."

Roxanne Jekot, who has put much of her professional and personal life on hold to work on the issue full time, puts it even more strongly. "Corporate America is very close to running this country. The only thing that is stopping them from taking total control are the pesky voters. That's why there's such a drive to control the vote. What we're seeing is the corporatization of the last shred of democracy.
" I feel that unless we stop it here and stop it now," she says, "my kids won't grow up to have a right to vote at all."



I thought that was an interesting quote from Zogby on 2003!!

Also embedded in the software were the comments of the programmers working on it. One described what he and his colleagues had just done as "a gross hack". Elsewhere was the remark: "This doesn't really work." "Not a confidence builder, would you say?" Ms Jekot says. "They were operating in panic mode, cobbling together something that would work for the moment, knowing that at some point they would have to go back to figure out how to make it work more permanently." She found some of the code downright suspect - for example, an overtly meaningless instruction to divide the number of write-in votes by 1. "From a logical standpoint there is absolutely no reason to do that," she says. "It raises an immediate red flag."

as DEMActivist.