Use it or lose it

Use this as a flyer, email--whatever. Get the message out about vote fraud or lose the vote come November. It's that simple--and that important.

Do the right thing. Spread this far and wide, modify it if you like and keep it kicked.


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The Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) was passed on the heels of the Florida 2000 presidential election and its "hanging chad" problem. Few thought the solution to the hanging chad, which was at least evidence of a voter’s intent, would be to completely eliminate the ballot. But that is what HAVA does.

HAVA mandates that states buy computer-controlled direct recording electronic (DRE) voting machines under the guise that that they are handicapped accessible. The only people who have access to the votes in these machines are the computer companies themselves.

What’s wrong with that?

With the new machines, there is no obligation for the owner of a computer company to protect our votes. The elected officials aren’t who are supposed to protect our votes are not told by the computer companies who sell the machines what software is being used. Elections officials are not trained to troubleshoot if the machines fail. Machine owners forbid election officials to tamper with them. Therefore, elections officials cannot do their job and protect you votes with HAVA. With electronic voting machines, there is no way of knowing whether your votes are being counted or not.

Consider these glaring conflicts of interest and "glitches":

• A Columbus OH precinct's electronic voting machine added 3,893 votes to President Bush's tally in 2004, even though there are just 800 voters there.

• Chuck Hagel first ran for the Senate in Nebraska in 1996 where they installed electronic voting machines owned by the biggest voting machine company in the US--Election Systems & Software (ES&S). Hagel won both the primaries and the general election in one of the biggest upsets ever. Hagel was the first Republican to win a Nebraska senatorial campaign in 24 years and, unbelievably, Hagel won in the largely black communities that had never before voted Republican. Six years later Hagel ran again against Democrat Charlie Matulka and won 83% of the vote in the biggest political victory in the history of Nebraska. Chuck Hagel was CEO of ES&S (then AIS) until 1995 and a major stockholder of the parent company of ES&S, McCarthy & Company during his elections.

• In Illinois, Populex is providing the computers for voting. Ronald Reagan's former Defense Secretary, Frank Carlucci, is on the 5-member Advisory Board of Populex. Carlucci is also the chairman emeritus of The Carlyle Group which has high profile partners and advisors on its payroll—like the president’s father—George Herbert Walker Bush. Say hello to Illinois' next Republican governor and even mayor.

• It's easier to rig an electronic voting machine than a Las Vegas slot machine, according to University of Pennsylvania professor Steve Freeman. Freeman says Vegas slots are better monitored and regulated than America's voting machines in a Washington Post article.

• A report by Johns Hopkins University says "Common voters, without any insider privileges, can cast unlimited votes without being detected" based on an analysis of the software for voting machines made by Diebold.

• Congressman John Conyers' website lists at least 125 incidents of vote fraud from Ohio during the 2004 election--most of them computer related. Remember the election hinged on Ohio. (Also, you may have seen Conyers being smeared recently on television --ignore it, read his site and know that he is fighting for our voting rights and that those in charge of the voting machines are threatened by that.)

• Convicted felons work for some of the voting machine companies and they have been known to show up at poll sites and swap computer drives without notice

In a nutshell, HAVA is to voting what No Child Left Behind is to education or what the Clean Air Act is to the environment. Instead of aiding voting, HAVA’s flimsy "standards" take away the right to ensure that our votes are counted. The same type standards enable the government to justify withholding funds and shutting down public schools under No Child Left Behind. (See a pattern between what the administration calls its programs and what their programs actually do?)

The Bush Administration is dangling $3.8 billion of our tax dollars to "assist" with purchases of machines that steal our votes. States who don't buy the machines by November 2006 are threatened with lawsuits, funded by our tax dollars again, through the Department of Justice. New York was sued in March 2006. States are being told they must buy the machines because they make voting accessible to the handicapped--not true in all instances depending upon the handicap. Furthermore, other voting methods were and are available to the handicapped but only the electronic voting machines are being mandated as replacements. Local and state activists have filed complaints or are lobbying Congress, and some are suing including Washington, California, New Mexico, New Jersey, Tennessee, and Ohio.

The growing theft of our votes lies at the tip of an iceberg that is in clear view. There has been a radical takeover of this country that can only worsen as HAVA is mandated in all states.

For the past six years we have been involuntary guinea pigs in an experiment to see if our votes could be stolen without people saying anything. The answer has been a resounding "yes." Yes, our votes can be stolen on a massive scale--as long as the media keeps quiet about it as they have. First, votes were stolen in a few small places like Nebraska and Georgia. We all saw what happened in Florida in 2000—a lot of those votes in Florida were on electronic machines; tens of thousands of votes disappeared for Gore after the polls closed. Now, it won't be just Ohio, or Florida but the whole nation that we have to worry about.

The bottom line is electronic voting means selling our voting rights to merchants who can count your vote or throw it away if you don't vote for the person they want in office.

This is not about partisan politics. It is about people who will keep stealing your vote so that they can steal your tax dollars no matter who you vote for. Our taxes are being used to fund wars where contracts and purchases are made to companies that our elected officials either are directly invested in—or closely tied to people invested in these companies. It’s criminal. This is about elected officials being helped to stay in office because they pay back the corporations whose lobbyists give them money hand over fist when they get elected by voting for laws that favor the corporations but cost the average citizen in terms of jobs, gas prices, unemployment, bankruptcy, living in polluted environments, global warming, etc.

The bottom line is this: we will lose more and more of our rights, health, jobs, and way of life if people don't pay attention.

What can you do?

• Tell your friends and family.
• Send this email to any and everybody that you can.
• Vote anyway--make them cheat until they are caught red handed.
• Write to your senator or congressman and express your concern. Here's a link to find their address(es): http://www3.capwiz.com/usatoday/home /
• Write to the media, here's a link to the national list of all media outlets: http://upload.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard ...
• Go to your favorite search engine and type in election fraud,pop some corn and have a good read.
• Sen. Barbara Boxer: http://ga4.org/campaign/counteveryvote?qp_source=counts ...
• Info on John Conyers effort to get a hearing on vote fraud: http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/120404W.shtml
•Voting Security info site: http://www.ecotalk.org/VotingSecurity.htm

We can never hope to regain democracy in our country until votes are correctly counted, and that's not going to happen with electronic voting that doesn't give us a way to correctly give us a record of votes cast. We wouldn't accept this kind of thing for ATMs, it's even more important for their to be a trail for votes.

:hi: