A Further Update on Voter Anxiety

Dear Friend and Reader,

It’s almost 10:00 at night over here. I just finished taking a movie break and am working on my second beer. Eric has sent me this link that I think is incredibly important and worthy of sharing with everyone involved in this process of voting. I strongly recommend clicking here to read the rest of this article.

According to truthout.org, ballot fraud is not only being worried over, but it is also being anticipated. It appears as though earlier today in Ohio, a Federal Judge ordered Michael Connell, head of an IT firm responsible for the ballot counts during the travesty that was our 2004 elections, to give a deposition. Cynthia Boez from The Associated Press writes:

Connell is a former associate of Karl Rove, who is believed by those familiar with the events in question to have engaged in witness intimidation to prevent testimony about what happened in Ohio in 2004. They also believe that IT companies associated with the Republican Party have redeveloped the capacity to manipulate electronic voting results in Tuesday’s election, both within Ohio and outside, including Pennsylvania and other key battleground states such as Colorado and New Mexico. One such firm, Triad GSI, is managing voter registration databases in 55 of Ohio’s 88 counties and is hosting 25 of those databases.

All this has led to speculation that the McCain campaign’s insistence that they can win Pennsylvania, Ohio and other states, despite being (in some places, significantly) behind in most of the polls, could be prompted by having been informed about planned cyber interference with electronic voting results. The reality is that a successful cyber attack only requires a few skilled IT experts with an in-depth understanding of digital security. Election returns in many states are presently emailed from local databases for statewide consolidation, without even the standard safeguards routinely used by banks and corporations. In other words, voting data can be relatively easily hacked.

The lawsuit in Ohio is being pursued as a violation of voting rights laws, and it claims that Connell witnessed a “kingpin” cyber attack on electronic voting results in several Ohio counties, the consequence of which was to give the 2004 national election to Bush (had Kerry won Ohio, he would have won the election). Serious statistical anomalies in several Ohio counties’ election returns, as well as a shocking disconnect between exit polls and actual results in ’04 in Ohio, have never been explained. Despite being urged by his running mate John Edwards to do so, Kerry declined to take legal action in Ohio.”

The suspicions by some Democratic operatives about impending Republican interference with electronic voting in 2008 have been further fueled by the sustained bellicosity of Republican spokespeople about voter registration errors by ACORN, believing that exaggerations of the ACORN problem have been encouraged by those involved in the Republicans’ own covert e-voting fraud in order to distract the media from recent news about the possibility of this far graver threat to the integrity of American elections. ”

The rest of the articleВ includes a list of things civilians and lawyers (who are also civilians) can do if fraud is suspected. The media has been doing a piss-poor job of covering all of this. Simply put, it’s up to us, so get your cell phone cameras ready to take pictures of your TV screens, or better yet, get ready to fire up the TiVo.

See you at the polls,

Genevieve