[ale] [OT] Update on the VoterGA Voting Rights Law Suit

[Jim Kinney]

Eeewww! Executive inbreeding is an image I did NOT want today!
Especially when it's chunky 50+ year old men who are related in ways
nature did not intend.

On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 12:35 AM, aaron <aaron at pd.org> wrote:
> On 2009, Oct, 21, , at 8:09 PM, Jim Popovitch wrote:
>> On Sat, Oct 17, 2009 at 22:10, aaron <aaron at pd.org> wrote:
>>> Earlier this month the Georgia Supreme Court handed down
>>> a decision in the VoterGA lawsuit challenging the
>>> constitutionality of Georgia's zero-evidence,
>>> unaccountable electronic voting systems.
>>
>> http://www.boingboing.net/2009/10/20/voting-machine-sourc.html
>>
>> Aaron, do you know if GA uses any of Sequouia's equipment?
>>
>> -Jim P.
>
> We don't use any Sequoia equipment in Georgia. The Diebold
> monopoly runs the whole show in most every county, from the
> design of the electronic and paper ballots to paper ballot
> printing to the (Hursti Hacked) optical scanners to the
> Zero Evidence black box vote fraud DRE touchscreen machines
> to the vote tabulation systems (running an unsecured M$
> Abscess database on stock windisease Xcrement Pile boxes).
>
> Diebold recently sold off their elections devision to ES&S,
> but it's still all in the family.  Bob Urosevich ran Deibold,
> his brother Todd runs ES&S.  I'd expect Bob to officially join
> his brother Todd as another ES&S exec shortly. My recollection
> is that there is also some executive inbreeding with Sequoia
> as well, but I don't have specifics at hand. Together, the
> Urosevich brothers control about 80% of the electronic voting
> machines used in U.S. elections, which in 2008 reflected about
> 33% of the total votes cast.
>
> So now there are only two corporate electronic election
> systems manufactures running the monopoly, but nothing
> has really changed and there is no real separation or
> competition between the parties. All the systems are equally
> secretive and corruptible. Regardless of manufacturer, the
> software and inner workings of all of the electronic voting
> systems is kept totally secret. There is no peer review of
> the code and all of the sycophant system testing companies
> who are supposed to "certify" the machines are locked behind
> "non disclosure" and "trade secret" claims so we don't even
> know what their voodoo "certification" processes are, let
> alone any details of their "testing" results. Public auditing
> of election results is equally abysmal, as none of the machines
> in use produce paper ballots as evidence and, to my knowledge,
> no statistically valid audits of election results from machines
> that produce a paper audit trail have ever been performed.
>
> In the end, it may well be that there is malicious code in
> the Diebold ES&S boxes similar to what is being discovered in
> Sequoia's boxes with this leak, but it is nearly impossible
> to know.  When voting rights advocates tried to examine the
> 2004 Georgia election results with Open Records requests to
> the county registrars for copies of the database archives kept
> on CD, the Secretary of State shut them down using a Diebold
> claim that the disks contained "Trade Secret" software. The
> folks doing the Open Records requests lacked the funds to
> file formal charges against the State officials and take
> the issue to court, but the boing boing article in your link
> suggests that Diebold might have been telling the truth
> about being so grossly incompetent that they put evidence
> of felony crimes on their election records CDs.
>
> It only gets worse when you learn about the origins of all
> these companies. The company that Diebold bought up 30 days
> before taking over Georgia's election systems, the one they
> bought so they would actually own some voting machines and
> thus might be able to fulfill the largest election systems
> purchase contract in history, the company that actually
> developed all the software and systems that Diebold dumped
> in Georgia, was Global Election Systems (based in Texas,
> of course). According to some investigative reports, the top
> execs of GES, at least one of whom was a felon convicted of
> grand larceny and tampering with computer files, admitted in
> memos to forming the company and creating the zero evidence
> machines with the specific intent of making it easier
> manipulate elections. Again, reportedly, the GES founders
> were self identified religious extremists who didn't think
> democracy should be trusted or that the people should be
> allowed to elect their own government.
>
> The loud BOOM was my head exploding. Again. I really
> shouldn't try to answer questions about this stuff.  :-)
> Only bright spot is my understanding that, with the
> notable exception of Georgia, every State employing
> electronic voting is in the process of discontinuing
> the use of Zero Evidence style Diebold-ESS-Sequioa
> machines.
>
> Felons working for GES / Diebold [/ ? ES&S ?] details
> can be found here:
> <http://www.wired.com/politics/security/news/2003/12/61640>
>
> peace
> aaron
>
>
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-- 
-- 
James P. Kinney III
Actively in pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness