GOP fears: Hugo Chavez manipulating US voting machines

[Swatopluk]

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/102906Y.shtml

Looks like the GOP gets cold feet about electronic voting. One of the voting machine producing companies has connections to a Venezuelan software company. Projecting their own vices they fear that Hugo "why hasn't the CIA taken him out yet" Chavez might try to manipulate the US elections (and probably not in favor of the GOP).
Should we laugh or be very very sad?

[beagle]

I knew it was a big mistake to give computers the vote.

[DeadPoet]

Absolutely. But I don't think they'll get rid of their computers because of Chavez. The risk of the whole system being rigged by Venezuela is probably not that high.. not as high as the risk of it being rigged by Americans.

[Sibling Chatty]

That whole scenario is ludicrous, coming from the people that were perfectly willing to turn over management of our ports to Dubai...

And just because the Repuglycants are unable to distingiush between a corporation and the government (they know who owns them) doesn't mean the Venezuelans can't.

The fact that there are already complaints coming out of South Florida--and they're not being answered because there's NO STRUCTURED RESPONSE SYSTEM for "I clicked this and it's registering THAT"--does not bode well for the upcoming elections.

That civil war that everybody's been saying won't come?? You know, the people against the GovernCorp?? It may be on the way.

[Aggie]

Absolutely. But I don't think they'll get rid of their computers because of Chavez. The risk of the whole system being rigged by Venezuela is probably not that high.. not as high as the risk of it being rigged by Americans.

Ah, yes, but it's important to raise objections now so that they can cry foul when they lose fairly. 

[Swatopluk]

Absolutely. But I don't think they'll get rid of their computers because of Chavez. The risk of the whole system being rigged by Venezuela is probably not that high.. not as high as the risk of it being rigged by Americans.

Ah, yes, but it's important to raise objections now so that they can cry foul when they lose fairly. 

I think that's exactly what this is all about. Hiding their own fraud or potential loss by preemptively claiming that is actually the Dems cheating.

[Sibling Chatty]

And the more people say that out loud, the more it becomes a problem for them to do it.

October Suprises become October Fizzles when they're so anticipated and so pre-publicized by the 'other side' that everybody just says "Yeah, yeah, we know, boogity, boogity, we're so scared or impressed or whatever you wanted, go away..."

Even the Repubs are getting tired of the stupid crap they're pulling.

If Bush tries to pull martial law out of his bag o' tricks, the only state he has is Florida. (Jeb must really be afraid of that little creep.) And I don't know that he'd get away with it there.

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

Meh, it sounds like an excuse to replace Sequoia machines (apparently not under their control) with Liebold TM.

I'm no fan of Chavez but the whole idea is beyond preposterous.

(now, the shell company with venezuelan friends with *loans* and *investments*, etc, doesn't sound so far fetched. As usual the devil's lies are peppered with truths to make them more credible.)

[Swatopluk]

My bet is 5 seats gained in the House and 2 in the Senate for the Dems according to the official results.
The cynic in me says that a rigging will be unnecessary because the purging will suffice. I read that Ohio's Blackwell purged half a million since 2000 from the voter lists (about 10% of all potential voters there).

Generally I recall that old joke from the 3rd Reich: Elections have to be postponed. Someone broke into (propaganda minister) Goebbels' desk and stole the results.

[Sibling Chatty]

I'm betting a bigger change in the house. Some of the Repubs are going down strictly because of the anger vote. Indications are that the RR isn't buying into the "we'll fix it" thing about the Foley incident, and Mehlmann's an obvious problem. (Rove's a possible closet problem.)

I voted today. Anymhere there was no Dem against a Repub, I voted Libertarian. (Except for one write in. If the Repub for Supreme Court dies and nobody else wrote someone in, Dan's gonna be a Texas Supreme!!) A couple that was coming in as we were leaving...she says "Don't forget. If there's no Dem, leave it blank or vote for somebody else." His response was, "I sure ain't votin' fer them crooks ever again." 12 years ago he was the Republican Party Chairman for this county.

I do prefer our voting machines to any of the others. We have the e-Slate, which are not connected to a modem, and can even be popped out of the "booth" and taken to the curb for a handicapped voter.

http://www.shapethefuture.org/eslate/eslate.html

(The video takes forever to load. Don't try unless you're bored and want to go take a nap before you watch it.)

[Teripie]

Our early voting here is done on Diebold machines. Absolutely no paper trail. When the supervisor of elections was questioned on this, he protested and said the was a paper trail, then produced the little slip of paper that has the results printed on it. Nothing individual, just a print out of what the machine says the total tally is. To give him some credit, he did test every single machine, something that is not required. He's trying to be a careful as he can be, considering the tools he is given. I think he's still sweating the incident in '04 when Gerhard (sp?) swept the county in the primary and he had dropped out of the race a month earlier.

Oh yeah, did I tell ya our supervisor is an appointee of Jeb Bush?

HBO is showing a documentary tonight at 9 EST. It's about the black box voting and titled "Hacking The Vote."

As to the election results, I predict there will be no change. Maybe the dems will pick up a seat or two, but not an entire branch. The people what to "vote the bums out" but they don't want to vote their bum out. And for what it's worth, if there are exit polls, they will be way off again. Just watch and see.

[Swatopluk]

Diebold tries to stop the airing of said HBO documentary without actually having seen it before.

Edit: I just stumbled on this story
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/110206G.shtml
Looks like that we actually have someone who actually got the "job" to program a voting-fraud system for Florida offered and rejected it with less than positive results (especially because he refused to keep his mouth shut about it)

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

*sigh*

I WISH I could say "I'm surprised" -- but, having my worst fears [regarding LieBold] confirmed hardly comes as a surprise, anymore.

Especially, when the "results" are compared to exit polls -- which up until 2000, were getting more and more accurate, as they refined their techniques.

But what's to do, except continue to hope that others, besides Clint will "go public"?