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Call To Arms: Computer Scientists Posted by paradox An extremely disquieting entry on faulty Diebold equipment and the Florida 2000 election can be found at Mark Crispin Miller's blog today. An appalling test scenario was documented at Salon yesterday. The Black Box Voting book was recently published online in pdf's. Without peerless voting mechanisms that everybody trusts our Democracy is dead. It'll be like living in Mexico under the PRI. It's not hyperbole. Only the fully qualified computer scientists can take this fight forward. I am an amateur political scientist, and although I know the truth of the danger here I will not be listened to. I have professional qualifications, but not academic ones. Call to arms: all qualified citizens in Computer Science, our Democracy is directly threatened in only 13 months. Critical compromises may have already taken place in Florida 2000 and Georgia 2002. Only you have the expertise, experience and qualifications to fully combat the democracy-killing idea that we can count votes without an available paper audit. Fate has handed you the tools and the timing to defend our primary core value in Democracy: counting votes. I have never spoken to or beseeched my fellow brother and sister citizens like this in my life. I beg of you to read the links, see the danger, band together and wipe out this incredible effrontery to the legacy of Paine, Franklin, Madison, Washington, Lincoln, and Roosevelt. We do not want to be eternally labeled as the generation that let Democracy die. <<http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2003/10/15/riverside_voting_machines/i ndex_np.html>> ----- <<http://markcrispinmiller.blogspot.com/2003_10_19_markcrispinmiller_archi ve.html#106693422588353286>> DIEBOLD VOTE REPLACEMENT MADE AL GORE CONCEDE!!! Corporate screw-up�if that's what it was�led TV networks to mis-call the race for Bush! WAS THIS THE FIRST ELECTORAL VICTORY FOR THE CHRISTIAN RECONSTRUCTIONISTS? MORE: http://www.blackboxvoting.org - http://www.blackboxvoting.com - http://www.talion.com/blackboxvoting.org.htm If you strip away the partisan rancor over the 2000 election, you are left with the undeniable fact that a presidential candidate conceded the election to his opponent based on a second card (card #3) that mysteriously appeared, subtracted 16,022 votes from Al Gore, and in some still undefined way, added 4,000 erroneous votes to George W. Bush, then, just as mysteriously, disappears. Black Box Voting reveals for the first time that it was the Volusia anomalies that caused the election to be called for Bush. An internal document from CBS, combined with timelines and interviews from Agence France-Presse and internal Diebold memos show that: A replacement set of votes was uploaded in Volusia County about one hour after the original votes. The original votes were on "copy 0" of the memory card containing the vote database. The replacement votes were tagged to a "copy 3." According to Diebold Election Systems Sr. V.P. of Research and Development Talbot Iredale, the second set of votes should not have been done and may have been "unauthorized." In the replacement vote set, totals for all races were correct EXCEPT for the presidential race. According to CBS documents, the erroneous 20,000 votes in Volusia was directly responsible for calling the election for Bush. Brevard County, Florida also used Global Election System (now Diebold) voting machines. Brevard omitted 4,000 votes for Gore from its tally, which also contributed to the decision by the networks to call for Bush. The two erroneous county totals came directly from the central tabulating system for the county. The GEMS program is Diebold's central tabulation software. In a report on July 8 this year, Bev Harris revealed how GEMS could be used to rig an election. Flaws she uncovered were confirmed with an internal memo by Diebold Election Systems Principal Engineer Ken Clark, who admitted that the GEMS program was configured in such a way that it is possible to "end run" the voting system. One journalist was doing his job correctly that night: Ed Bradley, a CBS correspondent best known for his work on "60 Minutes." Bradley sounded alarm bells over discrepancies in the data, but no one at CBS paid attention to him. CBS also ignored independent data from The AP; had CBS and the other networks used AP data instead of Voter News Service (VNS), they would not have called the election for Bush. The election was first called by Fox analyst John Ellis, who had earlier conferred with his two cousins, George W. Bush and Florida Governor Jeb Bush. Ellis was privy to the numbers from VNS, and presumably knew the margin that would be required in order to call the election. During the evening, a 55,000-vote spread evaporated into just hundreds of votes. CBS and other news outlets had the opportunity to change their call for Bush, and knew of the discrepancy between the AP data and VNS, but chose not to change the call for several hours. CBS correspondent Dan Rather took the unusual step of commenting on the air about the inexplicable stalling by CBS president Andrew Heyward. Al Gore called George W. Bush around 3:15 a.m. and conceded the election. Between 3:30 and 3:45, he boarded a motorcade to make a public concession. Votes were melting away at a rate of some 5,000 every 15 minutes, and Ed Bradley from CBS was telling everyone in sight that someone needed to check the figures. When Gore was two blocks from Memorial Plaza in Nashville, Tennessee, where he planned to issue a formal concession, word of the disappearing votes reached him. He chose not to concede: Thus we had a recount in Florida. If this isn't disturbing enough, consider these three points: 1. We don't know if this is an isolated incident. It may have occurred in other locations in smaller, less spectacular totals 2. The errors were correctable because paper ballots existed. 3. The fact that "negative votes" could be applied to a candidate's total demonstrates such a fundamentally flawed software model that it calls into question the competence and integrity of the programmers, the company and the certification process itself. Read more: Go to any Black Box Voting site that is up at the moment (as most of you know, both sites have had a string of takedowns for reasons ranging from Diebold cease and desist orders to hacking to bogus spam complaints. _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
