A saying by the sages of ancient China goes: If a man is caught stealing a hook (to fish and feed his family), he is hanged. If on the other hand he steals a country, he becomes an Emperor!!
But what about when he steals the whole world? The possibility of this, apparently, did not cross the minds of the great Chinese sages.
Virtually all the US media, and what passes for public opinion, is in a rush to put the past US election behind us. It is incredible how fear has cowed all.
That this type of computerization was smuggled into US elections is testament that humanity is, in the extreme, lax about matters of utmost importance.
For how could a thinking populace have accepted their destiny to rest on a "computerized" election that is nothing other than a "black box"? The whole year has seen warnings by the most eminent experts but nobody lifted a finger.
Access to govt information is a right that was won through heroic struggles of those who came before us. How come nobody ever even asked to look at the block of code that counts the vote in the software? How come the Democratic Party/Democratic National committee never asked?
It is indeed telling that the leaders of DP, including John Kerry, instead of setting up a bank of giant computer screens to trace the voting/counting process in as many voting places as possible all sat in front of TV screens instead. In this day and age this would be laughable if the lives of humanity were not at stake.
The stepsons of John Kerry, together with their mother Teresa, had to 'shout' at him to abandon his efforts to be even more Bush-like than Bush himself and salvage his honor as an anti-war candidate for the anti-war multitudes. And with so much at stake why didn't he suspect the possibility of computerized rigging? He told the world that the Bush camp was the most crooked, didn't he? (Don't you remember the open microphone?)
What has happened in the US is not just the stealing of an election, but the legitimatization of this stealing. The guys in OMAHA, who are behind all this have not only stolen a country but the whole world.
From now on they will just perfect the 'counting' part of the code and put in office whoever they choose, not only in the US but all over the world. And in perpetuity!!
There is an election in a year's time in Mozambique. Frelimo says that their election will be 'computerized'. 'Access to the database will only be limited to Frelimo officials', they say.
It is going to be a crude version of what we have seen in the US.
Indeed Uganda too is putting in place a similar black box.
México insists that they will always maintain their system which is uniform countrywide and consists of simply putting an X for your choice. Not 'black boxes'.
Where do we go from here?
Mitayo Potosi
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J Ssemakula <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I think it is dangerously naive to think that Dubya "won" because of the rural vote. The reason is simple enough: arithmetic. The US population is about 80% urban. Here, see for yourself:-
P2. URBAN AND RURAL [6] - Universe: Total population
Data Set: Census 2000 Summary File 1 (SF 1) 100-Percent Data
United States
Florida
Ohio
Total:
281,421,906
15,982,378
11,353,140
Urban:
222,360,539
14,270,020
8,782,329
Inside urbanized areas
192,323,824
13,470,104
7,311,293
Inside urban clusters
30,036,715
799,916
1,471,036
Rural
59,061,367
1,712,358
2,570,811
Filler
0
0
0
U.S. Census Bureau Census 2000 Rural vote? Rather than pussy-footing about, it is better to face reality: If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it most likely is an elaborately rigged duck!Go to the above tables and stick in any of the "battle states" and do the math yourself.
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:Hi guys,
After reading Mu7's letter to Bidandi Ssali I am convinced of the following:
1) Parliament will ammend the constitution to allow Mu7 to run for another term
2)Mu7 will win the Presidency in 2006 and will president for another five year term and not b'se he will rig the election but b'se the opposition is such in a dissarry and can't reorgnize to give a credible challenge to him. He will win the George Bush style winning in rular areas but not in cities. It will the opposition about 4-5yrs to organize.
3) Anyone who opposes the Kisanja will be fired from government. We will see more government officials declaring their allegiance to the Kisanja idea.
That's my take, I don't claim to be an expert on Ugandan politics but I am a very kin observer of Ugandan politics and the way things work in Uganda.
Frank
Glitch gave Bush extra votes in Ohio
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) -- An error with an electronic voting system gave President Bush 3,893 extra votes in suburban Columbus, elections officials said.
Franklin County's unofficial results had Bush receiving 4,258 votes to Democrat John Kerry's 260 votes in a precinct in Gahanna. Records show only 638 voters cast ballots in that precinct.
Bush actually received 365 votes in the precinct, Matthew Damschroder, director of the Franklin County Board of Elections, told The Columbus Dispatch.
State and county election officials did not immediately respond to requests by The Associated Press for more details about the voting system and its vendor, and whether the error, if repeated elsewhere in Ohio, could have affected the outcome.
Bush won the state by more than 136,000 votes, according to unofficial results, and Kerry conceded the election on Wednesday after acknowledging that 155,000 provisional ballots yet to be counted in Ohio would not change the result. (Full Ohio results)
The Secretary of State's Office said Friday it could not revise Bush's total until the county reported the error.
The Ohio glitch is among a handful of computer troubles that have emerged since Tuesday's elections. (Touchscreen voting troubles reported)
In one North Carolina county, more than 4,500 votes were lost because officials mistakenly believed a computer that stored ballots electronically could hold more data than it did. And in San Francisco, a malfunction with custom voting software could delay efforts to declare the winners of four races for county supervisor.
In the Ohio precinct in question, the votes are recorded onto a cartridge. On one of the three machines at that precinct, a malfunction occurred in the recording process, Damschroder said. He could not explain how the malfunction occurred.
Damschroder said people who had seen poll results on the election board's Web site called to point out the discrepancy. The error would have been discovered when the official count for the election is performed later this month, he said.
The reader also recorded zero votes in a county commissioner race on the machine.
Workers checked the cartridge against memory banks in the voting machine and each showed that 115 people voted for Bush on that machine. With the other machines, the total for Bush in the precinct added up to 365 votes.
Meanwhile, in San Francisco, a glitch occurred with software designed for the city's new "ranked-choice voting," in which voters list their top three choices for municipal offices. If no candidate gets a majority of first-place votes outright, voters' second and third-place preferences are then distributed among candidates who weren't eliminated in the first round. (E-vote goes smoothly, but experts skeptical)
When the San Francisco Department of Elections tried a test run on Wednesday of the program that does the redistribution, some of the votes didn't get counted and skewed the results, director John Arntz said.
"All the information is there," Arntz said. "It's just not arriving the way it was supposed to."
A technician from the Omaha, Neb. company that designed the software, Election Systems & Software Inc., was working to diagnose and fix the problem.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/11/05/voting.problems.ap
Copyright 2004 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Broward machines count backward
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 05, 2004
FORT LAUDERDALE — It had to happen. Things were just going too smoothly.
Early Thursday, as Broward County elections officials wrapped up after a long day of canvassing votes, something unusual caught their eye. Tallies should go up as more votes are counted. That's simple math. But in some races, the numbers had gone . . . down.
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Officials found the software used in Broward can handle only 32,000 votes per precinct. After that, the system starts counting backward.
Why a voting system would be designed to count backward was a mystery to Broward County Mayor Ilene Lieberman. She was on the phone late Wednesday with Omaha-based Elections Systems and Software.
Bad numbers showed up only in running tallies through the day, not the final one. Final tallies were reached by cross-checking machine totals, and officials are confident they are accurate.
The glitch affected only the 97,434 absentee ballots, Broward Elections Supervisor Brenda Snipes said. All were placed in their own precincts and optical scanners totaled votes, which were then fed to a main computer.
That's where the counting problems surfaced. They affected only votes for constitutional amendments 4 through 8, because they were on the only page that was exactly the same on all county absentee ballots. The same software is used in Martin and Miami-Dade counties; Palm Beach and St. Lucie counties use different companies.
The problem cropped up in the 2002 election. Lieberman said ES&S told her it had sent software upgrades to the Florida Secretary of State's office, but that the office kept rejecting the software. The state said that's not true. Broward elections officials said they had thought the problem was fixed.
Secretary of State spokeswoman Jenny Nash said all counties using this system had been told that such problems would occur if a precinct is set up in a way that would allow votes to get above 32,000. She said Broward should have split the absentee ballots into four separate precincts to avoid that and that a Broward elections employee since has admitted to not doing that.
But Lieberman said later, "No election employee has come to the canvassing board and made the statements that Jenny Nash said occurred."
Late Thursday, ES&S issued a statement reiterating that it learned of the problems in 2002 and said the software upgrades would be submitted to Hood's office next year. The company was working with the counties it serves to make sure ballots don't exceed capacity and said no other counties reported similar problems.
"While the county bears the ultimate responsibility for programming the ballot and structuring the precincts, we . . . regret any confusion the discrepancy in early vote totals has caused," the statement said.
After several calls to the company during the day were not returned, an ES&S spokeswoman said late Thursday she did not know whether ES&S contacted the secretary of state two years ago or whether the software is designed to count backward.
While the problem surfaced two years ago, it was under a different Br oward elections supervisor and a different secretary of state. Snipes said she had not known about the 2002 snafu.
Later, Lieberman said, "I am not passing judgments and I'm not pointing a finger." But she said that if ES&S is found to be at fault, actions might include penalizing ES&S or even defaulting on its contract.
Find this article at:
www.palmbeachpost.com/politics/content/news/epaper/2004/11/05/a29a_BROWVOTE_1105.html
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Letters from members of Congress to David Walker, Comptroller General of the United States, demanding an investigation of the election: November 5th, 2004 & November 8th, 2004
http://www.house.gov/judiciary_democrats/gaoinvestvote2004ltr11804.pdf
"Americans are born in a half-savage country" Ezra Pound, 1885 - 1972.
Mitayo Potosi
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