Voting Machines Fail, Incorrect Choices Appear on Screens

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

Kim Griffith voted on Thursday— over and over and over.

She's among the people in Bernalillo and Sandoval counties who say they have had trouble with early voting equipment. When they have tried to vote for a particular candidate, the touch-screen system has said they voted for somebody else.

It's a problem that can be fixed by the voters themselves— people can alter the selections on their ballots, up to the point when they indicate they are finished and officially cast the ballot. For Griffith, it took a lot of altering.

She went to Valle Del Norte Community Center in Albuquerque, planning to vote for John Kerry. "I pushed his name, but a green check mark appeared before President Bush's name," she said.

Griffith erased the vote by touching the check mark at Bush's name.
That's how a voter can alter a touch-screen ballot. She again tried to vote for Kerry, but the screen again said she had voted for Bush.

Michael Cadigan, president of the Albuquerque City Council, had a similar experience.

"I cast my vote for president. I voted for Kerry and a check mark for Bush appeared," he said.

http://abqjournal.com/elex/246845elex10-22-04.htm?lrail

[broncogary]

This could be a landslide!

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/...p?story=575453

With only eight days to go and the polls showing Bush and Kerry still neck and neck, the result is once agin likely to turn on the minutiae of the voting system. But this time the whole country seems poised to descend into post-election chaos.

No need to wonder if this year's US presidential election is headed for another meltdown: the meltdown has already started. The voting machines have already begun to break down, accusations of systematic voter suppression and fraud are rampant, and lawyers fully armed and ready with an intimate knowledge of the nation's byzantine election laws have flocked to court to cry foul in half a dozen states.

Nine days out from election day, we don't yet know whether the state-by-state arithmetic will lead to a post-election stalemate similar to the 36-day battle for Florida in 2000. It is, of course, possible that the margins of victory in the 50 states will be wide enough to avert the worst - even if overall conditions are likely to fall short of the usual definition of a free and fair election.

Given the nail-bitingly close numbers in the opinion polls, however, Election 2004 could just as easily produce a concatenation of knockdown, drag-out fights in several states at once, making the débâcle in Florida four years ago look, in retrospect, like the constitutional equivalent of a vicarage tea party.

[orinjkrush]

hey LAB, got a question for ya. given that this is razor thin; and how extreme people's feelings are; and reliving 2000 election all over again....do you think there is a good chance of .....in the streets violence??

[watermock]

Good Grief. They are hitting the straight ticket button.

I never am amazed how stupid people are. Take the straight ticket button off you dimwit.

It's amazing.

[watermock]

We have an election where people can't even chicken peck anymore. I am embarrassed. Jesus Christ! You can vote with your beak now and they can't figure it out.

[watermock]

We should just put a kernel of corn next to Kerry and the idiots might be able to peck their way to victory.

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

Originally Posted by orinjkrush

hey LAB, got a question for ya. given that this is razor thin; and how extreme people's feelings are; and reliving 2000 election all over again....do you think there is a good chance of .....in the streets violence??

Yeah, krush, there's always a potential for something like this. Many of us can remember all the social upheavals and riots during the 60s.

Historically, the same groups will only tolerate being surpressed for so long before the "nothing left to lose" dynamic kicks in.

My gut tells me, however, that there will be a last-minute movement where the undecideds break for Kerry, and that huge turnout by "ABB" voters will also turn the election for Kerry.

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

Bad News for Bush

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/...p?story=575453

Here's George W. Bush's problem. How does a president win re-election when all the news the voters are seeing is bad?

Polls show the president running even or slightly ahead of Senator John Kerry. But bad news is piling up like mounds of trash in a garbage strike, and that's never good for an incumbent.

The war in Iraq is a mind-numbing tragedy with no end in sight. Dozens of Iraqi army recruits were slaughtered Saturday in one of the deadliest attacks yet against the Iraqi security forces. Yesterday an American diplomat was killed in a mortar attack near the Baghdad airport.



The latest horrific video to come out of the war zone shows the kidnapped British-Iraqi aid worker, Margaret Hassan, trembling, weeping and begging for her life. "Please help me," she says. "This might be my last hours."

American troops have fought valiantly, but cracks in their resolve are beginning to show. "This is Vietnam," said Daniel Planalp, a 21-year-old Marine corporal from San Diego who was quoted in yesterday's New York Times. "I don't even know why we're over here fighting."

Here at home the stock market has tanked, in part because of record-high oil prices. The Dow Jones industrial average closed at its low for the year on Friday as world oil prices streaked ever higher. The cost of oil has jumped more than 75 percent in the past year. With the weather turning colder, the attention of homeowners - many of them voters - is being drawn to the price of home heating oil. What they're seeing is not pretty.

The Energy Department expects heating oil bills to increase nearly 30 percent this year, and that may be a conservative estimate. Thermostats across the country are heading down, down, down.

Republican campaign officials are worried about the dearth of good news. The flu vaccine shortage has led to price-gouging and long lines of sick and elderly patients, some of them on the verge of panic. Last week we learned that the index of leading economic indicators had moved lower in September, the fourth successive monthly decline, which could be an indication of a slowdown in economic growth.

The lead stories in The New York Times and The Washington Post on Friday were both about Iraq - and both were disheartening. The Times said senior American officials were assembling new information about the increasingly deadly Iraqi insurgency that showed "it has significantly more fighters and far greater financial resources than had been estimated."

The Post wrote that, according to a U.S.-financed poll, leaders of Iraq's religious parties are becoming the most popular politicians in the country, an extremely ominous development in the view of the Bush administration.

These are all stories with the potential to influence voters, and they are not being offset by other, more positive developments. The result has been high anxiety levels among Republican operatives.

"If you're asking me if there's a perfect storm of bad news occurring, the answer is no," said a G.O.P. campaign strategist, who asked not to be identified. "If you're asking if I'd like a little rosier scenario to be played out on the front pages and the nightly news, the answer of course would be yes."

Unable to counter the bad news with stories of major successes, the Bush campaign has turned almost exclusively to the so-called war against terror. The message in a nutshell: be very afraid.

A Bush campaign commercial released a few days ago shows wolves advancing menacingly toward the camera. A voice in the ad says, "Weakness attracts those who are waiting to do America harm."

At the same time, the Republican Party is doing what it can in key states to block as many Democratic votes as possible. Party officials have mounted a huge organized effort to challenge - some would say intimidate - voters in states like Ohio and Florida, in a bid to offset the effects of huge voter registration drives and a potentially heavy turnout of voters opposed to Mr. Bush and his policies.

Election officials in Ohio said they'd never seen such a large drive mounted to challenge voters on Election Day.

Voter suppression is a reprehensible practice. It's a bullet aimed at the very heart of democracy. But the G.O.P. evidently considers it an essential strategy in an environment with so little positive news.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

It Is The Wolves In The White House Who Are Preying Upon Democracy, And Gorging On Its Carcass

http://www.buzzflash.com/editorial/04/10/edi04079.html

Here's the crucial difference between the GOP theft of the election in 2000 and their efforts to steal the 2004 White House campaign.

In 2000, they were outside the government trying to steal their way in, with Florida as ground zero in the mugging of democracy.

In 2004, they ARE the government: controlling the legislative, executive and judicial branches.

They have appointed enough federal judges, combined with past right wing appointees in the Reagan and Bush I administrations, so that any election initiative that they support or oppose will by upheld or struck down by an ideologically driven right wing judge somewhere along the appellate route. Their moles are in place and ready to do what they were appointed to the bench for: to protect the Bush regime and the interests of the Republican Party and its fundamentalist supporters over the rights of Americans to choose their government.

It is like trying to win a football game when all the referees work FOR the opposing team.

If you are voting in a state with a Republican Secretary of State and a Republican Governor -- such as Florida and Ohio -- you are voting in an environment where the Bush Cartel is using its surrogates to try and suppress every Democratic vote that it can.

Already, through a variety of schemes, including working to ensure that provisional votes are not counted, felon purges, the organized dumping of Democratic registration forms, improper registration of Democrats (to ensure that their right to vote will be denied when challenged by a "rent-a-thug" poll watcher), to mysterious phone calls to Democratic voters telling them to vote in the wrong precinct, to the collection of absentee ballot requests for Dems that never show up at the election office, to the illegal registration of students and naturalized citizens as Republicans -- and including many, many more GOP dirty tricks -- the Republican Party has nationalized their Democratic voter suppression activity, using the multiple strategies that they tried out in Florida -- and many, many more new ones. Most of them are actions that are punishable as felonies.

But nothing will be as disgraceful an assault on democracy as the hiring of 2,500 "rent a Republican thugs" -- at $100 a day -- to intentionally intimidate minority and other Democratic voters from exercising their democratic and constitutional right by creating chaos and a menacing environment through challenging voters in Democratic (primarily minority) districts in Ohio. Such an onslaught of challenges on election day has the intent of tying up polling booths through lengthy challenges (a process that was successful in dooming the ill-fated voter recount in Florida in 2000 even before the Supreme Court stepped in), thus forcing voters to abandon unfathomable waits as each voter is challenged, requiring a lengthy review process of each individual's right to vote. Secondly, the very presence of hostile GOP thugs -- and the boastful public promotion of this strategy by the Republican Party of Ohio (at the behest of Karl Rove, you can be sure) -- is meant to keep fearful minority views from coming to the voting booths in Ohio at all. This is Jim Crow redux.

Such an effort, among a multitude of voter suppression tactics adopted by the male Katherine Harris of Ohio, Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, a right wing Bush puppet (he's even foamingly at the mouth anti-gay a la Rick "bestiality" Santorum), can impact tens of thousands of votes to the detriment of John Kerry in what as shaping up as the pivotal state of the election. Current projections indicate that Bush cannot win the election without winning Ohio, where he is currently behind in the polls.

That is why Blackwell -- like Katherine Harris, a Bush state campaign co-chair -- has gone to such lengths as requiring that voter registration forms would only be accepted on paper with a certain weight (which he only announced shortly before the registration deadline), until he was forced to stop implementing the requirement.

The refusal to honor provisional ballots in Ohio cast in a different precinct, first struck down and then upheld by a federal appeals court, could result in the loss of tens of thousands of Kerry votes. Although the justice department had no standing in the case, John "Bush owns my butt" Ashcroft filed an amicus brief on a similar provisional voting case in Michigan, even though the federal government was not a party to the suit. He was signaling to Republican office holders throughout the U.S. that the Bush Cartel was going to do everything possible to squash hundreds of thousands of provisional votes, and that they should assist in anyway they could. That was his message in the Michigan case. So you can see that this is an organized effort of disenfranchisement, involving every level of the Bush Cartel and their hired "consultants."

With all the right wing judges now sitting on the federal bench, not to mention the 5-4 "Bush at any price, democracy be damned" majority on the Supreme Court, it is only a matter of time before any appeal that favors democracy and voting rights is struck down in favor of Bush by some judicial ideologue who takes orders from the Federalist Society and the Bush Administration.

It should not be forgotten that William Rehnquist, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and one of the felonious five of 2000, got his start in right wing Republican politics by serving as a "poll watcher" in Arizona and aggressively challenging the rights of minorities to vote as a means of disenfranchisement. (This was something that Rehnquist committed perjury about in his confirmation hearings, by the way. But the Democrats, when the truth emerged, were forgiving, as always, and didn't put up a stink about our Chief Justice being found out to have lied under oath.)

So even before most of the country votes on November 2, it is likely that John Kerry will have been denied thousands upon thousands of votes, well in excess of one or two hundred thousand possibly, due to a national GOP strategy of voter suppression, intimidation and dirty tricks, using multiple strategies.

If this is the kind of democracy that Bush is having our soldiers die for, it is only further proof that he is a fraud. In his mind, a democracy is the exercise of voting by white Christians who want to turn America into a theocracy. The votes of minorities and Democrats are to be discounted as much as possible because they do not represent votes of "saved Christians" who are attempting to impose their faith and morality upon a nation they consider "fallen from God."

The denial of voting rights as a national strategy is not just a return to the days of Jim Crow, it is an indication that the Bush Cartel has a different perspective on democracy than what is guaranteed under our Constitution. It is the right to vote based on one's faith and party affiliation. It is the structuring of a state apparatus aimed at stifling democracy as we know it and replacing it more with something that is a cross between Franco's fascism and Stalin's Soviet style of rule.

In a story in the Boston Globe, it was revealed that White House Chief of Staff of Andrew Card recently told a gathering of Maine Bush supporters that the man in the White House regards Americans as 10-year-olds who need a strong father figure to lead them in this time of peril. That is the model upon which a fascist leader rules, not the model of Constitutional democracy upon which our nation is founded.

The pre-election voter suppression currently being carried out by Rove and company is an attempt to further erode our democracy, as the Bush Cartel has begun the dismantling of the democratic process ever since it first hijacked the election in 2000.

The Bush Family knows that Jeb Bush will carry Florida for Bush no matter what. He has already succeeded in using multiple tactics to suppress Democratic voters, particularly minorities, including minority voter intimidation in Orlando using state police and the second round of a felon's purge that was allegedly halted, but not really stopped by the individual Republican-run counties. As Tom DeLay has done in the House of Representatives several times in the past four years, Jeb will use a variety of means to make sure that his candidate (in the House it was Bush-backed bills) "wins" even if by one vote. If push comes to shove, there are always the Diebold electronic voting machines. Jeb has allowed Diebold to keep its software counting system "proprietary," meaning that the votes in Florida and wherever electronic voting machines are used (there are two other pro-Republican companies supplying such machines) for the counting of our votes has been "privatized." Republican-affiliated companies are counting the votes of America, and we don't have the right to know how they are counting them.

And don't forget that it was the CEO of Diebold, which is ironically located in the Buckeye State, who pledged that he would do everything possible to carry Ohio for Bush.

We take him at his word.

We trust the Kerry campaign, which has said that it is prepared to take on all legal challenges, has listened closely to that pledge. It is a pledge of allegiance to the Bush Cartel, not to America.

The institutional integrity of our democracy is at stake in this election.

Having once gotten away with the theft of the voting process, the Bush Cartel has had four years to plan its second national robbery, now operating from inside the government itself. They don't just have Jeb to do the dirty work for them; they have the entire national government, including the Department of (In) Justice.

Iraqis should take note that when Bush talks about freedom and democracy, he is using code words for a rigged election.

That is what democracy means to the Bush's: winning at all costs, the voters be damned.

What they have done in the pre-election period is to literally make Democratic votes vanish before they can even be cast. That is what they did with the infamous felon's list in Florida in 2000. Now, their system of disenfranchisement is much more multi-pronged and elaborate.

And now, like a cancer upon our Constitution, they have spread the disease throughout the nation.

If Kerry wins, Karl Rove plans to cry fraud at the polls, and then shop around for a judge who agrees with him that the Democrats stole the election.

If you think that is brazen hypocrisy, just remember Rove doesn't give a damn.

He knows that Nino Scalia will be camped out at the Supreme Court willing to rescue Bush from defeat, using whatever illogical partisan argument is necessary to get the dirty deed accomplished.

After all, the Bush Cartel, their corporate cronies, and the theocratic right own our government, don't they?

If they didn't, they might ironically argue, then how did they come to power? They weren't elected in 2000; that's for sure.

They run elections by a different set of rules. The voting is just an inconvenience to them. Their challenge is to come up with foolproof ways to rig the election.

Let's just hope that their plans have a fatal flaw, such as the will of the people triumphing over the treachery of the Bush thugs.

It's the only thing that can bring an end to an administration that has betrayed the American Revolution, our Constitution, and the right of one-person, one vote.

On September 11th, 2001, more than 3,000 people were horrifically murdered by terrorists as the "leaders" of this nation ignored warnings of an impending strike. It was an assault upon the United States.

But it is the wolves in the White House who are preying upon democracy, and gorging on its carcass.

[orinjkrush]

i believe the mission changed. when it was take saddam and his government down, we won. mission accomplished. when it became rebuild iraq, it became vietnam II. **** them, let them rebuild themselves. and they should pay war reparations to us, for making us come over there and clean up their mess. i bet the saudis are butt ****ing bush as we speak.

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

During the 2000 campaign Smirk said he was against nation building.

And he has the audacity to try to paint Kerry as a "flip-flopper?"

Orlando Sentinel Endorses Kerry

Today, the conservative board of the Orlando Sentinel — which hasn't endorsed a Democrat for President since Lyndon Johnson — joins the slew of papers that endorsed George W. Bush in 2000 but are now urging the election of John Kerry.

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/...,6815713.story

[orinjkrush]

i could go democratic. but kerry? **** the liar. what he did when he came back was treason.

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

Originally Posted by orinjkrush

i could go democratic. but kerry? **** the liar. what he did when he came back was treason.

Yeah, when I think about someone working to prevent the unnecessary deaths of untold numbers of Americans in an immoral war, "treason" is the first word that springs to mind.

IMO, the veterans who are taking payoffs from BushCorp to diss and lie about Kerry are traitors. They betray a brother who fought to bring them home alive.

The irony here is that when Kerry came home from Viet Nam, America was deeply divided over the war, and in the end, Kerry and the majority of Americans were right, and we got out.

[Captain_Poncho]

Originally Posted by L.A. BRONCOS FAN

Yeah, krush, there's always a potential for something like this. Many of us can remember all the social upheavals and riots during the 60s.

Historically, the same groups will only tolerate being surpressed for so long before the "nothing left to lose" dynamic kicks in.

My gut tells me, however, that there will be a last-minute movement where the undecideds break for Kerry, and that huge turnout by "ABB" voters will also turn the election for Kerry.

So does that mean you're gonna come storming up from the basement with a bucket on your head and a broom handle in your hand, so that you can take part in the righteous rioting once Bush wins the election again?

That'd be so cool.

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

Originally Posted by Captain_Poncho

So does that mean you're gonna come storming up from the basement with a bucket on your head and a broom handle in your hand, so that you can take part in the righteous rioting once Bush wins the election again?

That'd be so cool.

What are you going to do when Kerry sends the Kennebunkport Cowboy packing back to that faux ranch in Crawford?

Knowing you, you'll declare a victory for bush and go on believing he's still the president for another four years.

[W*GS]

Originally Posted by L.A. BRONCOS FAN

My gut tells me, however, that there will be a last-minute movement where the undecideds break for Kerry, and that huge turnout by "ABB" voters will also turn the election for Kerry.

Hey, maybe you and Bush can compare guts.

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

Originally Posted by W*GS

Hey, maybe you and Bush can compare guts.

Maybe you can do for bush what Monica did for Bill. (Everyone knows that's your fantasy.)

[W*GS]

Originally Posted by L.A. BRONCOS FAN

Maybe you can do for bush what Monica did for Bill. (Everyone knows that's your fantasy.)

'Fess up and admit that I was the one who came up with that gem, describing your fantasy, LABF.

Read the 9/11 report yet?
Been to opensecrets.org yet?
Calculate the daily volume of oil added to the SPR since late 2001 and compared that to the US daily oil consumption yet?
Come up with those comparisons of Gini coefficients yet?

Man, you got a lot of homework!

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

Originally Posted by W*GS

Man, you got a lot of homework!

You've obviously mistaken me for a member of your special ed class.

58,000 missing absentee ballots in South Florida

BROWARD COUNTY, Fla. -- Local 10 has received many phone calls from viewers in Broward County who say they have not received the absentee ballots –- and the news from the elections office doesn't sound good.

Local 10 has learned that many as many as 58,000 ballots that were supposed to mailed out on Oct. 7 and 8 could be missing.

The Broward County Supervisor of Elections office is saying only that the situation is "unusual," and they are looking into it.

Gisela Salas, Broward Deputy Elections Supervisor, said, "I hate to say 'missing' at this time because that has not yet be substantiated. Some ballots are starting to arrive. But there is an extraordinary delay."

The postal service told Local 10 late Tuesday that they don't have 58,000 ballots floating around. They did say that they have several employees assigned to deal only with ballots and they are being delivered in one to two days -- once they get them.

http://www.local10.com/politics/3854230/detail.html

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

WaPo: Kerry 50% Unelected 48%

Chart shows a definite upward trend.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv.../charting.html

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

Ohio's Sec of State IS Co-Chair of Bush's State Campaign And Up to DIRTY Tricks

Blackwell is trying to get thousands of newly registered voters off the rolls:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6331781/

Ohio could be Florida revisted.

These crooks are so taken with their power they'll do ANYTHING to keep it...

Some key points:

But election officials and other experts say there is a reasonable explanation for bloated election rolls that has nothing to do with fraud: The National Voter Registration Act prohibits them from purging voters from the rolls for four years after an initial notification is sent.

"It's unfortunate that there seems to be an assumption that there's fraud behind every problem," said Kay Maxwell, president of the League of Women Voters. "There often is a simple explanation. And we're very concerned that these challenges will intimidate people and keep them from voting."

Those who marched to Blackwell's office in Columbus appeared to agree. "We cannot forget what happened in Florida," Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), a veteran of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, told the crowd. "And it will not happen here."

[W*GS]

Originally Posted by L.A. BRONCOS FAN

You've obviously mistaken me for a member of your special ed class.

I always try to take into account your special needs and your intellectual disabilities.

Read the 9/11 report yet?
Been to opensecrets.org yet?
Calculate the daily volume of oil added to the SPR since late 2001 and compared that to the US daily oil consumption yet?
Come up with those comparisons of Gini coefficients yet?

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

Still on your knees for the bush crime family, eh W*GS?

Four Alarm GOP Theft of the Election Alert: Greg Palast Reveals GOP "Jim Crow" Voter Hit List for Election Day to Disenfranchise Minorities in Florida (And We're Sure They've Got Lists in Ohio)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programme...ht/3956129.stm

GOP Theft of the Election 2004 Update: Judge (There's Always One Along the Appeals Route to Rule for Bush) Won't Let 10,000 People Vote in Florida Whose Registration Forms Had Minor Technical Oversights. There Goes Thousands of Kerry Votes. 10/27

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/27/po...n/27felon.html

GOP Theft of the Election 2004: Philadelphia Republican Bigwig Caught in the Act 10/26

http://www.pnionline.com/dnblog/extr...es/001124.html

[Crushaholic]

If they're going to register all votes as a vote for Bush, can we send those voting machines to California and New York?

*cue evil laugh*