An Angry Girl on the Internet Tuesday, July 15, 2008

In honor of the original "angry girl" – Miz Salem-Shadow – and her vicarious return to the blogosphere (does that even make sense?), I present twenty amazing facts about voting in the US brought by an Angry Girl:

1. 80% of all votes in America are counted by only two companies: Diebold and ES&S. (source1, source2)
2. There is no federal agency with regulatory authority or oversight of the U.S. voting machine industry. (source1, source2)
3. The vice-president of Diebold and the president of ES&S are brothers. (source1, source2)
4. The chairman and CEO of Diebold is a major Bush campaign organizer and donor who wrote in 2003 that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." (source1, source2)
5. Republican Senator Chuck Hagel used to be chairman of ES&S. He became Senator based on votes counted by ES&S machines. (source1, source2)
6. Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, long-connected with the Bush family, was recently caught lying about his ownership of ES&S by the Senate Ethics Committee. (source1, source2)
7. Senator Chuck Hagel was on a short list of George W. Bush's vice-presidential candidates. (source1, source2)
8. ES&S is the largest voting machine manufacturer in the U.S. and counts almost 60% of all U.S. votes. (source1, source2)
9. Diebold's new touch screen voting machines have no paper trail of any votes. In other words, there is no way to verify that the data coming out of the machine is the same as what was legitimately put in by voters. (source1, source2)
10. Diebold also makes ATMs, checkout scanners, and ticket machines, all of which log each transaction and can generate a paper trail. (source1, source2)
11. Diebold is based in Ohio. (source1, source2)
12. Diebold employed 5 convicted felons as consultants and developers to help write the central compiler computer code that counted 50% of the votes in 30 states. (source1, source2)
13. Jeff Dean was Senior Vice-President of Global Election Systems when it was bought by Diebold. Even though he had been convicted of 23 counts of felony theft in the first degree, Jeff Dean was retained as a consultant by Diebold and was largely responsible for programming the optical scanning software now used in most of the United States. (source1, source2)
14. Diebold consultant Jeff Dean was convicted of planting back doors in his software and using a "high degree of sophistication" to evade detection over a period of 2 years. (source1, source2)
15. None of the international election observers were allowed in the polls in Ohio. (source1, source2)
16. California banned the use of Diebold machines because the security was so bad. Despite Diebold's claims that the audit logs could not be hacked, a chimpanzee was able to do it! (See the movie here) (source1, source2)
17. 30% of all U.S. votes are carried out on unverifiable touch screen voting machines with no paper trail. (source)
18. All -- not some -- but all the voting machine errors detected and reported in Florida went in favor of Bush or Republican candidates. (source1, source2, source3, source4, source5)
19. The governor of the state of Florida, Jeb Bush, is the President's brother. (source1, source2)
20. Serious voting anomalies in Florida -- again always favoring Bush -- have been mathematically demonstrated and experts are recommending further investigation. (source1, source2, source3, source4, source5, source6)

Something to ponder as another election looms. But since the 2000 and 2004 went so smoothly, I can't foresee any problems.