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The Single Greatest Threat to the Media Reform Movement : Electronic Election Theft

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Message andi novick
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Dear Friends,

This is longer than some of you like, but I believe the issue of electronic voting fraud is the most important issue for each and everyone of us. This, the singularly greatest crime of our history, is largely being blacked out by main stream media. Hence it is the responsibility of your friendly grass roots media reform organization to bring this to you and get this on everyone's priority radar screen and fast. We only have this small window [2007] to fight back before we lose what unfortunately is our best shot- the weak, dare I say, opposition party presently in the majority.

There's a lot in here and I would not have taken the time to compile this if I didn't believe how essential this fight is so take the length in stride and trust that some things are important enough that you can't get it all out in a paragraph or two.

You may think I'm suffering from my-issue-is-more-important-than-your-issue arrogance, but our system of government relies on our ability to elect representatives to govern us. No matter how important all our other issues are, they are subsumed by the massive theft which has occurred in the last few elections and the huge potential for 2008 to be rigged and returned to the uniparty. Clearly issues like media reform and clean elections are integral to the lack of good candidates because the forces of money in both instances keep out the best people for the job, but if the vote total is sufficiently manipulated, we can impact nothing.

I agree with Howard Zinn that we cannot expect reform from the top and that only social movements can force the changes we need to be a just and peaceful society. But social movements ultimately rely on our ability to affect the system by electing better representatives. In the last few years there has been a wholesale change in the way we conduct elections and most people barely appreciate the devastating consequence of having our 230 year right to observe and protect the integrity of our elections taken from us. How could they when we have lost our free press as well.

Over the next few months Re-Media will be bringing you this vital information you won't get from corporate media. We will continue to provide you with the evidence. We will be hosting a forum on the topic with experts in the field. We will be holding film series. And we as always, are asking you to take action. If you want to skip the rest of this email and just take action, jump to the end. It is extremely important that everyone act now. Or read on. I would not have put this much time in if I did not believe that unless all of us act now, we are in grave danger of sinking into a hole from which I can't see a way out.



Since Bush Took Office, We Have Been Forced by Federal Legislation to Vote on Electronic Machines Which University and Even Government Studies Agree "are vulnerable to errors and fraud and cannot be made secure"


Electronic voting was forced upon us by the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). The above quote is taken from the recent report of the esteemed National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), technical advisor to the HAVA created election commission.
The report http://vote.nist.gov/DraftWhitePaperOnSIinVVSG2007-20061120.pdf has declared that by using the DREs, which millions of Americans have no choice but to vote on, "a single clever, dishonest programmer in a voting machine company could rig an entire statewide election"! [A single person, not the thousands it would have taken to have the same impact before we were "required" to vote electronically, which is why the fact that 'well there's always been election fraud' is not a basis to dismiss electronic fraud].

Not only the NIST report, but the 2005 Government Accountability Office study http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d05956.pdf found "significant concerns about the security and reliability of electronic voting systems". Numerous university studies have also found these new machines Americans vote on can readily be programmed and have been programmed to steal our elections.

Some of you are reading this saying to yourselves - this isn't possible. Not surprising since not only was all of this largely unreported by the media, but the crime is huge and decent human beings cannot easily just accept this. But accept it we must because we stand to lose everything. So the information is here. Read it for yourselves. Here are some of the sites for university studies: Princeton- http://itpolicy.princeton.edu/voting/; Johns Hopkins - http://avirubin.com/vote.pdf . For an easier read, see these two articles I wrote www.freepress.org/departments/display/16/2006/1865 and http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_andi_nov_061207_remember_the_pinto_o.htm (both of which cite to numerous other sources of information).

The two types of electronic voting machines - DREs (touchscreen voting machines) and PBOSs (Paper Ballot Optical Scanners) - are destructive to democracy because both have proven themselves readily hackable and both are responsible for stolen elections. But at least with PBOSs you are casting a written ballot by your own hand which can theoretically be recounted. With a DRE, there is no ballot. You press a button and hope the software program records that vote, but there's no way to know. Once you hit the button it's all a big secret as to what happens next and the private voting machine companies won't let you look inside. We the People are not allowed to know what the computer is programmed to do with our vote!

In a few short years a basic tenet of our democracy -that voting is done privately but counting is done transparently- ended and now our right to observe and verify our elections has been legislated away. If that isn't the essence of treason.......... (You would think a free press would find that a newsworthy story).

While we don't know what happens after we press that button, we absolutely do know that many, many DREs have been programmed to change your vote or to eliminate your vote. We also know, because the government's own experts told us in the NIST report, that even with the most rigorous overhaul of existing DREs "they would not mitigate the threat of malicious code inserted by an insider at the voting machine company". A malicious code could fix an entire election and 'disappear' any evidence of tampering. Attaching a verified paper trail to these DREs--Representative Holt's proposed solution-- does nothing. The software could be programmed so that the electronic and paper records produced by the voting machine would agree--and both be wrong! See http://www.technologyreview.com/printer_friendly_article.aspx?id=17508. At the end of this email you are asked to contact Representative Holt and urge him to amend his bill. This is vitally important.

(For those of you who still feel more comfortable when you read this in the newspaper see the Washington Post article at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/30/AR2006113001637.html, but don't be fooled that attaching a printer or a paper trail to a DRE will fix the problem. For more on why attaching a paper trail to a DRE won't help and why all electronic voting must be eliminated see Bruce O'Dell's, Pull the Plug on E-Voting, parts I and II: www.truthout.org/docs_2006/102606L.shtml, www.truthout.org/docs_2006/102706O.shtml, wherein he explains that in a 2005 study by the Caltech-MIT Voting Project, in which test elections full of deliberately engineered paper trails errors were conducted, not one person reported a paper trail error while voting! A majority were unsure whether there were any errors or not, and almost a third of the participants continued to insist that there were no errors at all even after they were told otherwise by those who switched the votes! For more on why the HOLT bill as it now stands, which purports to improve the problem of DREs by adding a paper trail, is dead wrong see the end of this email at Federal Action You Must Take).

There is a lot of information in this email. You are entitled to it. The crime is so outrageous that when people are told the facts they find them too incredible to believe. For years establishment media not only would not report anything, but they ridiculed those who tried to warn us of the truth of this heinous theft (discredited as conspiracy nuts). Gradually pockets of the main stream press stopped ridiculing, but still the media resists the truth, either coming up with meaningless opposition or just suppressing the evidence. Silence. And yet all of this is documented and proven and available to those who have the eyes or the stomach for this most disturbing truth.

"Every truth passes through three stages before it is recognized. In the first it is ridiculed, in the second it is opposed, in the third it is regarded as self-evident"
-- Arthur Schopenhauer


2006 lulled some of us into a false sense of security and hence you see a total silence in the media. We will be bringing you the information the media refuses to report about what really happened in the 2006 election. For now, remember that the machines which had been rigged in 2000 and 2002 and 2004 are the same machines we voted on in 2006: The very machines NIST has said "are vulnerable to errors and fraud and cannot be made secure". If we fail to fight back now with everything we have, those will be the machines Americans vote on in 2008.

And when the government is once again controlled by one party with no checks and balances, no way to hold it accountable- who are we going to appeal to? Whose going to return us our voting system in which voting can be verified? Not the ones who benefit by the ability to stay in power. It will be too late by then to demand change. Whose going to listen? Whose going to have the majority control to act? None of us really want to give up our lives for democracy. We want to make these changes peacefully. We have this year to do that.

When you read this and you think-now she's gone too far. When you think somehow things will work themselves out or collapse and start over. When you would just as soon dismiss these words because who wouldn't- please take the time to read some of the literature cited here. Inform yourselves. And then imagine it's 2008 and there's one party which controls America. What are you going to do then?

There's much that can be done now to try to make a difference while we still can, but it requires you make the time to do it today and tomorrow until we get some handle on electronic theft. One day we will recover the right to count our own votes by our own hands with our own eyes. Hand counted paper ballots is the best defense we have, but it's unlikely we can be heard on that right now. For now we can fight to be able to vote on paper ballots. At least if the Optical Scanner is wrong we still have something to recount.

ACTIONS YOU MUST TAKE ON A FEDERAL LEVEL

Northeast Citizens for Responsible Media has signed on as an endorsing organization to the Request by Voters effort to amend the Holt legislation in Congress.

-- We urge each of you individually to sign on and support the Request by Voters: http://www.wethepatriots.org/HAVA/requestbyvoters.php

Unfortunately there has been much confusion and misunderstanding as the horror of electronic voting and DREs unfolds and takes its time to sink in. Vendors' disinformation campaigns and pressure by the Federal government caused many states and precincts to purchase DREs before they had the chance to stop and think about it. No one likes to admit they erred, although many counties have started owning up to their mistake and absorbing the loss, replacing their DREs with PBOSs. Most do not want to admit it and many have been brainwashed into believing that attaching a paper trail to these corrupt DREs will correct the problem, permitting the billions spent on DREs to be salvaged. (For more see Remember the Pinto or Why Isn't the Performance of Our Voting Machines as Important as the Performance of Our Blenders,OpEdNews).

Those in Congress who think they are helping, support the Holt bill which retains DREs but requires a paper trail - as if doing so would actually permit voters to verify their vote. The bill was and is popular among democrats in Congress and groups like Common Cause, MoveOn.org, TrueMajority, VerifiedVoting.org. Sometimes even the best of us get stuck. But the evidence reveals how wrong headed supporting the Holt legislation in its current form is. Adding a printer to a DRE will not solve the problem, but it will perpetuate massive vote fraud. It will add legitimacy to these corrupt machines by creating the illusion that we can verify the correctness of our vote when in fact it is not possible. Go back and look at http://www.technologyreview.com/printer_friendly_article.aspx?id=17508 and Bruce O'Dell's, Pull the Plug on E-Voting: www.truthout.org/docs_2006/102606L.shtml, www.truthout.org/docs_2006/102706O.shtml and you'll know why we must amend the Holt Bill.

For more information about the proposal to amend the Holt bill go to: Request by Voters: www.democracyfornewhampshire.com/files/requestbyvoters.pdf
Executive Summary: http://www.democracyfornewhampshire.com/files/request-byvoters-executive-summary.pdf

-- Contact Congressman Rush Holt mail@rushholt.com and tell him you support the Request by Voters.

-- Contact YOUR Congressional representatives and ask them to amend the Holt Bill (HR 550) by including the remedies and recommendations found in the Request by Voters. Contact: http://www.house.gov/

-- Support Representative Kucinich's HR 6200 legislation for hand counted paper ballots- Contact your Congressional representatives http://www.house.gov/

-- If you are a member of Common Cause or Moveon or True Majority, please write to them about the damage their actions are doing if the Holt bill is not amended and ask them to support these amendments.

thanks

andi novick
Northeast Citizens for Responsible Media (Re-Media)
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Andi Novick Election Transparency Coalition, www.etcnys.org, http://nylevers.wordpress.com/
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