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Post Election Comments from Coalition for Visible Ballots

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Message Vickie Karp
Post Election Comments from Coalition Founder G. Edward Griffin & Nat'l Chair Vickie Karp
G. Edward Griffin

The fact that many activists for honest elections now appear to be placated by a Democratic victory in the recent elections demonstrates that they really never understood the problem. It shows that their primary concern was, not over honest elections, but over who wins those elections. They really don't care if elections can be rigged through programmed voting machines so long as they are rigged to get THEIR team into office. Unfortunately, we find this attitude in both major political parties. The last election may have been a victory for the Democrat Party but it was not a victory for America, because the corrupt system of electronic voting remains solidly in place.

Pointing this out may be offensive to some, but we have an obligation to say it like it is. This is our last chance to do so. The truth is that the leaders of both major parties are content to have the electorate jump back and forth between their camps, because that gives the masses the false impression of "democracy at work." In reality, both parties are essentially the same team. They are very happy with programmable elections and will do nothing to change that in the future. It is the Holy Grail of collectivism. They are content to take turns.

The proposal for a mandatory 2% audit is not acceptable for two reasons. First, 2% is too small a sampling. It should be at least 5% or, preferably 10%. More important, however, is that it tricks everyone into accepting the premise that voting machines are acceptable in the first place. It defines the debate as "What safeguards shall we add to voting machines" when the debate really should be "Do we want to use voting machines at all?" That's not reform. It's a clever device for directing the debate away from a real solution.

Just say NO to voting machines - ANY kind. Paper ballots all the way are the only safeguard. Too time consuming to count, they say? Well, maybe they would find it more convenient and less time consuming to fight a bloody revolution in the streets! If we lose our votes, that's the only recourse we will have to restore representative government. Take your choice, America.

Who needs an instant count anyway? The newscasters can wait like everyone else. Honest elections are worth the effort.

Ed Griffin



NOW THAT THE ELECTION IS OVER...
Message from Vickie Karp, National Chair, Coalition for Visible Ballots

Now that the big mid-term election is over, we are dismayed to see many election reform activists backing off the electronic vote fraud issue...because the Democrats regained control of Congress. As if this negates the fact that 80% of Americans voted on fraudulent electronic voting systems on November 7th. We will never know if this election result occurred with or without voting machine manipulation, since the systems remain totally nontransparent to the citizens of our country. We can testify that thousands of problems with the machines, with election protocol, with electronic voter registration, with vendors being called in to "fix" machines that broke down on election day, have been reported across the country and are still coming in. For a partial list, you can look at www.votersunite.org 's website.

It is highly unlikely that this turn of events in Congress will result in any real, meaningful change in either our domestic or foreign policy, because most of the candidates who manage to win positions of power in our government are globalists and their agenda is the same regardless of their party affiliation. We wish that were not true, and would be thrilled if our "selected" leaders proved us wrong, but we'd be surprised if they did. Of course there are exceptions to this rule, but unfortunately, not many.
Faced with a renewed complacency on the part of the public that is satisfied with the results of this election, we who work on the election reform issue may be facing our biggest obstacle yet: the loss of the support from the activists who turned out to be partisan after all; support which took years to create.

Looming in the near future is a "solution" to the electronic vote fraud crisis: a big push to pass Congressman Rush Holt's HR 550 bill, which will call for adding printers to electronic voting machines, and a mandatory (minimum) 2% audit of election results. Our position on this is clear: We oppose HR 550 because of the evidence brought forward by the Black Box Voting "hacking team" of Harri Hursti and Dr. Herbert Thompson in Leon County, Florida, in 2005 and Emery County, Utah in March of 2006. Reports of these exploits (posted on www.blackboxvoting.org ) on real Diebold election equipment, the optical scan counter, AND the touchscreen with printer added, make a clear case for the ease with which elections can be hacked using either of these systems. In the HBO Hacking Democracy documentary, the "grand finale" shows the Hursti hack in Leon County. The optical scan counter prints out a paper "audit log" showing opposite totals from the ballots that were fed into the machine. Hursti had flipped the election by swapping out the memory card in the scanner with one he had pre-programmed for a "flip", and no one saw him do it.

The Diebold touchscreen machine, with printer added, showed multiple ways a hacker could access the software for the purpose of manipulating election results.

With evidence pointing to the likelihood that these machines are not just vulnerable to fraud, they were designed for it, why should we trust that adding a printer will solve the problems with these machines?

We are formulating a campaign to counter the disinformation push for HR 550 and in support of Congressman Dennis Kucinich's HR 6200, which calls for hand counted paper ballots for the 2008 Presidential election, the presidential race only. Though we would love to see this bill encompass other federal as well as state and local elections, those issues must be dealt with through additional legislation. Each state retains the power to decide how their state and local elections will be conducted, so that must be dealt with as a separate (and challenging) issue. Yet, HR 6200 is a start in the right direction of reclaiming our elections with hand-counted paper ballots, with totals posted at the precinct level.

Please stay tuned for more news and posts about HR 6200; we will be developing a letter than can be e-mailed around to the public and to elected officials to hopefully swing their support away from HR 550 and toward HR 6200.

We also recommend that you go to www.blackboxvoting.org website and consider taking some of the post-election actions outlined in the Citizens' Action Toolkit. One suggestion is filing Freedom of Information Act requests of your county election officials if electronic voting machines were in use and suspicious election results were noted in your area. In the toolkit are sample letters to use depending on which type of electronic voting system is in use in the county in question. If you are not sure how to evaluate the results of what you get, send your info to Bev Harris at Black Box Voting, along with the events that called your attention to that particular county, and she or another citizen volunteer can help analyze it.

Another recommendation: Please consider donating to Black Box Voting. Bev Harris has been working tirelessly on this issue for years. The HBO documentary mentioned above, Hacking Democracy, has opened the eyes of many Americans for the first time to the issue of elections being stolen with electronic voting systems. Her group is a non-profit and her work is entirely supported by donations.
Thanks for your interest in reclaiming our elections. When we finally get control back into the hands of the citizens, we will have reclaimed our Constitutional republic, and all the freedoms it ensures us. We need the help of each and every one of you in this struggle. Thanks for all you are doing!
Vickie Karp
National Chair, Coalition for Visible Ballots
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Vickie Karp is a realtor, a writer, a speaker, an activist, and a patriot from Austin, Texas. She is active in Coalition for Visible Ballots.
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