It may come as a shock to Obama supporters, but this morning on NBC's Meet the Press, John McCain has declared a guarantee of a victory on November 4th.
Many may feel that this is just desperate campaign rhetoric to drive turn out, but there are real reasons to believe that McCain is simply speaking what he knows to be true: The GOP has this race locked up through rigged voting machines, just like in 2004.
Here three reasons that should cause concern to all people who value free and fair elections.
- Digital voting machines have been proven to be insecure and can be hacked/rigged by anyone wishing a specific outcome
- Stories of falsified voting results can be found across the nation
- Initial funding for Diebold and ES&S (two of the biggest voting machine companies in the country) came from a Radical Right Wing Group that makes Rush Limbaugh look like a child.
More below the fold.
And, PLEASE read the dairy before you post a comment calling all this tinfoil. If you watch the Spoonamore interviews and still feel this is tinfoil, I can respect that. If you don't watch then your comments won't carry much weight to me.
Politico.com has a front page story discussing McCain's statements from today's Meet the Press.
"I guarantee you that two weeks from now, you will see this has been a very close race, and I believe that I'm going to win it," McCain told interim "Meet" moderator Tom Brokaw. "We're going to do well in this campaign, my friend. We're going to win it, and it's going to be tight, and we're going to be up late."
Some of this quote appears at the end of this short clip from today's show:
Let's expand on the three reason's noted above as to why this should be very concerning:
Reason for Concern #1. Voting Machines are Not Secure
McCain's comments today of a tight win echo those of Steven Spoonamore, an IT industry insider and life-long Republican (with a conscience).
Watch his comments below on how the election will turn out in an excerpt from a September 2008 interview.
Here's a short bio on Steven Spoonamore from his website:
Mr. Spoonamore is considered a leading theorist and innovator of systems involved with compression, digital image management and remote electronic monitoring. He has developed solutions for government agencies and elements of the US Armed Forces who have been aware of the threat risks in cyber security since the early 1990s.
Stephen Spoonamore has been attempting to bring this to light since 1998. In 2003, he confronted Maryland's State Board of Elections in a public meeting on the "hackabaility" of the system. Spoonamore got a copy of the 197-page unredacted report produced by Diebold which listed hundreds of serious problems. Maryland officials had not been given the unredacted report, rather they got the report with huge chunks black-lined. This incident is detailed in the video below:
Reason for Concern #2. Falsified voting results surface across the nation
Wired Magazine's Blog reported two serious cases of false voting results in the last 12 months.
Case 1: Faulkner County, Arkansas, May 2008
This article notes ES&S's erroneous election results earlier this year:
The problem occurred with two touch-screen voting machines made by Election Systems & Software, which were the only machines used in Faulkner County's East Cadron B voting precinct.
Haggard says the night before the election, officials noticed that the electronic ballot on two machines slated to be used at East Cadron B was missing the State House District 45 race.
Even though election officials caught the problem and added a paper ballot just for that race the problem was not solved. It seems that someone had set up these machines to switch votes from other races and count them in the District 45 race, altering the outcome.
At the end of the day, Dr. Terry Fiddler (D) had beat Linda Tyler (D) for nomination to the House seat with 794 votes to Tyler's 770. But a post-election examination revealed that despite the fact that the electronic ballots on the two machines at the East Cadron B precinct didn't display the District 45 race, the machines recorded votes for that race anyway.
Only after tracking down the paper trail could election officials figure out what the real vote count should have been. They had to pull the memory cards from the devices to see what happened.
Those paper trails showed correctly that there was no District 45 race on the ballot and, thus, that there were no votes cast on the machines for the District 45 race. But memory cards taken from inside the machines, showed that the machines recorded votes in the District 45 race. Officials were able to determine that those District 45 votes actually belonged to the Cadron Township Constable race because the same number of votes that were allocated to the District 45 race in the memory cards matched the number of votes that voters had cast in the Cadron Township Constable race, which appeared on the voter-verifiable paper audit trail.
"Somehow the recording software had tabulated it into the wrong race," Haggard says. "Thank goodness for the paper trail. We went to the paper trail and could show how people actually voted."
...
Once the bogus votes in District 45 were subtracted from the totals, Fiddler lost 51 votes in the race, showing that Tyler had actually won the nomination for the House seat.
Who knows how many other votes were siphoned off in other ways or in other precincts. It is unimaginable to me that ES&S could be allowed to continue providing voting machines.
Case 2: ES&S has problems with vote switching in Lawrence County, Ohio, November 2007.
Votes cast on e-voting machines made by ES&S went to the wrong candidates, according to officials in Lawrence County, Ohio.
This article shows a pattern of serious technical problems. In this case it was the end of day tally that was flipped.
Although a tally printed from the machines at the end of the day and posted on the door of a county precinct got the numbers correct -- 374 votes for Bill Robinson in the Hamilton Township trustee position and 170 votes for Allan Blankenship -- a tabulation machine at the county's headquarters flipped the numbers and gave 374 to Blankenship and 170 to Robinson. Officials noticed the problem when they compared the two tallies.
There are of course many more instances of problems with these machines. This document details a (partial) history of problems going back to 1980 as reported in the press.
Reason for concern #3: Diebold and ES&S founders owe their start to backing from wealthy, radical Christian businessman, who may still have controlling interest in ES&S.
Would you be surprised to know that two company's that make our nation's voting machines were funded by a man whose beliefs include the notion that America (and the world) should be won for Christ and placed under theocratic and Biblical rule? This was reported in an investigative piece by Scoop Independent News way back in 2003. Clearly this is a severe conflict of interest.
Brothers Bob and Todd Urosevich founded American Information Systems. Bob is currently president of Diebold and Todd Urosevich is Vice President, Aftermarket Sales of ES&S. (In 1999, American Information Systems, purchased Business Records Corp to become ES&S.)
American Information Systems (AIS) was primarily funded with money from Ahmanson brothers, William and Robert, of the Howard F. Ahmanson Co. The majority stake in ES&S is still owned by Howard F. Ahmanson and the Ahmanson Foundation
Howard Ahmanson belongs to Council for National Policy, a hard right wing organization and also helps finance The Chalcedon Institute. As the institute's own site reports, Chalcedon is a "Christian educational organization devoted to research, publishing, and promoting Christian reconstruction in all areas of life... Our emphasis on the Cultural or Dominion Mandate (Genesis 1:28) and the necessity of a return to Biblical Law has been a crucial factor in the challenge to Humanism by Christians in this country and elsewhere..." Chalcedon promotes Christian Reconstructionism, which mandates Christ's dominion over the entire world. The organization's purpose is to establish Old Testament Biblical law as the standard for society.
Kossacks are good at asking questions. Here are some of mine:
Why didn't the US press pick up on this report and investigate?
Why are continued errors in voting machine performance allowed to continue without a demand for a paper back up?
Why does John McCain feel so good about his chances of winning that he guarantees it on national television?
Why is the MSM ignoring Stephen Spoonamore?
Why has the Ohio's voter-filed lawsuit, King Lincoln Bronzeville v. Blackwell, fighting the 2004 election results been stayed with the court refusing to lift the stay and continue hearing the case? And why are attorneys seeking protection for the case's possible star witness Mike Connell, a republican strategist and consultant, who may have had a hand in falsifying voter results in Florida as well as Ohio in 2004?
Kossacks, why are WE not demanding a full investigation into these incidents?
According to Spoonamore, anyone smart enough, including the Russians, Chinese, or Israelis, can now digitally alter the outcome of America's elections.
One final comment from Mr. Spoonamore on these machines:
Please rec this dairy and help us get some national attention focused on this. I encourage you to watch the entire set of Spoonamore's interviews from September 2008 on You Tube.
UPDATE: I suggest people watch the full interview with Spoonamore before calling this tinfoil.
For those wanting to know more about the right wing connection for Diebold and ES&S, there is additional information on another dairy of mine here.
Also, to those asking me for more evidence, I am not a journalist. I am only putting together information gathered from multiple places after a bit of net research. I am not convinced that this is true, but I'd like to see it investigated as it smells bad to me. That's all. You are welcome to disagree.
UPDATE 2: Kossack Larry Madill in the comments asked whether there was evidence of a hack during election use. According to Spoonabore, in 2004 when the Green Party wanted a recount, the (pro-life) Rapp family who owns Triad removed the hard drives to "ensure a clean recount." Hard to investigate when the evidence gets removed. More in the House Judiciary Report: Preserving Democracy - What Went Wrong in Ohio. I am still reading through it. I welcome others to look at it and post their thoughts.