Is your vote safe? Answers within....
Diebold, the maker of voting machines that count a majority of our votes in this country, is all over the news suddenly. Today, Stull, Stull & Brody launched a Class Action suit against Diebold. This is the second class action suit in as many days. The first, announced yesterday, is filed by Scott+Scott, alleging securities fraud. Today's suit by Stull, Stull & Brody is being brought on behalf of shareholders unhappy with the faulty equipment and shady representations thereof by the corporation.
As Stull, Stull & Brody's press report states,
the Company lacked a credible state of internal controls and corporate compliance and remained unable to assure the quality and working order of its voting machine products. It is further alleged that the Company's false and misleading statements served to conceal the dimensions and scope of internal problems at the Company, impacting product quality, strategic planning, forecasting and guidance and culminating in false representations of astonishingly low and incredibly inaccurate restructuring charges for the 2005 fiscal year, which grossly understated the true costs and problems defendants faced to restructure the Company. The complaint also alleges over $2.7 million of insider trading proceeds obtained by individual defendants during the Class Period.
Diebold is the company whose
now ex-President, Wally O'Dell, raised funds for Bush's re-election campaign by
promising to help "Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President." It's beyond shameless that O'Dell was not forced out of Diebold for this obvious conflict of interest between the head of a company who counted many of the vote in Ohio. No, he had to be ousted because the stock was taking a nosedive. (Of course, the company says he is leaving for personal reasons. And if you believe that, I have some great swampland to sell.)
While O'Dell's resignation sent the stock soaring another story should be sending it plummeting. As Einsteinia reported yesterday, Black Box Voting has again proved how simple it is for an insider to rig an election on Diebold machines.
To care about this issue, one doesn't have to believe, as a growing number do, that any of the recent major elections has been stolen. The point is, the possibility for stealing an election is now so thoroughly proven that we should all be up in arms and taking direct action at local and federal levels to press for the passage of Rush Holt's bill H.R. 550, which provides, among other protections, a federal requirement for a voter-verifiable permanent paper record of every vote, and the implementation of a mandatory, surprise manual audit of 2% of the precincts, chosen at random, in every state.
It's already nearly too late to affect the 2006 elections. But if we wait, we won't be able to do anything about the 2008 elections either. And 2006 is actually MORE important than 2008, since that's the election deciding who writes our legislation.
There is literally no issue more important than securing our vote. Crafting our platform and choosing our messages will amount to nothing at all if at the polling place the votes are stolen. You don't have to believe elections HAVE been stolen to see how easily they COULD be, and how important it is to prevent this.
Those who believe past elections have been stolen do so on the basis of a lot of reading about serious discrepancies. And for those who say no one can keep secrets that long, listen to former Presidential Candidate Gary Hart, who served on the Church Committee investigating the CIA's abuses. At a recent conference, Hart revealed that many of the "Family Jewels", a 600-page list of the CIA's misdeeds that the committee secretly investigated, have NEVER come to light. So there are people, inside the government and outside of it, that can keep secrets FOREVER. If you've ever told a lie and gotten away with it, you know this on a small scale. There's no reason to believe this isn't possible on a large scale either.
In the wake of Watergate, Iran-Contra, the Downing Street Memo, and other scandals, is it so hard to believe a group of people would stop at nothing to subvert the will of the people, to steal our vote? To Dr. Ernest Partridge, a consultant, writer and lecturer in the field of Environmental Ethics and Public Policy, the evidence that the elections of 2000, 2002 and 2004 were stolen is overwhelming. Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman have been reporting in Ohio for months on a variety of electronic abuses of our vote - all documented, provable instances.
Fitrakis is so certain of the dangers we face that is he literally giving over his life to this issue by running for Governor in Ohio as a way to draw attention to this matter. It is a sad indictment of the Democrat Party that Fitrakis is running as a Green.
My own patience is wearing thin. Either the Democrats are going to get their act together and stop the wholesale privatization of our vote, or they are going to go down as the party that let our votes be sold to the highest bidder. Where are the giants with the moral courage to face down the cries of "Conspiracy Theorist" to fight the most important fight we've had to face since the Civil War?
I've worked on two presidential campaigns. I can tell you wholeheartedly that if an election CAN be stolen, it WILL be stolen. There's that much at stake and the players are so convinced of the righteousness of their position they will justify anything. Barry Goldwater wrote the book on it, saying "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice." Well that's just one short hop away from the Nazi belief that the ends justify the means. The price of liberty IS indeed eternal vigilence, and we have to all become much more vigilant of our vote.