US/voting

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About

This article is about voting in the United States, various related issues and proposed solutions.

This page is in need of updating. It mainly needs to be organized a bit better.

Related

Issues

  • Gerrymandering is a problem which significantly reduces the fairness of many elections in the US.
  • There have been repeated allegations of election fraud recently, especially in the 2000 and 2004 elections; Diebold and several other companies have been implicated.

Opinions

News

Leads

The following has been shamelessly copied from here without further checking (yet) (it's late and I should probably be doing something else anyway):

20 Amazing Facts About Voting in the USA

  1. 80% of all votes in America are counted by only two companies: Diebold and ES&S. http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/042804Landes/042804landes.html (article in Rolling Stone says "Today, eighty percent of all the ballots in America are tallied by four companies - Diebold, Election Systems & Software (ES&S), Sequoia Voting Systems and Hart InterCivic.")
  2. There is no federal agency with regulatory authority or oversight of the U.S. voting machine industry. http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0916-04.htm
  3. The vice-president of Diebold and the president of ES&S are brothers. http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/private_company.html
  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." http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/07/28/sunday/main632436.shtml
  5. Republican Senator Chuck Hagel used to be chairman of ES&S. He became Senator based on v otes counted by ES&S machines. http://www.onlinejournal.com/evoting/031004Fitrakis/031004fitrakis.html
  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. http://www.hillnews.com/news/012903/hagel.aspx
  7. Senator Chuck Hagel was on a short list of George W. Bush's vice-presidential candidates. http://www.businessweek.com/2000/00_28/b3689130.htm
  8. ES&S is the largest voting machine manufacturer in the U.S. and counts almost 60% of all U.S. votes. http://www.essvote.com/HTML/about/about.html
  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. http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0225-05.htm
  10. Diebold also makes ATMs, checkout scanners, and ticket machines, all of which log each transaction and can generate a paper trail. http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0225-05.htm
  11. Diebold is based in Ohio. http://www.diebold.com/aboutus/ataglance/default.htm
  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. http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,61640,00.html
  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. http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0312/S00191.htm
  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. http://www.chuckherrin.com/HackthevoteFAQ.htm#how
  15. None of the international election observers were allowed in the polls in Ohio. http://www.globalexchange.org/update/press/2638.html
  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! http://wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,63298,00.html
  17. 30% of all U.S. votes are carried out on unverifiable touch screen voting machines with no paper trail. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/07/28/sunday/main632436.shtml
  18. All -- not some -- but all the voting machine errors detected and reported in Florida went in favor of Bush or Republican candidates. http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,65757,00.html
  19. The governor of the state of Florida, Jeb Bush, is the President's brother. http://www.tallahassee.com/mld/tallahassee/news/local/7628725.htm
  20. Serious voting anomalies in Florida -- again always favoring Bush -- have been mathematically demonstrated and experts are recommending further investigation. http://www.yuricareport.com/ElectionAftermath04/ThreeResearchStudiesBushIsOut.htm

Links

things to read up on

voting reform initiatives