[+/-] Voting shitstorm thread

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Diebold electronic vote counters have been hacked!

New information indicates that hackers may be targeting the central computers counting our votes. All county elections officials who use modems to transfer votes from polling places to the central vote-counting server should disconnect the modems now.

There is no down side to removing the modems. Simply drive the vote cartridges from each polling place in to the central vote-counting location by car, instead of transmitting by modem. “Turning off” the modems may not be sufficient. Disconnect the central vote counting server from all modems, INCLUDING PHONE LINES, not just Internet.

In a very large county, this will add at most one hour to the vote-counting time, while offering significant protection from outside intrusion.

It appears that such an attack may already have taken place, in a primary election 6 weeks ago in King County, Washington -- a large jurisdiction with over one million registered voters. Documents, including internal audit logs for the central vote-counting computer, along with modem “trouble slips” consistent with hacker activity, show that the system may have been hacked on Sept. 14, 2004. Three hours is now missing from the vote-counting computer's "audit log," an automatically generated record, similar to the black box in an airplane, which registers certain kinds of events.

Election officials: Disconnect those modems NOW. If you don't: You gotta be replaced.
Reporters: Some election officials will lie to you. Show your kids what bravery looks like. Be courageous. Report the truth.
Citizens: Please help us by joining the Cleanup Crew. For now, e-mail crew@blackboxvoting.org to join, since our signup form has been taken out.
Candidates: Make a statement. Do not concede on Election Night. Wait until audits and records can be examined.

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Florida, via CNN:

When I went in on wed supervisor elections; I checked John Kerry, Betty castor and the Democratic slate. When i came to the last page which was the review screen, I was horrified when I saw that every choice I made had come up incorrect and just the opposite.

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Atlanta, Georgia: A woman is turned away from voting because her baby is wearing a Kerry tee-shirt. Un-fucking-believable.

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Santa Clara, California:

[W]e were all to mark our paper ballots, seal them in pink envelopes, and don't worry about filling out our names and addresses on the envelopes. Somehow--the nebulous theory goes--the election workers will be able to magically detect the paper ballots filled out by properly identified voters and pull them out to be counted tonight.

We left the station feeling VERY unsure that our votes would be counted.

If I was a busy election worker tonight, I'd just grab all those pink envelopes and heave them into the Provisional stack. And if I was the guy at the Provisional Counting Station, I'd have to seriously consider trashing all those envelopes without names and addresses filled in on the form on the outside. That's the point of a provisional ballot envelope, after all: to make it possible for them to verify your right to vote.

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New Orleans, Louisiana, via EFF:

It looks like New Orleans is becoming a major hotspot for voting problems: there are reports through the EIRS of more than 80 incidents, some involving entire precincts, with the 1-866-OUR-VOTE hotline ringing off the hook.

"In a situation like this, election officials should start offering people paper ballots, using absentees or others," says EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn. "And they need to keep the polls open later to compensate. This is plainly the result of poor planning and they need to move quickly now."

The problems being reported include:

• machines breaking down
• machines not lighting up
• machines crashing
• power outages
• no backup machines
• very few paper ballots, or incomplete paper ballots
• no provisional ballots in some locations