This may be the most important news since the 2004 election theft:

http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12155.htm

Party Hacks

The fix is in for 2008.

By Chris Floyd

03/02//06 "Moscow Times" -- -- Two weeks ago, an obscure, unelected, Republican-appointed official in California decided the future of the world. That future -- at least for the next several years -- will be an accelerating nightmare of war, corruption, repression, atrocity and terror. That's because the loyal apparatchik has, with the stroke of a pen, guaranteed the perpetuation of the Bush faction in power in 2008 and beyond.

One of the few certainties in modern U.S. politics is that no Democrat can win the presidency without carrying California. Thanks to the Electoral College system set up by the Founding Oligarchs to keep the low-born rabble from voting directly for president, the big haul of California's electoral votes is crucial for Democrats to offset the multitude of small, sparsely populated states that reliably vote Republican. Bagging California doesn't guarantee Democratic victory, but without it, the cliffhanger electoral counts in the goosed elections of 2000 and 2004 wouldn't even have been close.

Thus, the sudden, hugger-mugger decision by California Secretary of State Bruce McPherson to override the objections of his own experts and certify the eminently hackable voting machines of the politically partisan firm, Diebold, for use throughout the state means, quite simply, that the fix is in for 2008. It doesn't matter who the Democrats run -- Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, George Clooney or Jesus H. Christ in an Uncle Sam suit. It won't make a bit of difference. California is lost, the presidency is lost and the Bushists are in -- already. It's over.

After Diebold's machines failed miserably in a battery of tests last year, McPherson vowed to put their certification on hold until his own hand-picked panel of experts had fine-combed the system to a fare-thee-well, blogger Brad Friedman reports. The panel delivered their conclusions last month -- and the results were staggering, far beyond the worst fears of the most hard-core "conspiracy theorist." The panel found that Diebold's machines were riddled with curious built-in glitches that effectively "ceded complete control of the system" to hackers who could "change vote totals, modify reports, change the names of candidates and change the races being voted on."

What's more, "hackers wouldn't need to know passwords or cryptographic keys, or have access to any other part of the system to do their dirty work," the Los Angeles Times notes. "Voters, candidates and election monitors wouldn't necessarily know they'd been rooked." A more perfect vehicle for fixing an election can hardly be imagined. And it would require nothing more than a handful of high-tech zealots, not a vast conspiracy.

Naturally, after such a blistering condemnation, McPherson did what any official charged with guaranteeing the integrity and credibility of his state's elections would do: He approved the slipshod system by the dark of the moon, on a Friday before a holiday weekend, without any public hearings -- indeed, without waiting for the results of a pending federal review of Diebold's mole-infested code. Now, the Diebold contraptions, whose chronic "breakdowns" have featured in numerous contested elections and last-second "miracle" victories by Republican candidates across the country in recent years, will control California's pot of electoral gold.

A good example of how this control works can be found in Alaska. There, the state Democratic Party has long been seeking an audit of some of the 2004 Diebold-counted returns, which produced a series of strange anomalies -- including awarding President George W. Bush an extra 100,000 votes that turned out to be phantoms. First, state officials blocked the request because that information, the vote count of a public election, was a "company secret" that belonged exclusively to Diebold, Friedman reports. Then they decided that the returns could be examined -- but only on the condition that Diebold and the Republican officials be allowed to "manipulate the data" before it was released. In the end, even this tainted transparency was too much for the Bushist ballot crunchers; late last month, Alaska officials suddenly declared that examining the returns would pose a dire but unspecified "security risk" to the state.

America's votes are increasingly controlled by a small number of interrelated corporations: Diebold, ES&S and Sequoia, all of which have close political and financial ties to the Bush faction -- and to other dark forces as well. Diebold and ES&S were both bankrolled by tycoon Howard Ahmanson, who was also a major funder of the Christian "Reconstructionist" movement, which openly advocates a totalitarian theocracy in America, including the death penalty for homosexuals, slavery for debtors, stoning for sinners and stripping nonbelievers of citizenship. As journalist Max Blumenthal reports, these extremists have been welcomed as a key part of the Bushist base of politicized evangelicals, whose cadres have been quietly filling government posts for the past five years. Meanwhile, Sequoia -- whose machines racked up 100,000 "mistakes" in just one Florida county in 2004, according to a recent audit -- is owned by a business partner of the Carlyle Group, the investment firm whose insider deals and war profiteering have earned millions for the Bush family.

Thus, the 2008 election will be conducted largely on wide-open machines programmed by avowed partisans and paymasters of a ruthless gang that has already committed demonstrable vote fraud on a massive scale in engineering narrow "victories" in 2000 and 2004. So it doesn't matter who runs, who votes or how unpopular the Bush faction becomes through the murderous ruin of its radical agenda. The "consent of the governed" will be drowned in the blood money that has bought the nation's electoral process.

Yep - Let's fix a really blue state like California - Now I'm mad...

F Diebold...How dare they! and how dare this state..remember this is the the state, when enough was enough..ejected Gov. Davis.. yeah, I know Arnold was the temporary solution, but we are getting close friends, real close...to a voter revolt...just have to have assistance in refusing to accept this crap.

Will get even more involved then I am, although I am driving my county officals and state Sen/Reps nuts...This cannot happen...

No Shlt. I'm about as mad tonight as I have been since the 2004 election was stolen.

If I was still in California, I'd try to see what can be done about getting some massive protests rolling in Sacramento. This is beyond absurd. It is really really sick.

WHere are Diane Feinstein and Boxer?

WHere are the Dem officials who dominate the state house?

Dem politicians deserve to become extinct because they all are incompetent.

Sunshine - Boxer and Feinstein and Pelosi are chairing the Angelides ticket to get rid of Arnold...It boggles my mind, how the Diebold thing is being ignored.

HELLO

I believe Dems have been AWOL on the voting machine issue across the country.


They don't care. Or they are too stupid to to know they should care.

Perhaps we don't want these idiots trying to run the country after all.

Better to let the country implode due to what the GOP has done, and only after it is clear the GOP is responsible for said problems we can start replacing the Dems with truly savvy people in the Russ Feingold mold.

This only happened 3 days ago, and it blindsided everybody. We need to let Boxer, Feinstein, and any Dem congressmen that this is not tolerable.

Just finished making calls and followed with emails. But it is Saturday..will call again on Monday.

As I mentioned in a different thread, my county, El Dorado had begun preparing to do a "mail in only" election this go around, and I had been involved with trying to work out the details of making sure physically challenged and other disabled people would be included in the "legal" sense of the law. Well the county seems all too ready to just pay the bucks, buy the machines they have had ordered and on hold..and not have to "think" about it. I have been screaming bloody murder to my supervisor's also. We would have a bleeping more accurate vote going with the mail in..IMHO...

Why did the majority of them sell us down the river with the Patriot Act? What's the excuse for not filibustering Alito......what happened to so-called voter reform? The list goes on....

DW - Oh how true. This all should be addressed.

I think my panic is that it appears (trying not to turn it into a CT) that now they have the balls to go after one of the strongest blue states in the US. This has me furious and shaking in my boots. It has been like Chinese water torture...drip, drip, drip...well...I'm concerned about the flood that just might be about to follow...

Gee DW -- don't you know the answer to that? They are keeping their "powder dry" for some really important issue.

What makes me extremely angry is having had to make so-called excuses for Dem Leaders for way too long because it has also been apparent for quite some time now that not only are some complicit in furthering the Rep agenda, but we have held tightly on to them as our only alternative against them. And time after time they, with the exception of a handful like Russ Feingold, have rolled over and played dead. Even if we buy another excuse that they simply do not have a majority and are therefore rendered ineffective, what explains their anemic voting records?.......And in terms of the invasion of Iraq..there were some who were not "fooled' by the bushco agenda. Then look at the Patriot Act and other issues like the bankruptcy bill which for the purposes of qualifying their votes they chose instead to vote FOR many of these proposals.

In terms of Diebold and CA, how can we be surprised when a company like Enron (bush corporate crony) was able to manipulate and rob Californians blind and then let loose their dog Arnold on us to seal the deal? Couldn't Californians look that far ahead when they put this bush/corporate sycophant in office or were they overcome by his celebrity? BTW I was not living in Cali when this happened but I sure urged my family to vote against this retard.

I am furious about many things and Diebold encroachment is not the least of them!

(My letter sent to Senator Boxer - cut and pasted with minor edits from http://www.truevotemd.org/take_action_editor.asp )

Dear Senator Boxer,

We need a voter verified paper audit trail. By creating a paper ballot with each electronic vote we will be able to conduct random audits to ensure that the electronic record is consistent with the paper record. In addition, we will be able to have recounts when needed. Without a paper record there is no way to do an independent audit or recount.

Cancel the contract with Diebold. Dielbold has shown itself to be untrustworthy and partisan. They have put in place uncertified software in other states without the board of elections certifying it. Their leadership are partisan political activists – they should not be counting our vote.

Every vote is important and must be counted accurately. There is no way to tell whether the voter’s selection seen on the screen is the same as the voters selection counted by the machine. We need to be sure. The only way to ensure accuracy in the vote count is a voter verified paper audit trail.

Let’s get it right: This is an opportune time in history. Voters are concerned about the accuracy of the vote count and technology can do more than ever before to make sure votes are counted accurately. This is the time to put in place a voting system people can trust – where they can be sure their vote is counted as cast.

Voting is the core – the very foundation of our democracy. If we cannot trust the way votes are counted than our democracy is no longer legitimate.

Please investigate why the Diebold system was approved in the dead of night without proper oversight and review. I will not vote using the Diebold system.

Thank You,
Wundermaus

This is from a response I made on a similar thread you started.

WS I see some connection to the other thread "dual agents" but fail to see the connection with Jim's initial post here.....seems to me this one is simply the Diebold infiltration itself.....unless you have another angle here??

Question:

Does this mean every county in California must use Diebold? Or does it mean that they can use Diebold?

This doesn't seem like a good decision either way, but it does make a difference.

State Representatives to contact:

diebold, die!
you may or may not know that california sec. of state bruce mcpherson has approved the use of diebold voting machines in our state.

if you think this is a ludicrous idea, and you live in the golden state, ms. in la is urging you to make 5 calls to stop it.

the 5 calls (actually, 4 calls and an email, as sen. debra bowen asks you email her office) are to the members of the rules committee:


senator don perata (chair) d
(916) 651-4009
district office (510) 286-1333
senator.perata@sen.ca.gov

senator jim battin (vice-chair) r
(916) 651-4037
jim.battin@sen.ca.gov

senator roy ashburn r
(916) 651-4018
senator.ashburn@sen.ca.gov

senator debra bowen d
email only debra@debrabowen.com - (ms. bowen is mounting this case and will be busy preparing, emails are welcomed)

senator gilbert cedillo d
(916) 651-4022

http://xnerg.blogspot.com/2006/02/diebold-die.html

Bowen's letter to McPherson:

February 22, 2006

The Honorable Bruce McPherson
Secretary of State
1500 11th Street
Sacramento, CA 95814

Dear Secretary McPherson:

I strongly urge you to reverse your February 17th decision to re-certify Diebold’s voting machines for use in California. Your decision contradicts your earlier commitment not to review Diebold’s re-certification request until it had been approved by the federal Independent Testing Authorities (ITA) and your commitment not to certify any system that doesn’t comply with all standards established by the federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA). Furthermore, your decision violates state law. While your decision may be good for Diebold and its shareholders, it is not in the best interests of California’s voters or our democracy.


Federal ITA and HAVA Issues

On December 20, 2005, you announced that you would not consider reviewing the Diebold systems until the ITA had acted. Specifically, you stated, “During a thorough review of the application for the Diebold system currently pending certification, we have determined that there is sufficient cause for additional federal evaluation. I have consistently stated that I will not certify any system for use in California unless it meets the most stringent voting system requirements.” Attached to your statement was a letter from the chief of your Elections Division to Diebold, written presumably at your direction, stating, “We require this additional review before proceeding with further consideration of your application for certification in California. Once we have received a report from the federal ITA adequately analyzing this source code, in addition to the technical and operational specifications relating to the memory card and interpreter, we will expeditiously proceed with our comprehensive review of your application.” The ITA has yet to conclude its review of the Diebold memory cards, yet you have re-certified the machines in direct contradiction of your December 20, 2005, commitment to the voters.

On August 3, 2005, you announced that “[a]ll systems certified by the Secretary of State’s Office shall comply with the standards and requirements of the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) [Public Law 107-22, 106th Congress], including all requirements, standards and regulations promulgated pursuant to authority derived from HAVA, as well as complying with all other applicable requirements and standards explicit in federal and state laws, and any requirements, standards and regulations deriving authority from federal and state laws.” As you know, the 2002 Voting System Standards adopted by the Federal Election Commission (FEC) were adopted by the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) as the first set of guidelines adopted under HAVA. Those guidelines recommend that voting machines not be certified for use if they contain interpreted code. The Diebold machines that you re-certified on February 17 contain interpreted code, which is in direct violation of your August 3, 2005, commitment to follow the higher standards set forth by the EAC and the FEC.

Violations of California Law

Your decision to re-certify Diebold’s machines violates California Elections Code Section 19250(a), which precludes the Secretary of State from approving the use of any direct recording electronic (DRE) voting system unless it has received federal qualification. You sent the memory cards back to the Independent Testing Authorities (ITA) in December 2005 because, as you noted in the letter from the chief of your Elections Division to Diebold, “. . . this component was not subjected to federal source code review and evaluation by the Independent Testing Authorities (ITA) who examined your system for federal qualification. It is the Secretary of State’s position that the source code for the AccuBasic code on these cards, as well as for the AccuBasic interpreter that interprets this code, should have been federally reviewed.” If it was your position on December 20, 2005, that certain components of the system had never been federally reviewed, how could you lawfully certify a system on February 17 under Elections Code Section 19250(a) that contains these uncertified components?

Your decision to re-certify Diebold’s machines also violates Elections Code Section 19251(a). As you know, as of January 1, 2006, all DRE voting systems have to come with an accessible voter verified paper audit trail (AVVPAT). The AVVPAT must be “provided or conveyed to voters via both a visual and a nonvisual method, such as through an audio component.” The Diebold TSx doesn’t comply with this provision of the law. Instead, it provides an audio read-back of how the voter’s ballot was recorded electronically, not how it was captured on the AVVPAT, which makes the AVVPAT on the Diebold DRE useless for blind or visually-impaired voters. Given that fact, it appears Diebold’s voting systems don’t comply with Elections Code Section 19251(a) and therefore can’t lawfully be certified for use in California.

Required Public Process Not Completed

Finally, there is a significant legal issue that needs to be addressed regarding the lack of public notice and absence of a public hearing that should have preceded your decision to re-certify the Diebold machines. Although the report is dated February 14, 2006, the fact is this report wasn’t released publicly until after you issued your decision to re-certify the Diebold machines on February 17. The argument that the November 21, 2005, hearing you held on Diebold obviates the need for a new hearing under Elections Code Section 19204 doesn’t suffice, because your decision to re-certify Diebold’s machines was based solely on a report that wasn’t available, completed, or even envisioned at the time of the November 21, 2005, hearing. To hold a public hearing without providing the public with the information on which you based your decision to re-certify the Diebold machines only serves to undermine the public hearing requirement of the law.

For all of these reasons, I call on you to restore transparency to the voting machine certification process, which begins by reversing your decision to re-certify Diebold’s machines for use in California.

Sincerely,

Debra Bowen, Chairwoman
Senate Elections, Reapportionment & Constitutional Amendments Committee

DB:elg

http://www.bradblog.com/archives/00002463.htm

It seems like the answer is can, which means that things are hardly lost.

And even where Diebold is used, it's like putting a bad lock on your door. Not a good idea, but not a guarantee that your house will be burglarized while you are out either.

Bowen's website

http://www.debrabowen.com/

blog

http://www.debrabowen.com/blog/

Your doing a bang up job, George!

Thanks for providing the links DW.

I took action when some of them first were posted.

Arne - I get the feeling..that (at least in my county) there is a sense of relief, not outrage. There was a committee as I have mentioned to move ahead with mail in voting..This frees them up, to just grab those Diebold machines and get rid of the head aches right in front of their face. So what about what they MIGHT have to face?...Apparently, not much money goes into the "election reform" budget...It is a case of ignoring the warning signs of the fallout that might follow, just get these machines into place, and slime out of the questions about it later.

Deja Vu - Iraq..I know this is extreme..but hey, it worked once, why not try it again.

Party Hacks

The fix is in for 2008.

By Chris Floyd

03/02//06 "Moscow Times" -- -- Two weeks ago, an obscure, unelected, Republican-appointed official in California decided the future of the world. That future -- at least for the next several years -- will be an accelerating nightmare of war, corruption, repression, atrocity and terror. That's because the loyal apparatchik has, with the stroke of a pen, guaranteed the perpetuation of the Bush faction in power in 2008 and beyond.

One of the few certainties in modern U.S. politics is that no Democrat can win the presidency without carrying California. Thanks to the Electoral College system set up by the Founding Oligarchs to keep the low-born rabble from voting directly for president, the big haul of California's electoral votes is crucial for Democrats to offset the multitude of small, sparsely populated states that reliably vote Republican. Bagging California doesn't guarantee Democratic victory, but without it, the cliffhanger electoral counts in the goosed elections of 2000 and 2004 wouldn't even have been close.

Thus, the sudden, hugger-mugger decision by California Secretary of State Bruce McPherson to override the objections of his own experts and certify the eminently hackable voting machines of the politically partisan firm, Diebold, for use throughout the state means, quite simply, that the fix is in for 2008. It doesn't matter who the Democrats run -- Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, George Clooney or Jesus H. Christ in an Uncle Sam suit. It won't make a bit of difference. California is lost, the presidency is lost and the Bushists are in -- already. It's over.

After Diebold's machines failed miserably in a battery of tests last year, McPherson vowed to put their certification on hold until his own hand-picked panel of experts had fine-combed the system to a fare-thee-well, blogger Brad Friedman reports. The panel delivered their conclusions last month -- and the results were staggering, far beyond the worst fears of the most hard-core "conspiracy theorist." The panel found that Diebold's machines were riddled with curious built-in glitches that effectively "ceded complete control of the system" to hackers who could "change vote totals, modify reports, change the names of candidates and change the races being voted on."

What's more, "hackers wouldn't need to know passwords or cryptographic keys, or have access to any other part of the system to do their dirty work," the Los Angeles Times notes. "Voters, candidates and election monitors wouldn't necessarily know they'd been rooked." A more perfect vehicle for fixing an election can hardly be imagined. And it would require nothing more than a handful of high-tech zealots, not a vast conspiracy.

Naturally, after such a blistering condemnation, McPherson did what any official charged with guaranteeing the integrity and credibility of his state's elections would do: He approved the slipshod system by the dark of the moon, on a Friday before a holiday weekend, without any public hearings -- indeed, without waiting for the results of a pending federal review of Diebold's mole-infested code. Now, the Diebold contraptions, whose chronic "breakdowns" have featured in numerous contested elections and last-second "miracle" victories by Republican candidates across the country in recent years, will control California's pot of electoral gold.

A good example of how this control works can be found in Alaska. There, the state Democratic Party has long been seeking an audit of some of the 2004 Diebold-counted returns, which produced a series of strange anomalies -- including awarding President George W. Bush an extra 100,000 votes that turned out to be phantoms. First, state officials blocked the request because that information, the vote count of a public election, was a "company secret" that belonged exclusively to Diebold, Friedman reports. Then they decided that the returns could be examined -- but only on the condition that Diebold and the Republican officials be allowed to "manipulate the data" before it was released. In the end, even this tainted transparency was too much for the Bushist ballot crunchers; late last month, Alaska officials suddenly declared that examining the returns would pose a dire but unspecified "security risk" to the state.

America's votes are increasingly controlled by a small number of interrelated corporations: Diebold, ES&S and Sequoia, all of which have close political and financial ties to the Bush faction -- and to other dark forces as well. Diebold and ES&S were both bankrolled by tycoon Howard Ahmanson, who was also a major funder of the Christian "Reconstructionist" movement, which openly advocates a totalitarian theocracy in America, including the death penalty for homosexuals, slavery for debtors, stoning for sinners and stripping nonbelievers of citizenship. As journalist Max Blumenthal reports, these extremists have been welcomed as a key part of the Bushist base of politicized evangelicals, whose cadres have been quietly filling government posts for the past five years. Meanwhile, Sequoia -- whose machines racked up 100,000 "mistakes" in just one Florida county in 2004, according to a recent audit -- is owned by a business partner of the Carlyle Group, the investment firm whose insider deals and war profiteering have earned millions for the Bush family.

Thus, the 2008 election will be conducted largely on wide-open machines programmed by avowed partisans and paymasters of a ruthless gang that has already committed demonstrable vote fraud on a massive scale in engineering narrow "victories" in 2000 and 2004. So it doesn't matter who runs, who votes or how unpopular the Bush faction becomes through the murderous ruin of its radical agenda. The "consent of the governed" will be drowned in the blood money that has bought the nation's electoral process.

Annotations

Integrity of E-Balloting System Still in Doubt
Los Angeles Times, Feb. 23, 2006

Watchdog Group Questions 2004 Florida Vote
Associated Press, Feb. 23, 2006

Vanishing Act: Disappearing the Republic at the Push of a Button
Empire Burlesque, Sept. 19, 2003

Bush Poll Ratings at All-Time Low
CBS News, Feb. 28, 2006

Audit Shows Electronic Voting in Disarray
Bradblog.com, Feb. 23, 2006

Alaska Now Refuses Release of 2004 Election Data Citing Security Concerns
Bradblog.com, Feb. 24, 2006

Loot the Vote
Empire Burlesque, Jan. 19, 2006

Is the GOP "Shock-the-Vote" Brigade Planning to Heist California?
Huffington Post, Feb. 21, 2006

A State Senator Says Diebold Re-Certification in Violation of State Law
Bradblog.com, Feb. 23, 2006

Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election and Why They'll Steal the Next One Too
Mark Crispin Miller, Basic Books, October 2005

The Brutal Christ of the Armageddonites
Antiwar.com, Feb. 24, 2006

Pin Heads: The New Bush Push for Theocracy
Empire Burlesque, March 12, 2004

The "Pro-Family" Movement and Killing Gays
Max Blumenthal, Feb. 14, 2006

Body Blow: Bush's Worldwide War Against Women
Empire Burlesque, Oct. 3, 2003

Millions Are Dying Because of American Policies
Los Angeles Times, June 12, 2005

Cry Havoc: Bush's Own Personal Janjaweed
Empire Burlesque, Aug. 27, 2004

US Wants to Build Network of Friendly Militias to Fight Terrorism
AFP, August 15, 2004

Pentagon Plan for Global Anti-Terror Army
Sydney Morning Herald, Aug. 11, 2004

Into the Dark: The Pentagon Plan to Foment Terrorism
Empire Burlesque, Nov. 1, 2002

Darkness Visible: The Pentagon Plan to Foment Terrorism is Now in Operation
Empire Burlesque, Jan. 25, 2005

Slavery Under God's Laws
The Institute for Christian Economics,

Stoning: Integral to Commandment Against Murder
The Institute for Christian Economics,

World Conquest: The Obligation of Christian Politics
The Changing of the Guard, Dominion Press,

An Anthology of Reconstructist Thought
Christian Reconstructionism, November 2002

Judicial Warfare: Christian Reconstructionism and its Blueprint for Dominion
Crown Rights Press, 2003

E-Voting: How it Can Put the Wrong Candidate in Office
Common Dreams, Sept. 3, 2003

The Theft of Your Vote is Just a Chip Away
Thom Hartmann, July 31, 2003

Now Your Vote is the Property of a Private Corporation
Thom Hartmann, March 11, 2003

From Superpower to Tin-Horn Dictatorship
Lew Rockwell.com, Feb. 28, 2006

Copyright © 2006 The Moscow Times. All rights reserved.

Source: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article12155.htm

Not sure of your exact point, but let me suggest this as to why many places may be reluctant to ditch Diebold, or any of these electronic machines. I think that there are two bureaucratic factors at play here, the reluctance to change already made decisions, and preference for "the latest" in terms of new equipment. And Diebold could be exploiting this, no matter how shoddy their equipment may be.

Now as to the other side of the argument...

And this is not an endorsement of Diebold, but a suggestion that while their equipment may be extremely dubious that its use may not guarantee Republican victories forever.

There is a county close to where I live, Loudoun County and they use Diebold machines. During the 2001 election for Governor, the county voted for the Republican candidate, even though the Democrat (Mark Warner) won the election statewide. Now how did Loudoun vote in 2005 for Governor? They voted for the Democratic candidate, Tim Kaine, who won statewide. Now if the Republicans were guaranteed the power to steal elections by the use of Diebold machines, I would think that they certainly would have at least guaranteed that counties that they had won in the previous election went for them in the election at issue. But they obviously didn't in this case.

Now all this proves is that they didn't use Diebold to steal a particular county. It doesn't show that it couldn't be done. But I think that it does show that it isn't destined to be done. (And if the Republicans had won Virginia they certainly would have used it to suggest that Bush's popularity was beginning to recover, but instead the Democratic victory in a red state was considered another blow to Bush.)

http://www.sbe.virginia.gov/cms/Election_I...lots/Index.html

(For the above note that "Accu-vote" is Diebold.)

http://www2.sbe.virginia.gov/web_docs/Elec...05/html/107.htm
http://www.sbe.state.va.us/web_docs/electi...01/html/107.htm

Just remember, the US used to be a nice democracy!