20 Amazing Facts about Voting in the USA

Did you know....?

1. 80% of all votes in America are counted by only two companies:
Diebold and ES&S.

Evoting

Diebold

2. There is no federal agency with regulatory authority or
oversight
of the U.S. voting machine industry.

Common Dreams

Evoting

3. The vice-president of Diebold and the president of ES&S are
brothers.

Company

Landes 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."

CBS News

WishTV

5. Republican Senator Chuck Hagel used to be chairman of ES&S. He
became Senator based on votes counted by ES&S machines.

Mother Jones

Evoting

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.

BlackBoxVoting

HillNews

Radar

7. Senator Chuck Hagel was on a short list of George W. Bush's
vice-
presidential candidates.

Business Week

Indpendent

8. ES&S is the largest voting machine manufacturer in the U.S. and
counts almost 60% of all U.S. votes.

essvote

Landes

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.

Common Dreams

ITWorld

10. Diebold also makes ATMs, checkout scanners, and ticket
machines,
all of which log each transaction and can generate a paper trail.

Common Dreams

Diebold

11. Diebold is based in Ohio.

Diebold

12. Diebold employed 5 convicted felons as senior managers and
developers to help write the central compiler computer code that
counted 50% of the votes in 30 states.

Wired

Indymedia

13. Jeff Dean, Diebold's Senior Vice-President and senior
programmer
on Diebold's central compiler code, was convicted of 23 counts of
felony theft in the first degree.

HacktheVote

BlackBoxVoting

14. Diebold Senior Vice-President 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.

HacktheVote

BlackBoxVoting

15. None of the international election observers were allowed in
the
polls in Ohio.

Global Exchange

Enquirer

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. (See the movie here.)

Wired

MSNBC

17. 30% of all U.S. votes are carried out on unverifiable touch
screen voting machines with no paper trail.

CBS News

18. All — not some, but all — the voting machine errors detected and
reported in Florida went in favor of Bush or Republican candidates.

Wired

YuricaReport

Extravotes

ILCAonline

Scoop

19. The governor of the state of Florida, Jeb Bush, is the
President's brother.

Tallahassee

WashingtonPost

20. Serious voting anomalies in Florida — again always favoring
Bush —
have been mathematically demonstrated and experts are recommending
further investigation.

YuricaReport

ComputerWorld

AmericanFreePress

CommonDreams

Consortium News

USCountVotes



And, to finish this listl

FYI: Man of the Year for Time magazine...

Adolph Hitler, Man of the Year, Jan. 2, 1939

George W. Bush, Person of the Year, Dec. 19, 2004