Archive for category: Clean Elections

Reuters is reporting that Diebold, the notorious and partisan maker of electronic voting machines, now faces an informal Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) inquiry about how the company reports its revenue. As the saying goes in the voting machine business, there’s not much profit in selling machines, but there’s a lot in selling election results. Maybe that’s why Venezuela recently got into the voting machine business. They recently bought Sequoia, a major e-voting machine company used in the United States.

Critics have long charged that the Diebold machines are easily susceptible to manipulation, a fact confirmed by the General Accountability Office (GAO) regarding e-voting machines in general. News reports show election officials with Diebold machines across the nation are close to hitting the panic button. They already have in Pennsylvania, where
on Friday, May 5, 2006, elections officials impounded all of their Diebold touchscreen electronic vote machines “after a major firmware flaw was revealed which constitues a ‘major national security risk.'” Hacking into and disturbing election results fits nicely into what the Pentagon warned about in its briefing paper “Info Wars.”

And Diebold has had more than its share of malfunctions and problems. Utah officials are worried about their Diebold opti-scan machines – the same ones used in Cleveland and the same technology used in Toledo that malfunctioned so famously in the 2004 election. The covers of the November 2004 issues of both Popular Science and Popular Mechanics warned of the dangers of e-voting machines. The recent Cuyahoga County fiasco is just another dead canary in the cage. At a certain point we’ll realize they’re not dying of natural causes. We’ll find out that there is a deadly poison in our democratic system.

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Readers of this blog might want to consider the major malfunctioning of the voting machines in Ohio in yesterday’s primary. It is only going to get worse in the fall. Here’s a breakdown of some of the day’s problems from the Columbus Dispatch and the Cleveland Plain Dealer:

Cuyahoga (used Diebold machines)
– court-ordered extension of voting hours, requested by Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, because they didn’t open until 1:30pm. Ordered to stay open until 9:30pm.
– poll workers could not get new Diebold touchscreen machines to work in Cleveland housing project
– some people had to vote on paper ballots

Franklin County (used ES&S machines)
– Matt Damschroder, Franklin County BOE Director, claimed 50 people walked away without voting (according to Columbus Dispatch)
– ballots loaded without school levies included
– 20% (160 precincts) opened late
– ES&S placed a dozen company representatives on the ground
– voters complained about the open viewing of voting machine screen and lack of a curtain
– Worthington, Westerville and Hilliard – voters complained locals school levy issue was not on voting machines

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Yesterday, when the Fitrakis/Rios for Ohio Governor and Lieutenant Governor campaign turned in our final tally of 10,960 signatures, we were told by one of Secretary of State J. Kenneth Hackwell’s employees that we probably won’t be approved for the ballot until late June, or early July, hence impairing our ability (and that of other third parties) to raise money as ballot-approved candidates for the fall 2006 election. Because a few members of the entourage took photos outside the Borden Building, the privately-owned building housing the secretary of state’s office, building security pushed a camera into the face of one of the photographers and called the police on us.

This is how the game works. Instead of building a state building, which would belong to the people and which could be sold during hard times as an asset, Hackwell pays a ton of our tax money to the private owners of the Borden Building. That way, Hackwell and his staff can play “good cop” while the private security company harasses his political opponents. Recall that Hackwell had former U.S. Congressman Dan Hamburg arrested in December 2004 while he sat at a table at the café in the Borden Building. Also, Hackwell had private security forces harass black activist Judith Powell when she went to his office with WVKO 1580AM Radio talk show host Charles Traylor to talk about voting irregularities.

The only thing the Democrats and Republicans can agree upon is that it is OK to harass.

Last night, we were up counting and sorting our petitions to qualify the first Green-endorsed ticket for governor and lieutenant governor in Ohio history. As I write this morning at a little after 8am, Anita Rios and I have 10,960 signatures. 5,000 are required. Tim Kettler, the Green candidate for secretary of state, who worked so diligently on the recount in Coshocton County, phoned early to tell me he had over 9,000 signatures and will file with me as well, at 1pm today at J. Kenneth Hackwell’s office.

So, if you’re not doing anything at 1pm today, join us at the Borden building at the corner of 4th and Broad in downtown Columbus and help us make history. A press conference will follow immediately after the filing of petitions at the secretary of state’s office in the Borden building.

Under Ohio law, which is, like many Ohio laws, unfair and ludicrous, the Democrats and Republicans running for statewide office only had to get 1,000 signatures to get on the ballot, while “other party candidates” have to get five times as many signatures. And, under Ohio law, the Democrats and Republicans at the county Boards of Elections get to jointly verify our signatures without our presence. In Ohio, we have a two-party system, only slightly better than a dictatorship. And for every dollar the wealthy send the Republicans, they flip a 50-cent piece to the Democrats. Because they’re beholden to the same corporate money and studies indicate 1 percent of the population gives 90 percent of the money to political candidates, there’s very little real policy debate in Ohio, or the nation in general. Read more

It looks like American Blackout II. In the award-winning documentary film “American Blackout,” Ian Inanda chronicles how Republicans crossed over in the primary to beat one of America’s most progressive Congressional representatives, Cynthia McKinney. Now, Barbara Anne Ferris, a 52-year-old “Democrat,” is being endorsed by the Cleveland Plain Dealer, over incumbent Dennis Kucinich. When I spoke to Ferris on Sunday, I was dressed in a golf shirt and tan dress slacks to gather signatures at the Earthfest at the Cleveland Zoo. I asked her if she was a Democrat. She said, “You have to be one in Cleveland to win” and pointed out that a lot of Republicans were supporting her. Her website recently directed Republicans to ask for a Democratic ballot to defeat Kucinich.

Now, what are Kucinich’s great sins? According to the Plain Dealer, it is the fact that he “cobbled together a creaky, left-slanted platform” in the presidential primary. The Plain Squealer also noted, that “His legislative initiatives, whether for universal health care or his long-talked-of federal Department of Peace, are most informed by his place well to the left of all of Ohio’s other representatives.”

Thus, the Republican-owned Plain Dealer, the Republican Party, and a Republican candidate in Democratic trappings are conspiring to oust the populist Kucinich, whose only sin is trying to bring health care to 44 million Americans – the type of universal health care available in every other democracy.

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