Reply #169: Because it did happen with Diebold counting the votes, and I never saw...

[Up2Late]

...that commercial that everyone always talks about, not once! That commercial didn't do it, Diebold and the Rethugs did.

Another part of that election that nobody ever seems to remember is, this was the same election that flipped the Georgia Senate from D to R and almost flipped the House, that happened in 2004, giving the Republicans Full control of the Georgia State House for the first time since 1871!

It's really hard to find any news reports about the 2002 election for Georgia State Government now, so here are the result, you can count up the results if you want: <http://www.sos.state.ga.us/ELECTIONS/election_results/default.htm>

And it was also the election that the incumbent Democratic Governor, who all the polls showed him (Barnes) ahead 48 to 39 percent the last month before the election, but then Perdue "winning" by a margin of 52 to 45 percent, a 13 POINT Switch!

And the U.S. Senate race was a 8 point switch from what the polls were saying. Pretty normal stuff, huh?

<http://www.alternet.org/story/16474>

...USA Today reported on Nov. 3, 2002, "In Georgia, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll shows Democratic Sen. Max Cleland with a 49%-to-44% lead over Republican Rep. Saxby Chambliss." Cox News Service, based in Atlanta, reported just after the election (Nov. 7) that, "Pollsters may have goofed" because "Republican Rep. Saxby Chambliss defeated incumbent Democratic Sen. Max Cleland by a margin of 53 to 46 percent. The Hotline, a political news service, recalled a series of polls Wednesday showing that Chambliss had been ahead in none of them."

Just as amazing was the Georgia governor's race. "Similarly," the Zogby polling organization reported on Nov. 7, "no polls predicted the upset victory in Georgia of Republican Sonny Perdue over incumbent Democratic Gov. Roy Barnes. Perdue won by a margin of 52 to 45 percent. The most recent Mason Dixon Poll had shown Barnes ahead 48 to 39 percent last month with a margin of error of plus or minus 4 points."

Almost all of the votes in Georgia were recorded on the new touchscreen computerized voting machines, which produced no paper trail whatsoever. And nobody thought to ask for a new chip, although it was noted on Nov. 8 by the Atlanta Constitution-Journal that in downtown Atlanta's predominantly Democratic Fulton County "election officials said Thursday that memory cards from 67 electronic voting machines had been misplaced, so ballots cast on those machines were left out of previously announced vote totals." Officials added that all but 11 of the memory cards were subsequently found and recorded.

Similarly, as the San Jose Mercury News reported in a Jan. 23, 2003 editorial titled "Gee Whiz, Voter Fraud?" "In one Florida precinct last November, votes that were intended for the Democratic candidate for governor ended up for Gov. Jeb Bush, because of a misaligned touchscreen. How many votes were miscast before the mistake was found will never be known, because there was no paper audit." ("Misaligned" touchscreens also caused 18 known machines in Dallas to register Republican votes when Democratic screen-buttons were pushed: it's unknown how many others weren't noticed.)...

(Much more at link) <http://www.alternet.org/story/16474>

Then there was all this:

<http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0928-31.htm>

Published on Wednesday, September 28, 2005 by the Huffington Post

America's Next Election Nightmare

by Andrew Gumbel


In the 2000 presidential election we had Katherine Harris. In 2004 it was Kenneth Blackwell. And now a new horror show is about to play out in the troubled landscape of America’s dysfunctional democracy – yet another top state election official who also happens to be openly cheer leading for one side in a race for high office.

The new poster-child for how not to run elections is Cathy Cox, the Secretary of State of Georgia. Only she comes with an added twist. She won’t merely be helping to run someone else’s campaign in next year’s mid-terms; she will be running for office herself.

Cox, a Democrat, was the first Secretary of State to champion and purchase an all-electronic touch screen voting system for her state. She persuaded Georgia to spend an initial $54 million on a hitherto untried Diebold system in 2002, and has tried ever since to parlay the e-voting revolution she helped launch into a bid for the Georgia governorship in November 2006. “Advancing the e-government revolution,” is the slogan on her website.

Contrary to the fine rhetoric, however, a raft of official documents obtained exclusively by the Huffington Post – including the original contract signed with Diebold and a flurry of six amendments that followed between July 2002 and December 2004, as well as official correspondence and legal papers – show that Cox’s management of Georgia elections has been little short of a disaster. The documents were obtained by way of multiple public records requests, most of them coordinated by the Georgia voting rights activist Roxanne Jekot and her organization, Count The Vote.

The documentary record shows that elections were run on software that was not only untested but also uncertified, that key components broke down during live elections, that county officials were left clueless on how to operate the new machines because of a breakdown in the training schedule, and that the cost of installing the electronic touch-screen system jumped dramatically beyond the advertised $54 million, without proper legislative oversight or approval. None of this has previously been made public.

Among the most shocking findings:

(More at link) <http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0928-31.htm>

Here's one more: <http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0131-01.htm>

I know what happened here, I LIVE HERE! :mad: