Please forward this to anybody you know who cares at all about fair labor practices and accurate and fair public elections.
An explosive Dan Rather report "Trouble With Touchscreens" will premiere on HDNet tomorrow (Tuesday) night August 14. It features the history and problems of the ES&S iVotronic voting machine now used in 25 Pennsylvania counties, including Allegheny, Westmoreland, Butler, Beaver, Cambria, Centre, Chester, Luzerne, and more.
This amazing report will air tomorrow night at 8 PM but will be repeated multiple times over the coming days and weeks. Link to schedule and a 13-minute video preview:
http://www.hd.net/danrather.html#The preview is also online at:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1826549866685179676&hl=enThe Dan Rather report features footage and interviews on the sweatshop in the Philippines where the iVotronic voting machines are made by near-slaves earning $2.15 to $2.50 per day. Problems with the machines are attributed to manufacturing conditions including 90-plus degree assembly areas with no air conditioning or even fans, and 50 dump truck loads of " cats, and rats, and snakes, and all types of debris" removed from a basement inventory area.
Also interviewed on the program is Christine Jennings, the Florida Democratic candidate who lost her Congressional race last November by less than 400 votes, with over 18,000 undervotes inexplicably missing in that contest on the ES&S iVotronic machines in Sarasota County.
This report is a 'must watch' for anyone who cares about honest, accurate elections and fair labor practices. Again, Pennsylvania uses the iVotronic in 25 counties, including some of our largest. In any given election Pennsylvania could have a problem as bad or worse than Sarasota because we have 54 counties with no voter-verified paper ballots or meaningful way to audit these machines. And what a way to treat labor, both in the Philippines and here in the USA where we need good manufacturing jobs!
As the preview segment shows, ES&S has done offshore manufacturing via Pivot International, a contract product manufacturing company with headquarters in Lenexa, Kanas that uses manufacturing facilities in the Philippines (It also subcontracts work to China.)
"If you go into almost any plant in the non-developed countries of the Far East, you're going to see things that OSHA or EPA would shut down tomorrow," says Kirk Douglass, CEO of Pivot International, in a June 1, 2002 article in Industry Week.
http://www.industryweek.com/CurrentArticles/asp/articles.asp?ArticleID=1262Pivot International apparently has a Pittsburgh Connection. Kirk Douglass received a Masters of Science degree in Industrial Administration from CMU and then later was connected to PPG, according to a 2001 article in Kansas City Small Business Monthly. The article says that it was while working in the Philippines for part of PPG's Biomedical Systems Division that Douglass met the "Ching" character mentioned in Dan Rather's report, and apparently the two of them subsequently bought the makings of Pivot International from PPG:
http://web.archive.org/web/20020624145810/http://kcsmallbiz.com/2001/january/KCE_0101.htmWhy, why, WHY did so so many of our supposedly pro-union, pro-labor officials vote to buy these sweatshop-made machines, including some of our leading Democrats like Dan Onorato?
Labor day is coming up soon.
WE CAN & MUST GET THIS INFORMATION & MESSAGE OUT.
Electronic voting without voter-verified paper ballots and audits of all elections is deadly dangerous to our democracy. And it is pretty darn inhuman when it comes to fair labor practices as well.
For more information about electronic voting in Pennsylvania, please see
http://www.VotePA.usFor national information go to
http://www.votetrustusa.org and
http://www.verifiedvoting.org
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