Astounding vote fraud news

Something stinks in Alaska. John Gideon of Brad Blog has received some amazing facts about the 2004 vote in that state -- where the Secretary of State has tried to keep the info hidden:

The State of Alaska website shows 16 of 40 house districts with more than 200% voter turnout, Also, if you add up the vote totals from each district they come to more than 100,000 votes for state wide candidates than the summary reports show.

More than 7 months ago the Democrats asked for an explanation. The state said it could not release the data files because they were proprietary to Diebold.

Diebold gave the state permission to release the files.

The state still refused.

Ron Baiman has a Powerpoint presentation on the "baked" Alaskan election -- unfortunately, the presentation won't load up for me. Perhaps if we ask Ron real nice, he'll convert it to Flash or HTML?

Baiman also claims that the 2004 "hard copy" data will be destroyed in early September, unless someone offers to store it.

Meanwhile, in San Diego: Controversy still surrounds the CA-50 election. I will reiterate my view that Democrat Francine Busby probably would have lost a clean election -- but that doesn't mean we should ever tolerate a non-clean election. The San Diego Union Tribune published an agonizingly dumb editorial on the subject, defending the idea of poll workers taking election machines home for a slumber party:

And safeguards are numerous. The memory card inside every electronic machine has a tamper-evident seal. Before the polls open on Election Day, two poll workers check the seal on every machine and certify that the seals were unbroken. Then every machine is tested with what is called a “zero tape,” certifying that no votes have yet been cast.

And so on. The thing devolves into the usual rot about those awful, awful internet conspiracy theorists. Paul Lehto is compiling a response:

The situation is much more dire with elections, where the secrecy is provided by computers. A computer is something that simply does what it is told to do (so long as one can speak its languages) and will do simply anything it’s told without any regard for law, morality or ethics. Because computers simply follow the commands of anyone (whether given on election day or stored with a command not to execute until election day) the fact that the government claims to test the machines by casting one or two votes on a few machines before and a few after the election is laughably insufficient not so much because of the low numbers tested, but because the only thing that matters with a computer is knowing for sure exactly what the computer was asked to do on the day of election itself. But, we can’t know that. A person that knows computers can place undetectable “easter egg” code that executes only on a later date, Election Day.

A word about that memory card seal: It's a joke. Diebold machines have an open MMC/SD slot and an open PCMCIA slot, both of which allow "extra" programming to sneak in. If you don't know what a PCMCIA slot is, ask the geeky teenager who lives next door. (We should also take into some consideration the little-known fact that power cords can be used to transmit data.) Those machines are as vulnerable as naked woman tied to a bed in a war zone.

Placing a thick lock on the front door of the building means nothing if you leave the side doors wide open.