Vote notes

Brad Friedman offers a couple of pieces of good news today: His "Velvet Revolution" for clean elections has received some support in Congress -- specifically from Maxine Waters and John Conyers. Green candidate David Cobb also supports the VR plan, which is called Divestiture for Democracy.

The basic idea: Boycott all companies that won't allow for transparent election machinery.

Ahmanson: I propose taking things a step further. Boycott any firm connected with the Ahmanson family. Howard Ahmanson is the "Mr. Big" running the machines that tabulate so much of our vote. And Ahmanson (as I never tire of pointing out) is on record as favoring theocracy over democracy.

Incidentally, word has it that Ahmanson was the secret power who engineered the Grey Davis recall in California, which led to the Schwarzenegger reign, which led to the persecution and political assassination of Kevin Shelley, staunch foe of the compu-vote.

There is no reason in the world why any Democrat should have any association with Ahmanson-owned Home Savings. If you have money in that institution, pull it out pronto!

L.A. shennanigans: L.A. county elections head Connie McCormack, who led the Shelley lynch mob, is doing her damnedest to inflict paper-free voting on my home.

What is the strange appeal of Diebold and related companies? As I've mentioned on a few earlier occasions, and as Daniel Hopsicker and others have outlined, these companies have a long and outrageous history of palm-greasing.

Just a coincidence. There were at least 57,000 official complaints to Congress about election problems, and most of those problems occurred on electronic machines. And George W. Bush benefited from nearly every "malfunction."

Billion Dollar Bounty! Someone out there (aside from Clint Curtis) must be willing to spill the beans about vote fraud. And maybe that bean-spillage will occur if the reward is sufficient. This site is trying to put together a billion-dollar bounty to anyone who can offer the straight skinny.

Count the ballots: Lynn Landes offers one of the best new pieces on vote fraud. She patiently explains a niggling little fact to which I've made glancing reference in the past: A paper trail is no panacea. That paper will remain unseen unless someone demands a recount. If the e-vote tabulators spit out a margin of victory large enough to bypass an automatic recount, then no-one will ever examine the evidence.

What we need are three things:

1. A full paper trail.

2. Foolproof safeguards for the evidence. I see no reason why we can't have 24/7 camera surveillance.

3. An automatic count of the paper evidence, even if the margin of victory is quite wide.

We could offer many more recommendations, of course -- above all, I would like to see an international organization regulate elections in all industrial nations.