Thursday, June 15, 2006

Take action against vote fraud

Did Francine Busby lose the bellweather race in CA-50? Most people think the "papers" comment sunk it for her. Such was my own presumption. But now I'm wondering: If the loss was honest, why did we see such outrageous and illegal behavior involving custody of the voting devices?

For the full story, go here. A sample:
Why, if we are not alleging fraud, should there be a manual hand count of the ballots? Well, it is very simple. The poll workers took the Diebold machines home in the days and weeks prior to the election in violation of all established security protocols (not to mention common sense) as implemented by California's Secretary of State Bruce McPherson after demonstrating that Diebold voting machines, both optical scan and touch screen, are highly prone to tampering.
If you are concerned about these sorts of illegalities, you will want to sign the petition here.

If you read a great deal about criminal cases, you may have encountered the concept of "framing a guilty man." This phrase refers to cops or prosecutors who (allegedly) salt the evidence against a guilty party because the available, legally-admissable evidence may not suffice. We may be dealing with a similar phenomenon here. Even if we posit that Busby probably would have lost a fair election, rigging the vote just in case remains a heinous crime.

1 comment:

RJB said...

The Democrats had poll observers all over the 50th District. Busby had representation at the county Registrars office when the votes were counted. There were no reports of suspicious counts or tampering, yet this has become some sort of cause on some blogs.

Busby lost because she didn't energize the Democratic base and give them a reason to get out and vote. Between the lame attack ads from the DCCC and the "papers" comment, not enough Democrats bothered to go to the polls.

There were very few Diebold touch screen voting stations in use. Most of the voting was via optical scan ballots.

Busby lost.