IWETHEY v. 0.3.0 | TODO
1,095 registered users | 0 active users | 0 LpH | Statistics
Login | Create New User
IWETHEY Banner

Welcome to IWETHEY!

New Maybe this will cheer you up.
[link|http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/29/washington/29ballot.html?_r=1&oref=slogin|Something for the conspiracy theory buffs out there]. Yeah, it's the New York Times, but they're not *always* wrong. Besides, the Miami Herald got there first.

Excerpts:

The federal government is investigating the takeover last year of a leading American manufacturer of electronic voting systems by a small software company that has been linked to the leftist Venezuelan government of President Hugo Chavez.

The inquiry is focusing on the Venezuelan owners of the software company, the Smartmatic Corporation, and is trying to determine whether the government in Caracas has any control or influence over the firm's operations, government officials and others familiar with the investigation said...

Smartmatic was a little-known firm with no experience in voting technology before it was chosen by the Venezuelan authorities to replace the country's elections machinery ahead of a contentious referendum that confirmed Mr. Chavez as president in August 2004...

But the role of the young Venezuelan engineers who founded Smartmatic has become less visible in public documents as the company has been restructured into an elaborate web of offshore companies and foreign trusts.

'The government should know who owns our voting machines; that is a national security concern,' said Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of New York, who asked the Bush administration in May to review the Sequoia takeover.

'There seems to have been an obvious effort to obscure the ownership of the company,' Ms. Maloney said of Smartmatic in a telephone interview yesterday. 'The Cfius process, if it is moving forward, can determine that.'

...The concerns about possible ties between the owners of Smartmatic and the Chavez government have been well known to United States foreign-policy officials since before the 2004 recall election in which Mr. Chavez, a strong ally of President Fidel Castro of Cuba, won by an official margin of nearly 20 percent.

Opposition leaders asserted that the balloting had been rigged. But a statistical analysis of the distribution of the vote by American experts in electronic voting security showed that the result did not fit the pattern of irregularities that the opposition had claimed.

At the same time, the official audit of the vote by the Venezuelan election authorities was badly flawed, one of the American experts said. 'They did it all wrong,' one of the authors of the study, Avi Rubin, a professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University, said in an interview...

'No foreign government or entity, including Venezuela, has ever held any stake in Smartmatic,' Mr. Stoller said. 'Smartmatic has always been a privately held company, and despite that, we've been fully transparent about the ownership of the corporation.'

Mr. Stoller emphasized that Bizta was a separate company and said the shares the Venezuelan government received in it were 'the guarantee for a loan.'

Mr. Stoller also described concerns about the security of Sequoia's electronic systems as unfounded, given their certification by federal and state election agencies.

But after a municipal primary election in Chicago in March, Sequoia voting machines were blamed for a series of delays and irregularities. Smartmatic's new president, Jack A. Blaine, acknowledged in a public hearing that Smartmatic workers had been flown up from Venezuela to help with the vote.

Some problems with the election were later blamed on a software component, which transmits the voting results to a central computer, that was developed in Venezuela.

I say:

I'm sure it's nothing.

And now, from conspiracy theory to bad horror flick: [link|http://www.thejournalnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061029/NEWS05/610290334/1021|the dead are voting in New York]

Excerpts:

A new statewide database of registered voters contains as many as 77,000 dead people on its rolls, and as many as 2,600 of them have cast votes from the grave, according to a Poughkeepsie Journal computer-assisted analysis.

The Journal's analysis of New York's 3-month-old database is the first to determine the potential for errors and fraud in voting. It matched names, dates of birth and ZIP codes in the state's database of 11.7 million voter registration records against the same information in the Social Security Administration's "Death Master File." That database has 77 million records of deaths dating back to 1937...

Tales of votes being cast from the grave are part of election lore. Last year, at least two dead voters were counted in a Tennessee state Senate race that was decided by fewer than 20 votes. As a result of that and other irregularities, seven poll workers were fired, an entire precinct was dissolved and the election results were voided by the state Senate, forcing the removal of the presumed winner. Three elections workers were indicted for faking the votes.

In 1997, a judge declared a Miami mayoral election invalid because of widespread fraud, including dead voters.

Venezuela poised to hack our elections?

And in one of the more notorious examples, inspectors estimated that as many as 1 in 10 ballots cast in Chicago during the 1982 Illinois gubernatorial election were fraudulent for various reasons, including votes by the dead.


[link|http://www.angelfire.com/ca3/marlowe/politics.american.html#20061029|Angelfire link] (turn off Javascript to avoid popups)

[link|http://fnmarlowe.blogspot.com/2006/10/venezuela-poised-to-hack-our-elections.html|Comment at blogger.com]

----------------------------------------------------------------
4 out of 5 Iraqis choose democracy!
If you don't like my posts, don't click on them.
Never mind the AP. Here's the real Iraq reporting: [link|http://michaelyon.blogspot.com/|http://michaelyon.blogspot.com/]
"The period of debate is closed. Arms, as the last resort, decide the contest." - Thomas Paine, Common Sense
New The executive branch
swinging from a matched set of hemp neckties at the Hague would cheer me up.



[link|http://www.blackbagops.net|Black Bag Operations Log]

[link|http://www.objectiveclips.com|Artificial Intelligence]

[link|http://www.badpage.info/seaside/html|Scrutinizer]
Expand Edited by tuberculosis Aug. 21, 2007, 06:16:40 AM EDT
New why wait for the foreigners?
the current admin is so close to trashing the constitution to demand justice immediately.
thanx,
bill
Any opinions expressed by me are mine alone, posted from my home computer, on my own time as a free american and do not reflect the opinions of any person or company that I have had professional relations with in the past 50 years. meep
New Um...not that I disagree with you
regarding the voting machines being owned by a foreign company are a bad thing (surprise)...


but, the machines in question aren't owned by [link|http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/30/AR2006103001224.html| Smartmatic Corp or Sequoia Voting Systems Inc.] hell, the machines in question aren't even owned by Diebold.

The voting device vendor is Election Systems & Software Inc., Sola said, adding that the system will work as planned. "We take many aggressive steps to ensure that the election is programmed and tabulated accurately," he said. "We balance the number of voters that enter a precinct to the number of ballots cast there. We also reconcile each touch-screen unit against audit data to ensure that the results are accurate." [link|http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9004682&intsrc=news_ts_head| Computer World]
     More rigged voting machines - (tuberculosis) - (14)
         I'm just waiting... - (inthane-chan)
         Maybe this will cheer you up. - (marlowe) - (3)
             The executive branch - (tuberculosis) - (1)
                 why wait for the foreigners? - (boxley)
             Um...not that I disagree with you - (Simon_Jester)
         The way things are going... - (folkert) - (8)
             I predicted that here about a year ago. - (Andrew Grygus) - (7)
                 See you at the barricades. - (inthane-chan) - (5)
                     Buy guns while you can. It's our only hope. - (imric) - (4)
                         You don't need guns - (tuberculosis) - (3)
                             Find me an American Gandhi - (drewk) - (2)
                                 It will happen if this election doesn't shift the balance -NT - (tuberculosis)
                                 American ghandi? that would be billy sunday -NT - (boxley)
                 Don't worry about that... - (jb4)

Worth getting into a flame war on the New York Times crossword blog.
94 ms