DIEBOLD - 2008 "The fix is in" - Moscow Times

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Party Hacks

The Moscow Times March 3, 2006
By Chris Floyd

Two weeks ago, an obscure, unelected, Republican-appointed official in California decided the future of the world. That future -- at least for the next several years -- will be an accelerating nightmare of war, corruption, repression, atrocity and terror. That's because the loyal apparatchik has, with the stroke of a pen, guaranteed the perpetuation of the Bush faction in power in 2008 and beyond.

One of the few certainties in modern U.S. politics is that no Democrat can win the presidency without carrying California.

Thus, the sudden, hugger-mugger decision by California Secretary of State Bruce McPherson to override the objections of his own experts and certify the eminently hackable voting machines of the politically partisan firm, Diebold, for use throughout the state means, quite simply, that the fix is in for 2008. It doesn't matter who the Democrats run -- Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, George Clooney or Jesus H. Christ in an Uncle Sam suit. It won't make a bit of difference. California is lost, the presidency is lost and the Bushists are in -- already. It's over.

What's more, "hackers wouldn't need to know passwords or cryptographic keys, or have access to any other part of the system to do their dirty work," the Los Angeles Times notes. "Voters, candidates and election monitors wouldn't necessarily know they'd been rooked." A more perfect vehicle for fixing an election can hardly be imagined. And it would require nothing more than a handful of high-tech zealots, not a vast conspiracy.

Naturally, after such a blistering condemnation, McPherson did what any official charged with guaranteeing the integrity and credibility of his state's elections would do: He approved the slipshod system by the dark of the moon, on a Friday before a holiday weekend, without any public hearings -- indeed, without waiting for the results of a pending federal review of Diebold's mole-infested code.

http://context.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2006/03/03/120.html