In Germany: Suing, to prevent electronic ballots

[DetlefK]

The Chaos Computer Club (a non-for-profit-organization of german hackers) is suing the state of Hessen at the Hessen state court, to prevent the usage of electronic voting machines. Their arguments are, that they violate the basic principles of an open, equal and state-sanctioned election.

links:

Unluckily, I couldn't find an article handling this topic in english, so I have to link to a german article.
http://www.tagesschau.de/inland/wahlcomputer2.html

www.ccc.de/ - The Chaos Computer Club

[Peace Patriot]

1. Germany has one of the most pristine voting processes in the world.

Paper ballots that are placed in glass jars, visible to all, until they are hand-counted in front of all. Exit polls that are conducted as a check on election fraud, and not (as here) tweaked to force the exit polls to confirm official results. They have real elections in Germany (and real exit polls), and of course global corporate predators want to change that and get Germans to install these private election systems in which the votes are 'counted' by TRADE SECRET, proprietary code, owned and controlled by rightwing corporations, as they are throughout the United States, with disastrous results for ordinary people. All of Germany's strong worker protections and liberal reforms, and its democracy itself, will be undone.

It IS possible to run an electronic system that is transparent, but private interests must be entirely cut out, as is done in Venezuela, by, a) using an OPEN SOURCE CODE system (in which anyone may review the code by which the votes are tabulated--the state owns the code, which is wide open to inspection), and b) hand-counting a substantial percentage of the votes as a check on machine fraud (Venezuela hand-counts 55%).

With a closed, "trade secret" system, the U.S. counts 0% to 1%. Yup, you read that right. Many states do ZERO hand-counting in a system run on TRADE SECRET code, with the code owned and controlled by FAR RIGHTWING, BUSHITE CORPORATIONS. Bush-Cheney campaign chairs and major fundraisers (Diebold). Major donors ($1,000,000) to extremist 'christian' causes, such as touting the death penalty for homosexuals (ES&S's major investor Howard Ahmanson). These are the people who 'counted' 80% of U.S. votes in 2004. And people wonder how Bush can be president. It's no mystery at all. The only mystery is, who exactly, in the Democratic Party leadership let this happen--and, indeed, enthusiastically supported it. We need to stop asking "Are our Democratic Party leaders nuts?" and start asking about their ties to war profiteers. System still in place. (S)elected this current so-called 'Democratic' Congress, which keeps larding Bush/Cheney with billions and billions more of our non-existent tax dollars to keep killing Iraqis until they sign over their oil rights.

Germany will see their own horror happen all over again, as we have seen it happen here, if e-voting is foisted upon them (unless they include strong transparency checks like Venezuela's). I trust that Germans are more alert to this kind of fascist coup than North Americans are. They have been far more vigilant over their democracy than we have been, over the last 50 years. Such an irony, that we helped defeat nazism in Germany, which began with 'brownshirts' stuffing ballot boxes, and yet we have permitted the 'brownshirts' at Diebold and ES&S (also Sequoia) to stuff the ballot boxes here, in a more sophisticated but no less devastating way.

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For the connection between the punchcard vote mis-count in Florida 2000 and the e-voting companies who benefited (and gain controlled of our election system as a result), see Dan Rather's "The Trouble With Touchscreens," www.HD.net.

For general info on e-voting, see "MythBreakers" at www.votersunite.org.