06-04-2009, 01:04 AM
<b>2004 Election : American Right Wing Conspiracy</b>
In the USA, there has been a strong movement against fraudulent use of electronic voting mechanism by corporate interests and political groups. The huge difference between all the major exit polls and the actual election result is a reason to worry about the fraudulent misuse of electronic voting mechanism. Republicans were desperate to win as the war on terror and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were at crucial stage. Similar to the difference between exit polls and poll results in India, there was huge difference between the exit poll results and actual election results in the 2004 reelection of former US president George Bush. This difference led to several independent investigations. Whistle blowers and watchdog groups have inturn unearthed a major right wing conspiracy that titled the American public opinion using the electronic voting machine software. Indian EVM are claimed to be much less complex and less prone to manipulation or rigging, but experts don't rule out the possibility of fraud. Indigenous machines are not networked, but are not immune from manipulation.
Private companies like Diebold, whose owners are close to the Bush Government are now being questioned for their lack of integrity and fraudulent use of the digital voting system that allegedly rigged major US elections under the former US President. There is no such disputes about the integrity of the government controlled defence electronic units that manufactured the indigenous EVMs. The nation was taken aback by the open allegation made by the former Chief Election Commissioner Gopalaswami against his colleague and the current election commissioner, Navin Chawla being a stooge of the ruling party.
US Activists investigating the 2004 Presidential election have identified hundreds of preceincts in Florida, Ohio and other states where the voting results did not match the exit polls. These inconsistencies occurred primarily in precincts where electronic voting machines with no paper trail were used. In Florida, these discrepancies contributed for George Bush's statewide "victory" margin. Many of them were in precincts with a strong Democratic majority. In the USA many media commentators have explained the gap between the exit polls and the final vote counts by claiming that the exit polls were flawed. However, in those precincts where there was a machine that produced a "paper trail," the exit polls almost exactly matched the actual vote and there were few discrepancies giving George Bush extra votes. When a voter casts his or her ballot for someone other than the candidate they intended to vote for, this is called a "misvote." Misvotes in Ohio,Florida, and New Mexico appear to have given George Bush his winning percentage. (Misvotes favoring George Bush reached as high as 40% on some vote machines in some Florida, Ohio and New Mexico precincts. There were also high misvote totals in other states. Is it just an accidental coincidence that one of the senior officials holding top positions in the EVM manufacturing defence units was posted in the New York Office of the Indian company and maintained close contacts with their US counterparts under the former US president. In fact the electoral victory of Barack Obama in the latest US election could not happen, if the American people were not vigilant about the electronic vote fraud perpetuated by right wing politicians with the help of government officials and the corporate sector. For details (http://www.flcv.com/fraudpat.html)
http://www.futuregov.net/articles/2009/may...etter-paper-ba/
According to Madhav Ragam, Director, Government & Education, Healthcare & Life Sciences, Growth Markets Unit, IBM, while India does a good job considering the "mind-boggling" scale and complexity of its elections, no voting process is invulnerable. "There is usually a weak point in the system, internal or external, that can be exploited. The technological challenge is how you put the necessary processes and procedures in place to ensure that as little as possible falls through the cracks."
In an interesting piece on dangers of digital voting, Bruce Shneier said: "DRE machines must have a voter-verifiable paper audit trails (sometimes called a voter-verified paper ballot). This is a paper ballot printed out by the voting machine, which the voter is allowed to look at and verify. He doesn't take it home with him. Either he looks at it on the machine behind a glass screen, or he takes the paper and puts it into a ballot box. The point of this is twofold: it allows the voter to confirm that his vote was recorded in the manner he intended, and it provides the mechanism for a recount if there are problems with the machine." He added: "Software used on DRE machines must be open to public scrutiny. This also has two functions: it allows any interested party to examine the software and find bugs, which can then be corrected, a public analysis that improves security; and it increases public confidence in the voting process - if the software is public, no one can insinuate that the voting system has unfairness built into the code (companies that make these machines regularly argue that they need to keep their software secret for security reasons. Don't believe them. In this instance, secrecy has nothing to do with security
In the USA, there has been a strong movement against fraudulent use of electronic voting mechanism by corporate interests and political groups. The huge difference between all the major exit polls and the actual election result is a reason to worry about the fraudulent misuse of electronic voting mechanism. Republicans were desperate to win as the war on terror and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were at crucial stage. Similar to the difference between exit polls and poll results in India, there was huge difference between the exit poll results and actual election results in the 2004 reelection of former US president George Bush. This difference led to several independent investigations. Whistle blowers and watchdog groups have inturn unearthed a major right wing conspiracy that titled the American public opinion using the electronic voting machine software. Indian EVM are claimed to be much less complex and less prone to manipulation or rigging, but experts don't rule out the possibility of fraud. Indigenous machines are not networked, but are not immune from manipulation.
Private companies like Diebold, whose owners are close to the Bush Government are now being questioned for their lack of integrity and fraudulent use of the digital voting system that allegedly rigged major US elections under the former US President. There is no such disputes about the integrity of the government controlled defence electronic units that manufactured the indigenous EVMs. The nation was taken aback by the open allegation made by the former Chief Election Commissioner Gopalaswami against his colleague and the current election commissioner, Navin Chawla being a stooge of the ruling party.
US Activists investigating the 2004 Presidential election have identified hundreds of preceincts in Florida, Ohio and other states where the voting results did not match the exit polls. These inconsistencies occurred primarily in precincts where electronic voting machines with no paper trail were used. In Florida, these discrepancies contributed for George Bush's statewide "victory" margin. Many of them were in precincts with a strong Democratic majority. In the USA many media commentators have explained the gap between the exit polls and the final vote counts by claiming that the exit polls were flawed. However, in those precincts where there was a machine that produced a "paper trail," the exit polls almost exactly matched the actual vote and there were few discrepancies giving George Bush extra votes. When a voter casts his or her ballot for someone other than the candidate they intended to vote for, this is called a "misvote." Misvotes in Ohio,Florida, and New Mexico appear to have given George Bush his winning percentage. (Misvotes favoring George Bush reached as high as 40% on some vote machines in some Florida, Ohio and New Mexico precincts. There were also high misvote totals in other states. Is it just an accidental coincidence that one of the senior officials holding top positions in the EVM manufacturing defence units was posted in the New York Office of the Indian company and maintained close contacts with their US counterparts under the former US president. In fact the electoral victory of Barack Obama in the latest US election could not happen, if the American people were not vigilant about the electronic vote fraud perpetuated by right wing politicians with the help of government officials and the corporate sector. For details (http://www.flcv.com/fraudpat.html)
http://www.futuregov.net/articles/2009/may...etter-paper-ba/
According to Madhav Ragam, Director, Government & Education, Healthcare & Life Sciences, Growth Markets Unit, IBM, while India does a good job considering the "mind-boggling" scale and complexity of its elections, no voting process is invulnerable. "There is usually a weak point in the system, internal or external, that can be exploited. The technological challenge is how you put the necessary processes and procedures in place to ensure that as little as possible falls through the cracks."
In an interesting piece on dangers of digital voting, Bruce Shneier said: "DRE machines must have a voter-verifiable paper audit trails (sometimes called a voter-verified paper ballot). This is a paper ballot printed out by the voting machine, which the voter is allowed to look at and verify. He doesn't take it home with him. Either he looks at it on the machine behind a glass screen, or he takes the paper and puts it into a ballot box. The point of this is twofold: it allows the voter to confirm that his vote was recorded in the manner he intended, and it provides the mechanism for a recount if there are problems with the machine." He added: "Software used on DRE machines must be open to public scrutiny. This also has two functions: it allows any interested party to examine the software and find bugs, which can then be corrected, a public analysis that improves security; and it increases public confidence in the voting process - if the software is public, no one can insinuate that the voting system has unfairness built into the code (companies that make these machines regularly argue that they need to keep their software secret for security reasons. Don't believe them. In this instance, secrecy has nothing to do with security