Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Indikasi Sangat Kuat Pencurangan Dalam Pemilu 2009
Indikasi Sangat Kuat Pencurangan Dalam Pemilu 2009
2009!
Bung FADLI ZON, kindly ask Mr. Prabowo Subianto/Mas Hashim READ them:
http://www.google.co.id/search?q=vote+fraud+america&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-
8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
Don't blame the poll workers in Florida. The facts, supported by voting machine experts and
numerous newspaper articles, have made it clear. Computerized voting machines that were certified
by the state of Florida, caused most of the problems in Florida's primary election. In the absence of
paper ballots, the damage is now irreversible.
This was no accident. It's not new. And Florida is not alone.
"The concept is clear, simple, and it works. Computerized voting gives the power of selection, without
fear of discovery, to whomever controls the computer," wrote the authors of VoteScam (1992), James
& Kenneth Collier (both now deceased). It's a 'must read' book about how elections have been
electronically and mechanically rigged in the United States for decades, and with the knowing and
sometimes unknowing support of media giants and government officials, including... ironically... Janet
Reno.
Only a few companies dominate the market for computer voting machines. Alarmingly, under U.S.
federal law, no background checks are required on these companies or their employees. Felons and
foreigners can, and do, own computer voting machine companies. Voting machine companies
demand that clients sign 'proprietary' contracts to protect their trade secrets, which prohibits a
thorough inspection of voting machines by outsiders. And, unbelievably, it appears that most election
officials don't require paper ballots to back up or audit electronic election results. So far, lawsuits to
allow complete access to inspect voting machines, or to require paper ballots so that recounts are
possible...have failed.
As far as we know, some guy from Russia could be controlling the outcome of computerized elections
in the United States.
In fact, Vikant Corp., a Chicago-area company owned by Alex Kantarovick, formerly of Minsk,
Belorussia (also known as White Russia, formerly U.S.S.R.), supplies the all-important 'control cards'
to Election Systems & Software (ES&S), the world's largest election management company, writes
reporter Christopher Bollyn. According to ES&S, they have "handled more than 40,000 of the world's
most important events and elections. ES&S systems have counted approximately 60% of the U.S.
national vote for the past four presidential elections. In the U.S. 2000 general election, ES&S systems
counted over 100 million ballots."
Getting back to Kantarovich, he would not disclose where the control cards are made, except they
aren't made in America, writes Bollyn. Nor would he discuss his previous employment. Bollyn says he
got some not-too-thinly-veiled threats from Kantarovich.
Kantarovich sounds more like the Russian mafia, than a legitimate businessman.
But the really big deal is this....all of ES&S's touch screen machines contain modems, "allowing them
to communicate—and be communicated with—while they are in operation," reports Bollyn. That
communication capability includes satellites. "Even computers not connected to modems or an
electronic network can still be manipulated offsite, not during the election, but certainly before or
after," says voting systems expert Dr. Rebecca Mercuri.
ES&S supplied the touch screens for Miami-Dade and Broward counties where the worst machine
failures occurred. But the debacle was nothing new for ES&S. Associated Press (AP) reporter Jessica
Fargen wrote in June 2000, "Venezuela's president and the head of the nation's election board
accused ES&S of trying to destabilize the country's electoral process. In the United States, four states
have reported problems with equipment supplied by the company. Faulty ES&S machines used in
Hawaii's 1998 elections forced that state's first-ever recount."
Sequoia is another voting systems company that sends a cold chill down my spine. "Mob ties, bribery,
felony convictions, and threats of coercion are visible in the public record of the election services
company," according to investigative journalist and filmmaker Daniel Hopsicker, and reported in
Spotlight.com. Hopsicker says that Pasquale "Rocco" Ricci, a 65-year-old senior executive with
Sequoia, and the firm's Louisiana representative, recently pled guilty to passing out as much as $10
million dollars in bribes over the course of almost an entire decade." According to American Law
Education Rights & Taxation (ALERT), Ricci is the president of Sequoia International, which also
manufactures casino slot machines.
That's just great. Now, we could possibly have both the Russian mafia and the U.S. mafia involved in
our elections.
In May 2002 Sequoia was bought by De La Rue, based in England. By their own estimate, De La Rue
is "the world's largest commercial security printer and papermaker, involved in the production of over
150 national currencies and a wide range of security documents such as travelers checks and
vouchers. Employing almost 7,000 people across 31 countries, (De La Rue) is also a leading provider
of cash handling equipment and software solutions to banks and retailers worldwide." And they
develop technology for secure passports, identity cards, and driver's licenses.
Okay, add Dr. Evil to the mix and be on the look-out for international money launderers, drug kingpins,
and Nazis.
The Shoup Voting Solutions of Quakertown, Pennsylvania, has a reputation for rigging elections,
wrote the late co-author of VoteScam, Jim Collier. According to Collier, in 1979, Ransom Shoup II, the
president of the firm, was convicted of conspiracy and obstruction of justice stemming from an FBI
investigation of a vote-fixing scam involving the old-fashioned lever machines in Philadelphia."
These reports are just the tip of the iceberg. The numerous instances of U.S. voting systems error and
fraud are documented in a 1988 report for the U.S. Commerce Department entitled, "Accuracy,
Integrity, and Security in Computerized Vote-Tallying" by Roy G. Saltman, a computer consultant for
the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Computer Systems Laboratory. Many other
experts and observers have been warning and complaining about these problems for decades.
But complaints, warnings, reports, and books like "VoteScam," haven't deterred government officials
like Pinellas County (Florida) Commissioners Calvin Harris and County Judge Patrick Caddell. They
told the St. Petersburg Times in October 2001 that they were aware that all of the voting machine
companies had "problems in their pasts." But, Harris said, "We have to look at this objectively and not
get tied up into the emotions of, 'Some guy might be a crook."
Dear Commissioner Harris...when it comes to elections in America...assume crooks are in
control...and then act accordingly.
Lynn Landes is a freelance journalist specializing in environmental issues. She writes a weekly
column which is published on her website www.EcoTalk.org and reports environmental news for
DUTV in Philadelphia, PA. Lynn's been a radio show host and a regular commentator for a BBC radio
program.
Links:
• http://www.votescam.com
• http://www.securepoll.com
• http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0805-07.htm
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(Note: Christopher Bollyn is one of the greatest
reporters in the world. He is independent and
intrepid. He is what Geraldo Rivera and Dan Rather
pretend to be. Bollyn reported on, and contributed to,
our "Citizens for a Fair Vote Count" Convention
which was held at the Greater Cincinnati Airport in
late August, 2000. This article explains, as far as
possible, the nuts and bolts of how 99% of the
counties in the USA incredibly delegate the
"counting" of our votes to a few private companies,
who "count" the votes in secret. We at votefraud.org
believe that these few private companies now fix
every key election in collaboration with the 5 major
TV Networks, the AP Wire Service, and the Ruling
Elite behind all these entities. This Ruling Elite also
controls the Democratic National Committee and the
Republican National Committee -- which entities
look the other way and NEVER protest this
absolutely un-American, unconstitutional, and
criminal arrangement.)
HOW A PRIVATE
COMPANY COUNTS OUR
VOTES ON ELECTION
NIGHT
By Christopher Bollyn
American Free Press
VOTING IN CHICAGO
END OF ARTICLE
Articles by Subject Electronic Voting
• ELRON - VOXEO: The Israeli Defense Firm That Tallies the Iowa Caucus
• Chicago Ballot Chaos
• Florida Election Stolen
• Death of Democracy Or May the Best Hacker Win
The Iowa caucus is only a few days away and the nation's attention will be directed to the
results, which signify the beginning of the U.S. presidential race. But does anyone watch who
tallies the results of the Iowa caucus?
The Iowa caucus results were tallied in 2004 by a company that is headed by a man whose
company was bought by Elron Electronics, the Israeli defense firm. I suspect that it will be
the same this year. Don't expect to see any grassroots political activists doing the tally in
Iowa. The Israeli defense establishment takes care of that part of the American "democratic"
election process.
VOXEO
In the summer of 2004, I first learned that a foreign and out-of-state company using
Interactive Voice Response (IVR) technology tallied the Iowa caucus results.
The system used to tally the 2004 Iowa caucus results was provided by a company called
Voxeo, which was apparently based in Orlando, Florida. (Yellow flag goes up in the mind of
those familiar with Orlando and electronic vote fraud history. See Bollyn article on Yang
below.)
The calls from the nearly 2,000 caucus centers in Iowa went to a Voxeo call center in Atlanta,
Georgia.
On January 31, 2005, I wrote to Michelle Bauer, Iowa's Secretary of State with some
questions about the use of Voxeo, a foreign company located in Florida, to tally the results of
the Iowa caucus:
Dear Sirs,
When I visited the headquarters of the Democratic Party in Des Moines last summer, I
learned that the tally of the Iowa caucus had been "out-sourced" to a company in Atlanta,
Georgia.
What this means is that the tallying of the Iowa caucus results was done over the telephone,
using the touch-tone buttons, to enter the results from each caucus location…
I am interested in how this was done, and why. Why did the Democratic Party allow the
crucial tally of the caucus results to be done by a company in Atlanta? Don't they trust their
own math skills?
Kind regards,
Christopher Bollyn
A person named Mike Milligan wrote back on behalf of Secretary of State Bauer:
Dear Christopher:
The Secretary of State forwarded me the email you sent to then on Monday, January 31, 2004
[sic] regarding the Iowa Caucuses.
Unfortunately you either received some incorrect information in your travels or are confused.
The Iowa Democratic Party completed all of the caucus night tabulations in Iowa, in the Des
Moines/Polk County Convention Center, which was the Caucus night HQ. In fact, our tech
staff wrote the software that tabulated the results.
To answer your second to last question, we feel we have a comfortable grasp of mathematics.
Sincerely,
MWM
I am responding to you about how the caucus results for the Iowa Democratic Party were
tallied on the night of the nation's first caucus. After checking my sources, I can assure you
that it is correct that an out-of-state telephone/computer system tallied the Iowa precinct
results.
The system used was provided by Voxeo Corporation based in Orlando, Florida. The calls
went from Iowa to a call center in Atlanta, Georgia.
See: http://www.voxeo.com/
This information was first provided to me last August by John McCormally, Communications
Director for the Iowa Democratic Party in Des Moines, Iowa.
Today I called Voxeo (800) 305-5771 in Orlando and although I didn't go into detail, the
receptionist confirmed that Voxeo had conducted the telephone tally of the Iowa Democratic
Caucus results.
McCormally told me that chairmen were selected in all 1,993 precincts and these chairmen
called in on touch-tone phones and after giving their PIN number, were able to enter the
results from their precinct using the touch-tone number pad.
I'm not going to go into great detail at this point, but this procedure of using an out-of-state
computer company to tally the precinct results for the Iowa Democratic Caucus lacks the
transparency and openness that one might expect in this exercise in grass-roots poll.
Clearly, if someone wanted to adjust the results, it would be the easiest thing to do to do it
through this computer system in Orlando, Florida. The Democrats in Iowa would never be
aware of it, regardless of their math skills, unless the paper results were carefully audited in
an open and honest manner.
Christopher Bollyn
Now, who really is Voxeo, and why are the Iowa caucus results tallied by them? I don't know
if the 2008 Iowa results will be tallied in the same way, but I wouldn't doubt it.
Voxeo is headed by Jonathan Taylor, who is the company's President and CEO. This is what
his Voxeo webpage says about him:
Jonathan combined his experience in both business operations and technology innovation to
found Voxeo in 1999. Under his guidance, Voxeo has seen triple-digit revenue growth for
four consecutive years and has been profitable since January, 2004. Prior to Voxeo,
Jonathan founded and helped bring three additional software and infrastructure service
companies to profitability.
From 1995 to 1997, Jonathan was the founder and President of InterResearch and
Development Group (IRdg), Inc. IRdg created and licensed iPost - the first internet powered
OEM unified messaging solution - to leading telecommunications providers including
Ericsson, Motorola and Unisys. IRdg was acquired by Elron Electronic Industries (Nasdq:
ELRN) subsidiary MediaGate in 1997.
There you have it. Jonathan Taylor's company, which he founded, was taken over by Elron
Electronic Industries, the Israeli defense high tech company:
In its early days, Elron focused on defense, particularly electronics and avionics, as well as
the emerging medical and technology sectors. In 1966, Elron founded Elbit, which combined
the expertise of the Ministry of Defense-Research Institute in special computer design with
Elron's experience in electronic product design, manufacture and management.
Source: http://www.elron.net/default.asp?PageID=203
This is important information that Americans need to know and which they will not find in
the Zionist-controlled media in the United States. It needs to be understood that the entire
election process in the United States is a fraud. More than that, it is a fraud that is being
perpetrated by the Israeli defense establishment on the naïve and gullible American public.
The sine qua non of an honest and transparent election process is the open counting of the
votes by the voters themselves in each polling station in front of the open eyes of other
citizens and members of the media. Any compromise in this most fundamental and essential
process which acts to remove the citizenry from the vote-counting process simply cannot be
accepted.
This is what Americans MUST get back to, in every polling station in the nation: paper
ballots that are hand counted in front of the public.
Nothing else will do to protect their democratic franchise in the United States - NOTHING.
See also:
By Christopher Bollyn
5 April 2006
The $50 million touch-screen and optical-scan voting system provided by Sequoia Voting
Systems failed across Chicago and suburban Cook County during the March 21 Illinois
primary. However, the leading corporate-controlled newspapers merely lamented the
failures of the system without addressing its fundamental flaws or even reporting that
the company running the election is foreign-owned.
The “high-tech” computerized voting system was “cumbersome” and “slow,” one
mainstream Chicago newspaper reported. The machines failed across the county causing
“plenty of frustration and confusion for voters,” the paper reported. The ballots and votes
from more than 400 precincts were still uncounted two days after the election due to
machine malfunctions and lost memory cartridges which contain the results.
Reports from other dailies noted that as of noon Wednesday, Chicago was missing
memory cartridges from 252 polling stations while Cook County officials “couldn’t find”
the results from 162 suburban precincts.
Election officials tried to assure the public that although nobody knew where all the
ballots and computerized memory cartridges were, they were “most assuredly not lost.”
“I don’t trust that,” U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.) said. “This is Chicago. This is Cook
County. We created vote fraud, vote scandal and stealing votes. We created that
mechanism. It became an art form.”
“Ballot chaos” is how another large Chicago newspaper described the situation in which
the votes from hundreds of precincts could not be found or counted on Election Night.
“We have accounted for the votes,” Langdon Neal, city election chairman told the
publication. “What we haven’t been able to do is count them.”
In one precinct on the Near South Side, for example, the Sequoia optical scanner failed to
register anything but Republican ballots. Although “election officials” tried to repair the
machine four times, by the end of the day it had failed to register a single Democratic
ballot in a precinct in which some 86 percent of the voters are Democrats.
When this reporter went to vote, the touch-screen machine went completely dead as the
voter in front of me pressed the button to print. When the poll workers were asked if
other voters had had similar problems with the equipment they said it had happened all
day and showed me an unplugged machine that had broken down earlier.
When the polls closed at 7 p.m., I was at the Cook County Clerk’s office to see how the
votes were tallied.
Citizens in Chicago, as in most American cities, are, however, forbidden from viewing or
participating in the any aspect of the vote-counting process.
The so-called counting of the votes is managed by some two dozen employees of
Sequoia Voting Systems, a privately held foreign company. These employees, many of
whom are not even U.S. citizens, have “full access” to the “back room area,” a sealed-off
section of the 5th floor of the county clerk’s office which is called the “tally area.”
In Chicago, the person in charge of the tallying of the votes was a British employee of
Sequoia named David Allen from London. Allen, who ran the “Sequoia War Room” in an
office next to that of Cook County Clerk David Orr, oversaw the “tally room” team, which
included a dozen Venezuelan employees, who operated the hidden computer equipment
that counts the votes.
As I have reported before, there are wire services such as the Associated Press, who
could be seen having direct connections leading from their computers to the hidden
mainframe computer of the Sequoia tallying system located behind the wall on the 5th
floor of the clerk’s office.
Senior executives from Sequoia Voting Systems and from its partner company,
Smartmatic, such as company president Jack A. Blaine and Roger Alejandro Piñate
Martinez, vice president of special operations, also had “full access” to the tally area.
Sequoia, which was previously held by the British-based firm De La Rue PLC, a company,
which produces bank notes, travelers checks and cash handling equipment, was merged
or combined with Smartmatic in March 2005.
Smartmatic, which has a U.S.-based office in Boca Raton, Fla., is headed by three young
Venezuelans along with Blaine, a former vice president with Unisys. A dozen Venezuelans
could be seen managing the most sensitive aspects of the recent election in Chicago.
Smartmatic, the parent company of Sequoia Voting Systems, obtained the company for a
“ridiculously low amount of money,” Charles D. Brady, an analyst with Hibernia
Southcoast Capital Inc., said at the time of the merger.
While De La Rue purchased 85 percent of Sequoia in 2002 for $35 million, it reportedly
sold the growing global company for only $16 million in 2005. Tracey Graham, then
president of Sequoia, said more than 30 organizations had expressed interest in buying
her company, yet no names of other bidders were given citing “confidentiality
agreements.”
The chief officers of Sequoia-Smartmatic are two 32-year old Venezuelans from Caracas,
Antonio Mugica and Alfredo Anzola. Anzola also works as a Venezuela-based lawyer
brokering international oil deals with the Cleveland law firm of Squire, Sanders &
Dempsey.
“With the combination of Sequoia and Smartmatic, both proven innovators with
accomplished track records in either the U.S. or abroad, we are creating the first truly
global leader in providing voter-verified electronic voting systems,” Blaine said in March
2005 when the merger was announced.
There is, however, nothing verifiable about the Sequoia voting system used in Cook
County. The voter has no way of knowing if his vote has been counted or how it was
counted.
The absolute lack of transparency in U.S. voting systems yields unverifiable election
results, which can only be accepted on faith. In Chicago voters are asked to trust the
results produced by malfunctioning machines operated by a privately owned foreign
company.
Asked about the nature of the foreign company that runs elections in Cook County, Scott
Burnham, spokesman for Cook County Clerk Orr simply said, “Ask Sequoia” and hung up
the phone. Asked about the ownership of the privately held company, Allen, who
supervised the tally, refused to answer and handed the phone to Michelle Shafer, the
company’s vice president and spokesperson.
Pressed about Allen’s citizenship, Shafer finally admitted that the Sequoia employee who
oversaw the tally was, indeed, a British citizen who had been assisted by a team of
Venezuelans.
Dimas Ulacio, one of the Venezuelan technicians who worked in the tally area spoke with
me. “Who really owns Sequoia?” I aksed Ulacio. “Is Sequoia-Smartmatic truly a
Venezuelan company or is it a British-owned company masquerading as a Venezuelan
company?”
The widespread failures of the Sequoia voting system in the Cook County election, Shafer
said, made for a “very typical Election Day in a jurisdiction where they are changing
voting technology.” Rather than blame the machines, Shafer blamed human error.
See also:
21 December 2004
TITUSVILLE, Florida. While the mainstream media has focused on a sensational murder
trial in California and the political crisis that followed the flawed elections in Ukraine, it
has ignored a huge domestic story about the computer programmer who has come
forward and explained how he had written computer code to steal elections in Florida.
An affidavit signed by the programmer, Clinton Curtis, in Prince George’s County, Md., on
Dec. 6, 2004, names the individuals involved in a computer vote fraud scheme that he
worked with in “the early fall of 2000” as “lead programmer” for a company called Yang
Enterprises, Inc. (YEI), based in Oviedo, Fla.
The 4-page Curtis document contains 15 points that he swears are both true and correct.
“I declare under penalty of perjury,” Curtis signed on the affidavit, “that the above is true
and correct.”
By the fall of 2000 Curtis had worked as a programmer for two years with YEI, a listed
“small, minority, woman-owned business” that does extensive business with NASA and
Florida. The CEO of YEI is a Chinese immigrant named Mrs. Li Woan Yang.
On its web site, YEI says it has 250 employees working at its Oviedo headquarters, the
Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Patrick Air Force Base and
Tallahassee, Fla.
According to published company documents, the contact person for YEI is Mike Cohen,
Yang’s “executive secretary.” Cohen, named by Curtis as being one of the three key
persons at YEI involved in creating the program in 2000, has not answered telephone
calls.
See also:
What is particularly troubling about these machines is the fact that they contain an internal
two-way modem, which enables anyone with a modem-equipped computer, from hackers
and vendors to telephone company personnel and politicians, to potentially access and alter
the computer’s tally of the votes.
---
Cook County, IL – Across the United States, in precincts from coast to coast, ballot-counting
computers equipped with cellular telephony and two-way modems have counted the votes of
the American people. These ballot-counting machines, designed and operated by private
companies, and the laws that ushered in their use have essentially disenfranchised citizen
election judges from the vote-counting process and relegated them to insignificant roles as
public servants working for private business on election night.
OFFICIAL INDIFFERENCE
Some officials concerned with elections have pondered the unthinkable; namely, the stealing
of a presidential election by computer fraud in the metropolitan areas of key states. Steve
White, former assistant attorney general of California, said, “ Given the importance of the
national election, sooner or later it will be attempted. There is a real reluctance to concede the
gravity of the problem.”
Officials at the Illinois State Board of Elections, the agency that approves the voting
machines used in the state was contacted and asked about how the integrity of the elections
could be safeguarded; each and every official interviewed was indifferent to the threat of
computer vote fraud. Rick Fulle, Assistant Director of voting systems and 25-year veteran of
the board said, “You can’t secure any computer system.”
When asked if election judges were permitted by law to do a manual recount of the votes – to
verify the accuracy of the computer tally – the officials invariably replied, “You do not do a
hand count,” although Fuller added, “nothing would stop them.”
A hand count of the votes by the election judges at the precinct level, before posting the
results, is the only way to ensure that the machine tally is correct and that no computer fraud
has been perpetrated. However, election officials discourage any manual audit saying that
there are too many choices on the ballot and that a manual count would take too long.
In Switzerland, arguably the most democratic nation, all major political decisions are put
before the people as referenda and polling with hand-counted paper ballots is conducted at
least four times a year. Switzerland is not a member of the United Nations due simply to the
fact that the Swiss people have rejected UN membership at the polls.
NOBODY CARES
Tests of computer vote-counting systems used in Illinois from 1983-1987, which tested tens
of thousands of ballots, revealed significant errors in the computer counting in more than
twenty percent of the tests. Fulle said that in Illinois today there is “a 16 percent error rate”
with ballot-counting machines. He expected numerous problems on election night saying
“equipment will fail across the state.”
“I don’t understand why nobody cares,” Michael L. Harty, former Illinois director of voting
systems and standards said, “At one point, we had tabulation errors in twenty-eight percent of
the systems tested, and nobody cared.”
The indifference of election officials, the people ultimately responsible for the integrity of the
elections, proves a point made by a former president of the University of Chicago, Robert M.
Hutchins, who said, “The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from
ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment."
Officials from the Illinois Board of Elections said that election judges are only required to
verify that the number of ballots tabulated by the machine matches the number of ballots
counted by the judges – as if voters are only voting for one candidate. Fulle added, “Nothing
in the law [Illinois] requires that the count be accurate.” In this way the basic role of election
judges -- to count and verify the accuracy of the vote -- has been usurped and compromised
by election machines operated by private companies.
Whether it was the Precinct Ballot Counter 2100 (PBC), the Optech Eagle III, the Model 100
Optic Mark Reader (OMR), or the Votronic touch-screen system that counted your vote, these
machines have something in common:
they are all designed and operated by Elections Systems & Software, Inc. (ES&S) - and they
each contain a two-way modem, allowing them to communicate - and be communicated with
- while they are in operation.
What is particularly troubling about these machines is the fact that they contain an internal
modem, which enables anyone with a modem-equipped computer, from hackers and
vendors to telephone company personnel and politicians, to potentially access and alter
the computer’s tally of the votes.
ES&S is “the largest company in the world focusing solely on automating the election
process.” The company “provides specialized systems and software to automate the entire
election process for local, state, and national governments worldwide.” ES&S is a
reorganized company that was given a new name in November 1997 after combining two of
the largest election machine companies: Business Records Corp. (BRC, formerly part of
Cronus Industries) and American Information Systems, Inc. (AIS).
ES&S is a privately held company owned by unknown investors and headed by Aldo Tesi,
who refers to the democratic franchise as “the election industry.” The company is
headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska and supplies “thousands and thousands of machines being
used across the country” to more than 2,200 U.S. jurisdictions in 49 states.
Cook County bought nearly 5,000 PBC machines from ES&S at a cost of $25 million for the
suburbs and the city of Chicago in what a company spokesman called a “huge contract.”
It was reported (in the Omaha World Herald, whose publisher, John Gottschalk is one of the
directors of ES&S) that the head of Venezuela’s National Elections Council, Etanislao
Gonzalez, placed the blame for the technical difficulties during the election on the Nebraska-
based ES&S. Gonzalez said, “the firm flagrantly failed to meet its commitments and the
failure had destabilized the country’s electoral process.”
A Venezuelan air force jet flew to Omaha to fetch experts to “salvage” the election. It was
reported that more than 6 percent of the 7,000 voting machines broke down during the
Venezuelan election and that there were major “technical glitches”. ES&S said that the rate of
failure in the Venezuela election was "slightly higher than we would expect."
The PBC machines contain an internal Expedite modem made by Novatel Wireless, an
international company based in San Diego, a “spin-off” of two Canadian companies:
NovAtel, Inc. of Calgary, a company specializing in satellite communications and global
positioning systems, and an internationally owned oil company in Alberta.
“You certainly run the risk of somebody hacking into these [vote-counting] machines,” a
spokesman for Novatel Wireless said, “The machine can be accessed anytime it is plugged
in,” – if one knows the computer’s IP (Internet Protocol) address. “Internet voting scares me,”
he added, “it puts us in the same situation as a third-world country.” When asked about the
ownership of Novatel Wireless, he said, “I’ve no idea who owns the company.”
Roy Saltman, a computer consultant at the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s
Computer Systems Laboratory wrote a report for the U.S. Commerce Dept. in 1988 entitled,
“Accuracy, Integrity, and Security in Computerized Vote-Tallying”, in which he documented
many instances of vote mistabulation and the inherent vulnerability of U.S. voting systems to
error and fraud. Among the possible methods he listed by which “unknown persons may
perpetrate undiscoverable frauds” were “fraudulent alterations in the computer program or in
control cards that manipulate the program” and “introduction of false voting summaries
through changes in data stored in removable data storage units of precinct-located, vote-
counting devices.”
Herb Deutsch, who works in the technical department of ES&S in Rockford, IL, where the
PBC was designed has worked with election software and hardware for 25 years having
formerly worked for BRC. Deutsch defended the PBC saying that its ballot tabulation
program is “generic” and that its computer code has been “certified.”
CONTROL CARDS
However, each PBC machine is programmed and run by a pre-programmed 512-K memory
card. According to Deutsch, “the memory card can be used for lots of purposes” and contains
the coded instructions that “essentially tell the machine what to do” when it is turned on.
These cards are programmed at the company offices of ES&S in Chicago. The card is
removed by the election judges and turned in to headquarters when the polls close.
Vikant Corp., a Chicago area company owned by Alex Kantarovich of Minsk, Belorussia,
supplied the control cards to ES&S. When asked where Vikant cards are produced,
Kantarovich said, “I cannot disclose where the cards are made,” but admitted that they are not
made in America.
Mr. Kantarovich said that he has been in America for 11 years but declined to discuss his
employment prior to running Vikant Corp., saying, “I don’t want to disclose that
information.”
Kantarovich said he had obtained his degree in the Soviet Union and initially refused to
answer questions about how his product was chosen for the ES&S voting equipment saying
that it was “inside information that I cannot disclose.” Kantarovich said later that his firm was
chosen over larger firms like IBM and Panasonic because Vikant was uniquely able to meet
the specific requirements of ES&S and provide the cards on short notice. He added, however,
that there had been “some problems” with the cards from other suppliers.
Kantarovich said, “To tell you the truth, I have no idea how these vote counting machines
work. We are just the supplier of one particular product.”
Deutsch said that he trusted that the election computers were safe from hackers on the very
day that it was reported that Microsoft’s computers and source code had been “hacked” for a
week. Teenagers have demonstrated that breaking into the most secure computer networks in
the world is “child’s play,” but serious questions about the security of the national election
computer network are dismissed as preposterous.
Security experts say the attack on Microsoft shows that no one is safe - it was reported that
the information stolen from Microsoft was sent to Russia, although this could be a front for
people anywhere on the net.
Source:
NA (Network America) e-wire
http://www.votefraud.org/News/2000/10/102700.html
See also: