Make Your Vote Count In 2008

counted in 2008 on electronic voting machines made and serviced by two companies – Diebold and ES&S. According to the excellent article by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. that follows this page, “Was the 2004 Election Stolen?,” those two companies have close ties to the Republican Party. The Chairman and CEO of Diebold in 2004 was a major Bush campaign organizer and donor who wrote in 2003 that he was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.” RFK Jr.’s article documents that the Diebold machines contributed to switching enough votes from Kerry to Bush in Ohio to deliver Ohio’s electoral votes to Bush and change the outcome of the election. This has been corroborated in books by Greg Palast, Mark Crispin Miller and many others, and in a scientific report by the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law. These sources also document that electronic voting machines, especially Direct Recording Electronic voting machines (DREs), are highly vulnerable to the corruption of their vote recording and tabulating functions. A much safer method of voting – and having those votes recorded and counted – is the use of paper ballots counted by precinct-based optical scanners (called a PBOS system). PBOS systems also happen to be cheaper than DREs for all but the smallest precincts. Since the Democrats did better than expected in the 2006 election, you might believe that voting machines are no longer a problem. However, as Greg Palast reported in a November 2006 article, “How They Stole The Mid-Term Election,” it wasn’t that the election wasn’t stolen, it was just that it wasn’t stolen “big” enough (i.e. there wasn’t enough fraud to overcome massive public disgust with the current administration). Ensuring that the upcoming elections truly reflect the will of the people of the United States is vital. Your help is needed to roll back the push to have votes counted on vulnerable DREs in 2008. Please inform yourself by using the sources listed below and then spread the word as widely as possible. New York would be better off keeping its existing levermachine system rather than switching to DREs for the 2008 election. (Some activists and legislative leaders are working toward that end, see below. ) But, since federal authority may supercede that of the states, it is even more important to take action nationally rather than locally.