VOTING COUNT UPDATE

BRAD BLOG - The first of several federal whistleblower qui tam (fraud)
suits have now been filed against one of America's major electronic
voting machine companies. . .
Florida attorney Mike Papantonio who, along with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
hosts Ring of Fire weekends on Air America Radio, was a guest on Mike
Malloy's radio program last night (complete audio linked at the URL
below.) He discussed the upcoming whistleblower suits that he and Robert
F. Kennedy Jr. are filing against several of the voting machine
companies. . . Pap reported last night that the "dream team of lawyers"
they've assembled . . . includes a bunch of those who took on the
tobacco companies in a successful quarter billion dollar suit - so
they're not likely easily intimidated . . .

AP - "The designers of video games have built far more sophisticated
security into their systems than have the manufacturers of voting
machines," said Lowell Finley, co-director of Voter Action, a non-profit
and non-partisan group based in Berkeley, Calif. "The biggest problem is
security against tampering."

About 80% of American voters will use some form of electronic voting in
the November election, where every seat in the House of Representatives
is up for re-election, as are 33 Senate offices and 36 governorships.

New York University's Brennan Center for Justice released a one-year
study last month that determined that the three most popular types of
U.S. voting machines "pose a real danger" to election integrity. . .
More than 120 security threats were identified, including wireless
machines that could be hacked "by virtually any member of the public
with some (computer) knowledge" and a PC card; the failure of most
states to install software that could detect outside attacks; and the
failure of many states to audit their electronic systems.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-07-13-evoting_x.htm

GREG PALAST - Right now in Mexico's capitol, nearly a million ballots
sit in tied bundles uncounted. That's four times the "official" margin
of victory of the ruling party over Lopez Obrador. Supposedly, they're
"votos nulos" -- null votes, unreadable. But, not surprisingly, when a
few packets were opened, the majority of these supposedly unreadable
votes were Lopez Obrador's.

If you think that's a Mexican game, think again. Because that's exactly
what happened in Florida and Ohio. In Florida, 179,855 ballots
supposedly showed no vote for President. A closer look by the US Civil
Rights Commission statisticians showed that 54% of those Florida "votos
nulos" were cast by African-Americans. Did black folk forget to vote
for President, couldn't make up their minds or, as one TV network
implied, were too dumb to figure out the ballot? Not at all. Machines
can't count some ballots. But people can. For example, several voters
wrote in, "Al Gore," which the machines rejected as his name was already
printed on the ballot. The write-in could fool a machine but a human
has no problem figuring out that voter's intent.

The National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago
reviewed all 179,855 "uncountable" votes and found the majority
attempted to choose Gore. And they would have been counted -- but
Florida's Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, ordered a halt.

So Bush was elected not by counting the votes but by preventing their
count. And he was reelected the same way in 2004 when a quarter million
votes were nullified in Ohio.

But why fixate on Florida and Ohio? Here's a nasty little fact about
voting in the Land of the Free not reported in your newspapers:
3,600,380 ballots were cast in the November 2004 presidential election
that were never counted. In 2000, the uncounted ballots totaled just
under two million. . .

Lopez Obrador put political force behind his legal demands by calling on
voters from every state in Mexico to march to the capital. Two million
are expected to arrive this Sunday. The result: the word among the
political classes is that the election may be annulled. Even the
conservative Financial Times has warned Mexico's elite not to "fool
itself" by ignoring the demand for a full vote count.

North-of-the-Border Democrats just don't get it. The Republican Party
is pushing "provisional" ballots, pushing voter ID requirements,
compiling secret challenge lists, scrubbing voter registries and selling
us vote-nullifying ballot boxes: they get it completely. The GOP knows
the key to their electoral domination is not in winning over their
opponents' votes, but in not counting them.

http://gregpalast.com