tuluum's Diaryland Diary
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Voting Corruption :O (article)
Simi had wanted to go out last night but I conked out early. So knackered. Then woke up around 10pm watched Angel and Newlyweds, had an FAP meeting with Lynn, then worked on an OSCommerce project til around 5a.m.
BTW that was one of the best episodes of Angel EVER! There were so many great lines. hahah
I'm gonna rip you a new puppethole, bitch! hahahaha.. good times people, good times...
I'm pretty giddy right now too :D
Anyway, here's a really excellent article on how Bush could still win, even if he doesn't any votes :|
Published on Monday, October 13, 2003 by the lndependent/UK
All the President's Votes?
A Quiet Revolution is Taking Place in US Politics.
By the Time It's Over, the Integrity of Elections Will be in the
Unchallenged, Unscrutinized Control of a Few Large - and
Pro-Republican - Corporations.
Andrew Gumbel wonders if democracy in America can survive
by Andrew Gumbel
Something very odd happened in the mid-term elections in Georgia
last November. On the eve of the vote, opinion polls showed Roy
Barnes, the incumbent Democratic governor, leading by between
nine and 11 points. In a somewhat closer, keenly watched Senate
race, polls indicated that Max Cleland, the popular Democrat up
for re-election, was ahead by two to five points against his
Republican challenger, Saxby Chambliss.
Corporate America is very close to running this country. The
only thing that is stopping them from taking total control are
the pesky voters. That's why there's such a drive to control the
vote. What we're seeing is the corporatization of the last shred
of democracy.
Those figures were more or less what political experts would
have expected in a state with a long tradition of electing
Democrats to statewide office. But then the results came in, and
all of Georgia appeared to have been turned upside down. Barnes
lost the governorship to the Republican, Sonny Perdue, 46 per
cent to 51 per cent, a swing of as much as 16 percentage points
from the last opinion polls. Cleland lost to Chambliss 46 per
cent to 53, a last-minute swing of 9 to 12 points.
Red-faced opinion pollsters suddenly had a lot of explaining to
do and launched internal investigations. Political analysts
credited the upset - part of a pattern of Republican successes
around the country - to a huge campaigning push by President
Bush in the final days of the race. They also said that Roy
Barnes had lost because of a surge of "angry white men"
punishing him for eradicating all but a vestige of the old
confederate symbol from the state flag.
But something about these explanations did not make sense, and
they have made even less sense over time. When the Georgia
secretary of state's office published its demographic breakdown
of the election earlier this year, it turned out there was no
surge of angry white men; in fact, the only subgroup showing
even a modest increase in turnout was black women.
There were also big, puzzling swings in partisan loyalties in
different parts of the state. In 58 counties, the vote was
broadly in line with the primary election. In 27 counties in
Republican-dominated north Georgia, however, Max Cleland
unaccountably scored 14 percentage points higher than he had in
the primaries. And in 74 counties in the Democrat south, Saxby
Chambliss garnered a whopping 22 points more for the Republicans
than the party as a whole had won less than three months
earlier.
Now, weird things like this do occasionally occur in elections,
and the figures, on their own, are not proof of anything except
statistical anomalies worthy of further study. But in Georgia
there was an extra reason to be suspicious. Last November, the
state became the first in the country to conduct an election
entirely with touchscreen voting machines, after lavishing $54m
(�33m) on a new system that promised to deliver the securest,
most up-to-date, most voter-friendly election in the history of
the republic. The machines, however, turned out to be anything
but reliable. With academic studies showing the Georgia
touchscreens to be poorly programmed, full of security holes and
prone to tampering, and with thousands of similar machines from
different companies being introduced at high speed across the
country, computer voting may, in fact, be US democracy's own
21st-century nightmare.
In many Georgia counties last November, the machines froze up,
causing long delays as technicians tried to reboot them. In
heavily Democratic Fulton County, in downtown Atlanta, 67 memory
cards from the voting machines went missing, delaying
certification of the results there for 10 days. In neighboring
DeKalb County, 10 memory cards were unaccounted for; they were
later recovered from terminals that had supposedly broken down
and been taken out of service.
It is still unclear exactly how results from these missing cards
were tabulated, or if they were counted at all. And we will
probably never know, for a highly disturbing reason. The vote
count was not conducted by state elections officials, but by the
private company that sold Georgia the voting machines in the
first place, under a strict trade-secrecy contract that made it
not only difficult but actually illegal - on pain of stiff
criminal penalties - for the state to touch the equipment or
examine the proprietary software to ensure the machines worked
properly. There was not even a paper trail to follow up. The
machines were fitted with thermal printing devices that could
theoretically provide a written record of voters' choices, but
these were not activated. Consequently, recounts were
impossible. Had Diebold Inc, the manufacturer, been asked to
review the votes, all it could have done was program the
computers to spit out the same data as before, flawed or not.
Astonishingly, these are the terms under which America's top
three computer voting machine manufacturers - Diebold, Sequoia
and Election Systems and Software (ES&S) - have sold their
products to election officials around the country. Far from
questioning the need for rigid trade secrecy and the absence of
a paper record, secretaries of state and their technical
advisers - anxious to banish memories of the hanging chad fiasco
and other associated disasters in the 2000 presidential recount
in Florida - have, for the most part, welcomed the touchscreen
voting machines as a technological miracle solution.
Georgia was not the only state last November to see big
last-minute swings in voting patterns. There were others in
Colorado, Minnesota, Illinois and New Hampshire - all in races
that had been flagged as key partisan battlegrounds, and all won
by the Republican Party. Again, this was widely attributed to
the campaigning efforts of President Bush and the demoralization
of a Democratic Party too timid to speak out against the looming
war in Iraq.
Also See:
Diebold Voting Machine Owner Committed To Give Votes To Bush in
2004
Cleveland Plain Dealer 8/28/2003
Will Bush Backers Manipulate Votes to Deliver GW Another
Election?
Democracy Now! 9/4/2003
www.blackboxvoting.com
Strangely, however, the pollsters made no comparable howlers in
lower-key races whose outcome was not seriously contested.
Another anomaly, perhaps. What, then, is one to make of the fact
that the owners of the three major computer voting machines are
all prominent Republican Party donors? Or of a recent political
fund-raising letter written to Ohio Republicans by Walden
O'Dell, Diebold's chief executive, in which he said he was
"committed to helping Ohio to deliver its electoral votes to the
president next year" - even as his company was bidding for the
contract on the state's new voting machinery?
Alarmed and suspicious, a group of Georgia citizens began to
look into last November's election to see whether there was any
chance the results might have been deliberately or accidentally
manipulated. Their research proved unexpectedly, and
disturbingly, fruitful.
First, they wanted to know if the software had undergone
adequate checking. Under state and federal law, all voting
machinery and component parts must be certified before use in an
election. So an Atlanta graphic designer called Denis Wright
wrote to the secretary of state's office for a copy of the
certification letter. Clifford Tatum, assistant director of
legal affairs for the election division, wrote back: "We have
determined that no records exist in the Secretary of State's
office regarding a certification letter from the lab certifying
the version of software used on Election Day." Mr Tatum said it
was possible the relevant documents were with Gary Powell, an
official at the Georgia Technology Authority, so campaigners
wrote to him as well. Mr Powell responded he was "not sure what
you mean by the words 'please provide written certification
documents' ".
"If the machines were not certified, then right there the
election was illegal," Mr Wright says. The secretary of state's
office has yet to demonstrate anything to the contrary. The
investigating citizens then considered the nature of the
software itself. Shortly after the election, a Diebold
technician called Rob Behler came forward and reported that,
when the machines were about to be shipped to Georgia polling
stations in the summer of 2002, they performed so erratically
that their software had to be amended with a last-minute
"patch". Instead of being transmitted via disk - a potentially
time-consuming process, especially since its author was in
Canada, not Georgia - the patch was posted, along with the
entire election software package, on an open-access FTP, or file
transfer protocol site, on the internet.
That, according to computer experts, was a violation of the most
basic of security precautions, opening all sorts of
possibilities for the introduction of rogue or malicious code.
At the same time, however, it gave campaigners a golden
opportunity to circumvent Diebold's own secrecy demands and see
exactly how the system worked. Roxanne Jekot, a computer
programmer with 20 years' experience, and an occasional teacher
at Lanier Technical College northeast of Atlanta, did a
line-by-line review and found "enough to stand your hair on
end".
"There were security holes all over it," she says, "from the
most basic display of the ballot on the screen all the way
through the operating system." Although the program was designed
to be run on the Windows 2000 NT operating system, which has
numerous safeguards to keep out intruders, Ms Jekot found it
worked just fine on the much less secure Windows 98; the 2000 NT
security features were, as she put it, "nullified".
Also embedded in the software were the comments of the
programmers working on it. One described what he and his
colleagues had just done as "a gross hack". Elsewhere was the
remark: "This doesn't really work." "Not a confidence builder,
would you say?" Ms Jekot says. "They were operating in panic
mode, cobbling together something that would work for the
moment, knowing that at some point they would have to go back to
figure out how to make it work more permanently." She found some
of the code downright suspect - for example, an overtly
meaningless instruction to divide the number of write-in votes
by 1. "From a logical standpoint there is absolutely no reason
to do that," she says. "It raises an immediate red flag."
Mostly, though, she was struck by the shoddiness of much of the
programming. "I really expected to have some difficulty
reviewing the source code because it would be at a higher level
than I am accustomed to," she says. "In fact, a lot of this
stuff looked like the homework my first-year students might have
turned in." Diebold had no specific comment on Ms Jekot's
interpretations, offering only a blanket caution about the
complexity of election systems "often not well understood by
individuals with little real-world experience".
But Ms Jekot was not the only one to examine the Diebold
software and find it lacking. In July, a group of researchers
from the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins
University in Baltimore discovered what they called "stunning
flaws". These included putting the password in the source code,
a basic security no-no; manipulating the voter smart-card
function so one person could cast more than one vote; and other
loopholes that could theoretically allow voters' ballot choices
to be altered without their knowledge, either on the spot or by
remote access.
Diebold issued a detailed response, saying that the Johns
Hopkins report was riddled with false assumptions, inadequate
information and "a multitude of false conclusions".
Substantially similar findings, however, were made in a
follow-up study on behalf of the state of Maryland, in which a
group of computer security experts catalogued 328 software
flaws, 26 of them critical, putting the whole system "at high
risk of compromise". "If these vulnerabilities are exploited,
significant impact could occur on the accuracy, integrity, and
availability of election results," their report says.
Ever since the Johns Hopkins study, Diebold has sought to
explain away the open FTP file as an old, incomplete version of
its election package. The claim cannot be independently
verified, because of the trade-secrecy agreement, and not
everyone is buying it. "It is documented throughout the code who
changed what and when. We have the history of this program from
1996 to 2002," Ms Jekot says. "I have no doubt this is the
software used in the elections." Diebold now says it has
upgraded its encryption and password features - but only on its
Maryland machines.
A key security question concerned compatibility with Microsoft
Windows, and Ms Jekot says just three programmers, all of them
senior Diebold executives, were involved in this aspect of the
system. One of these, Diebold's vice-president of research and
development, Talbot Iredale, wrote an e-mail in April 2002 -
later obtained by the campaigners - making it clear that he
wanted to shield the operating system from Wylie Labs, an
independent testing agency involved in the early certification
process.
The reason that emerges from the e-mail is that he wanted to
make the software compatible with WinCE 3.0, an operating system
used for handhelds and PDAs; in other words, a system that could
be manipulated from a remote location. "We do not want Wyle
[sic] reviewing and certifying the operating systems," the
e-mail reads. "Therefore can we keep to a minimum the references
to the WinCE 3.0 operating system."
In an earlier intercepted e-mail, this one from Ken Clark in
Diebold's research and development department, the company
explained upfront to another independent testing lab that the
supposedly secure software system could be accessed without a
password, and its contents easily changed using the Microsoft
Access program Mr Clark says he had considered putting in a
password requirement to stop dealers and customers doing "stupid
things", but that the easy access had often "got people out of a
bind". Astonishingly, the representative from the independent
testing lab did not see anything wrong with this and granted
certification to the part of the software program she was
inspecting - a pattern of lackadaisical oversight that was
replicated all the way to the top of the political chain of
command in Georgia, and in many other parts of the country.
Diebold has not contested the authenticity of the e-mails, now
openly accessible on the internet. However, Diebold did caution
that, as the e-mails were taken from a Diebold Election systems
website in March 2003 by an illegal hack, the nature of the
information stolen could have been revised or manipulated.
There are two reasons why the United States is rushing to
overhaul its voting systems. The first is the Florida d�b�cle in
the Bush-Gore election; no state wants to be the center of that
kind of attention again. And the second is the Help America Vote
Act (HAVA), signed by President Bush last October, which
promises an unprecedented $3.9bn (�2.3bn) to the states to
replace their old punchcard-and-lever machines. However,
enthusiasm for the new technology seems to be motivated as much
by a bureaucratic love of spending as by a love of democratic
accountability. According to Rebecca Mercuri, a research fellow
at Harvard's John F Kennedy School of Government and a
specialist in voting systems, the shockingly high error rate of
punchcard machines (3-5 per cent in Florida in 2000) has been
known to people in the elections business for years. It was only
after it became public knowledge in the last presidential
election that anybody felt moved to do anything about it.
The problem is, computer touchscreen machines and other
so-called DRE (direct recording electronic) systems are
significantly less reliable than punchcards, irrespective of
their vulnerability to interference. In a series of research
papers for the Voting Technology Project, a joint venture of the
prestigious Massachusetts and California Institutes of
Technology, DREs were found to be among the worst performing
systems. No method, the MIT/CalTech study conceded, worked more
reliably than hand-counting paper ballots - an option that US
electoral officials seem to consider hopelessly antiquated, or
at least impractical in elections combining multiple local,
state and national races for offices from President down to
dogcatcher.
The clear disadvantages and dangers associated with DREs have
not deterred state and county authorities from throwing
themselves headlong into touchscreen technology. More than
40,000 machines made by Diebold alone are already in use in 37
states, and most are touchscreens. County after county is poised
to spend hundreds of millions of dollars more on computer voting
before next spring's presidential primaries. "They say this is
the direction they have to go in to have fair elections, but the
rush to go towards computerization is very dubious," Dr Mercuri
says. "One has to wonder why this is going on, because the way
it is set up it takes away the checks and balances we have in a
democratic society. That's the whole point of paper trails and
recounts."
Anyone who has struggled with an interactive display in a museum
knows how dodgy touchscreens can be. If they don't freeze, they
easily become misaligned, which means they can record the wrong
data. In Dallas, during early voting before last November's
election, people found that no matter how often they tried to
press a Democrat button, the Republican candidate's name would
light up. After a court hearing, Diebold agreed to take down 18
machines with apparent misalignment problems. "And those were
the ones where you could visually spot a problem," Dr Mercuri
says. "What about what you don't see? Just because your vote
shows up on the screen for the Democrats, how do you know it is
registering inside the machine for the Democrats?"
Other problems have shown up periodically: machines that
register zero votes, or machines that indicate voters coming to
the polling station but not voting, even when a single race with
just two candidates was on the ballot. Dr Mercuri was part of a
lawsuit in Palm Beach County in which she and other plaintiffs
tried to have a suspect Sequoia machine examined, only to run up
against the brick wall of the trade-secret agreement. "It makes
it really hard to show their product has been tampered with,"
she says, "if it's a felony to inspect it."
As for the possibilities of foul play, Dr Mercuri says they are
virtually limitless. "There are literally hundreds of ways to do
this," she says. "There are hundreds of ways to embed a rogue
series of commands into the code and nobody would ever know
because the nature of programming is so complex. The numbers
would all tally perfectly." Tampering with an election could be
something as simple as a "denial-of-service" attack, in which
the machines simply stop working for an extended period,
deterring voters faced with the prospect of long lines. Or it
could be done with invasive computer codes known in the trade by
such nicknames as "Trojan horses" or "Easter eggs". Detecting
one of these, Dr Mercuri says, would be almost impossible unless
the investigator knew in advance it was there and how to trigger
it. Computer researcher Theresa Hommel, who is alarmed by
touchscreen systems, has constructed a simulated voting machine
in which the same candidate always wins, no matter what data you
put in. She calls her model the Fraud-o-matic, and it is
available online at www.wheresthepaper.org.
It is not just touchscreens which are at risk from error or
malicious intrusion. Any computer system used to tabulate votes
is vulnerable. An optical scan of ballots in Scurry County,
Texas, last November erroneously declared a landslide victory
for the Republican candidate for county commissioner; a
subsequent hand recount showed that the Democrat had in fact
won. In Comal County, Texas, a computerized optical scan found
that three different candidates had won their races with exactly
18,181 votes. There was no recount or investigation, even though
the coincidence, with those recurring 1s and 8s, looked highly
suspicious. In heavily Democrat Broward County, Florida - which
had switched to touchscreens in the wake of the hanging chad
furore - more than 100,000 votes were found to have gone
"missing" on election day. The votes were reinstated, but the
glitch was not adequately explained. One local official blamed
it on a "minor software thing".
Most suspect of all was the governor's race in Alabama, where
the incumbent Democrat, Don Siegelman, was initially declared
the winner. Sometime after midnight, when polling station
observers and most staff had gone home, the probate judge
responsible for elections in rural Baldwin County suddenly
"discovered" that Mr Siegelman had been awarded 7,000 votes too
many. In a tight election, the change was enough to hand victory
to his Republican challenger, Bob Riley. County officials talked
vaguely of a computer tabulation error, or a lightning strike
messing up the machines, but the real reason was never
ascertained because the state's Republican attorney general
refused to authorize a recount or any independent ballot
inspection.
According to an analysis by James Gundlach, a sociology
professor at Auburn University in Alabama, the result in Baldwin
County was full of wild deviations from the statistical norms
established both by this and preceding elections. And he adds:
"There is simply no way that electronic vote counting can
produce two sets of results without someone using computer
programs in ways that were not intended. In other words, the
fact that two sets of results were reported is sufficient
evidence in and of itself that the vote tabulation process was
compromised." Although talk of voting fraud quickly subsided,
Alabama has now amended its election laws to make recounts
mandatory in close races.
The possibility of flaws in the electoral process is not
something that gets discussed much in the United States. The
attitude seems to be: we are the greatest democracy in the
world, so the system must be fair. That has certainly been the
prevailing view in Georgia, where even leading Democrats - their
prestige on the line for introducing touchscreen voting in the
first place - have fought tooth-and-nail to defend the integrity
of the system. In a phone interview, the head of the Georgia
Technology Authority who brought Diebold machines to the state,
Larry Singer, blamed the growing chorus of criticism on "fear of
technology", despite the fact that many prominent critics are
themselves computer scientists. He says: "Are these machines
flawless? No. Would you have more confidence if they were
completely flawless? Yes. Is there such a thing as a flawless
system? No." Mr Singer, who left the GTA straight after the
election and took a 50 per cent pay cut to work for Sun
Microsystems, insists that voters are more likely to have their
credit card information stolen by a busboy in a restaurant than
to have their vote compromised by touchscreen technology.
Voting machines are sold in the United States in much the same
way as other government contracts: through intensive lobbying,
wining and dining. At a recent national conference of clerks,
election officials and treasurers in Denver, attendees were
treated to black-tie dinners and other perks, including free
expensive briefcases stamped with Sequoia's company logo
alongside the association's own symbol. Nobody in power seems to
find this worrying, any more than they worried when Sequoia's
southern regional sales manager, Phil Foster, was indicted in
Louisiana a couple of years ago for "conspiracy to commit money
laundering and malfeasance". The charges were dropped in
exchange for his testimony against Louisiana's state
commissioner of elections. Similarly, last year, the Arkansas
secretary of state, Bill McCuen, pleaded guilty to taking bribes
and kickbacks involving a precursor company to ES&S; the voting
machine company executive who testified against him in exchange
for immunity is now an ES&S vice-president.
If much of the worry about vote-tampering is directed at the
Republicans, it is largely because the big three touchscreen
companies are all big Republican donors, pouring hundreds of
thousands of dollars into party coffers in the past few years.
The ownership issue is, of course, compounded by the lack of
transparency. Or, as Dr Mercuri puts it: "If the machines were
independently verifiable, who would give a crap who owns them?"
As it is, fears that US democracy is being hijacked by corporate
interests are being fueled by links between the big three and
broader business interests, as well as extremist organizations.
Two of the early backers of American Information Systems, a
company later merged into ES&S, are also prominent supporters of
the Chalcedon Foundation, an organization that espouses
theocratic governance according to a literal reading of the
Bible and advocates capital punishment for blasphemy and
homosexuality.
The chief executive of American Information Systems in the early
Nineties was Chuck Hagel, who went on to run for elective office
and became the first Republican in 24 years to be elected to the
Senate from Nebraska, cheered on by the Omaha World-Herald
newspaper which also happens to be a big investor in ES&S. In
yet another clamorous conflict of interest, 80 per cent of Mr
Hagel's winning votes - both in 1996 and again in 2002 - were
counted, under the usual terms of confidentiality, by his own
company.
In theory, the federal government should be monitoring the
transition to computer technology and rooting out abuses. Under
the Help America Vote Act, the Bush administration is supposed
to establish a sizeable oversight committee, headed by two
Democrats and two Republicans, as well as a technical panel to
determine standards for new voting machinery. The four
commission heads were supposed to have been in place by last
February, but so far just one has been appointed. The technical
panel also remains unconstituted, even though the new machines
it is supposed to vet are already being sold in large quantities
- a state of affairs Dr Mercuri denounces as "an abomination".
One of the conditions states have to fulfil to receive federal
funding for the new voting machines, meanwhile, is a
consolidation of voter rolls at state rather than county level.
This provision sends a chill down the spine of anyone who has
studied how Florida consolidated its own voter rolls just before
the 2000 election, purging the names of tens of thousands of
eligible voters, most of them African Americans and most of them
Democrats, through misuse of an erroneous list of convicted
felons commissioned by Katherine Harris, the secretary of state
doubling as George Bush's Florida campaign manager. Despite a
volley of lawsuits, the incorrect list was still in operation in
last November's mid-terms, raising all sorts of questions about
what other states might now do with their own voter rolls. It is
not that the Act's consolidation provision is in itself evidence
of a conspiracy to throw elections, but it does leave open that
possibility.
Meanwhile, the administration has been pushing new voting
technology of its own to help overseas citizens and military
personnel, both natural Republican Party constituencies, to vote
more easily over the internet. Internet voting is notoriously
insecure and open to abuse by just about anyone with rudimentary
hacking skills; just last January, an experiment in internet
voting in Toronto was scuppered by a Slammer worm attack.
Undeterred, the administration has gone ahead with its so-called
SERVE project for overseas voting, via a private consortium made
up of major defense contractors and a Saudi investment group.
The contract for overseeing internet voting in the 2004
presidential election was recently awarded to Accenture,
formerly part of the Arthur Andersen group (whose accountancy
branch, a major campaign contributor to President Bush, imploded
as a result of the Enron bankruptcy scandal).
Not everyone in the United States has fallen under the spell of
the big computer voting companies, and there are signs of
growing wariness. Oregon decided even before HAVA to conduct all
its voting by mail. Wisconsin has decided it wants nothing to do
with touchscreen machines without a verifiable paper trail, and
New York is considering a similar injunction, at least for its
state assembly races. In California, a Stanford computer science
professor called David Dill is screaming from the rooftops on
the need for a paper trail in his state, so far without result.
And a New Jersey Congressman called Rush Holt has introduced a
bill in the House of Representatives, the Voter Confidence and
Increased Accessibility Act, asking for much the same thing. Not
everyone is heeding the warnings, though. In Ohio, publication
of the letter from Diebold's chief executive promising to
deliver the state to President Bush in 2004 has not deterred the
secretary of state - a Republican - from putting Diebold on a
list of preferred voting-machine vendors. Similarly, in
Maryland, officials have not taken the recent state-sponsored
study identifying hundreds of flaws in the Diebold software as
any reason to change their plans to use Diebold machines in
March's presidential primary.
The question is whether the country will come to its senses
before elections start getting distorted or tampered with on
such a scale that the system becomes unmanageable. The sheer
volume of money offered under HAVA is unlikely to be forthcoming
again in a hurry, so if things aren't done right now it is
doubtful the system can be fixed again for a long time. "This is
frightening, really frightening," says Dr Mercuri, and a growing
number of reasonable people are starting to agree with her. One
such is John Zogby, arguably the most reliable pollster in the
United States, who has freely admitted he "blew" last November's
elections and does not exclude the possibility that foul play
was one of the factors knocking his calculations off course.
"We're plowing into a brave new world here," he says, "where
there are so many variables aside from out-and-out corruption
that can change elections, especially in situations where the
races are close. We have machines that break down, or are
tampered with, or are simply misunderstood. It's a cause for
great concern."
Roxanne Jekot, who has put much of her professional and personal
life on hold to work on the issue full time, puts it even more
strongly. "Corporate America is very close to running this
country. The only thing that is stopping them from taking total
control are the pesky voters. That's why there's such a drive to
control the vote. What we're seeing is the corporatization of
the last shred of democracy.
"I feel that unless we stop it here and stop it now," she says,
"my kids won't grow up to have a right to vote at all."
� 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
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10:53 a.m. - Thursday, Feb. 19, 2004
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