Cynthia McKinney news conference Friday 2/24 10:30 AM

[Boredtodeath]

Cynthia will be holding a press conference this 10:30 AM this Friday at her Dekalb County office regarding electronic voting and the Georgia Voter ID law with Bradley Heard.

We'll discuss the 6 amendments to the Diebold contract along with the known failures of the voting equipment, as well as why Georgia officials aren't responding to the evidence these machines don't meet federal standards.

We will also discuss the fact that Diebold wants us to toss our current voting machines and buy new:

Our new voting equipment has been deemed obsolete for audit trail purposes by the office of the Sec. of State and the Kennesaw Elections Center which now indicate that the machines cannot even be retrofitted with printers.

McKinney District Offices:
North DeKalb Mall, Suite D-46
2050 Lawerenceville Highway
Decatur, GA 30033
Voice: 404-633-0927
FAX: [phone]

[CottonBear]

1. Holy crap! GA has to buy all new Diebold election stealing machines?

No freaking way. Paper ballots only.

[Boredtodeath]

2. Yes, that's the proposal!

You feel ripped off yet?

The least costly approach to voter verified paper ballots in Georgia would be to advocate a return to an optical scan system which creates a voter verified paper trail which bears the actual vote of Georgians and not some computerized version which can be manipulated.

[CottonBear]

3. I only ever used the lever machines in my part of GA.

I'm not sure exactly how the machine recorded the vote but it had to be 1,000 times safer than these Diebold vote stealers.

[Boredtodeath]

4. We had punch cards

in the county when I lived there - northeast Georgia.

But 21 counties used ES&S optical scan beginning in 1996.

[CottonBear]

5. Oconee County used optical scan. Clarke & Madison used lever machines.

I think I remember a public radio call in show with Cathy Cox. Someone asked about the Diebold machines and election fraud and stated that the lever, punch card and optical scn machines were safer. She said something about how the vote totals were put on a computer and submitted by computer to a main site so that was the same as voting with Diebold machines.

It made no sense then and it still doesn't now. You can't hack the vote of a lever, punchcard or scan machine. There's some sort of actual paper record.

[Boredtodeath]

6. Clearly, the OpScans are hackable (see Harri Hursti), but

with a piece of paper, we can prove they were hacked.

I was just informed that GA state Senator Vince Fort introduced the Vote Count Protection Act in Georgia (SB591) which calls for Open Source software, paper ballots and that the paper ballots be counted (100%) AT THE PRECINCT before any results are released.

Go Senator Fort!!!!!!!!

[CottonBear]

7. Thank you Senator Fort. God save us from Cathy Cox and Diebold.

I am so super pissed off at Cathy Cox. I thought she's be a good Gubernatorial candidate before the Diebold fiasco. Even if she gets elected, if a Republican is elected SoS then we'll still be screwed. We Democrats need to win big in GA in 2006.