Another list ...

... this one's less funny than yesterday's. I haven't commented much on the whole voting legitimacy thing, because it seems pretty clear that Bush did actually win this last election, even if by a very narrow margin. But this list, compiled by Angry Girl, is worth a look. (Thanks to Jaana for the link.) I've excerpted the list itself here, but if you go onto Angry Girl's page, you can link to all kinds of references and back up for each of these items. Most of this stuff is old news, and some of the implied connections are purely circumstantial, but it still makes for some powerfully interesting reading. I'd be interested in hearing what readers think - do you believe the election was a fraud? Add your comments and let me know!

1. 80% of all votes in America are counted by only two companies: Diebold and ES&S.
2. There is no federal agency with regulatory authority or oversight of the U.S. voting machine industry.
3. The vice-president of Diebold and the president of ES&S are brothers.
4. The chairman and CEO of Diebold is 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."
5. Republican Senator Chuck Hagel used to be chairman of ES&S. He became Senator in a surprise upset, with votes counted by ES&S machines.
6. Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, long-connected with the Bush family, was recently caught lying about his ownership of ES&S by the Senate Ethics Committee.
7. Senator Chuck Hagel was on a short list of George W. Bush's vice-presidential candidates.
8. Kenneth Blackwell co-chaired George Bush's Ohio election campaign. As Ohio secretary of state, he left no stone unturned to surpress the democratic vote.
9. Diebold's new touch screen voting machines have no paper trail of any votes. In other words, there is no way to verify that the data coming out of the machine is the same as what was legitimately put in by voters.
10. Diebold also makes ATMs, checkout scanners, and ticket machines, all of which log each transaction and can generate a paper trail.
11. Exit polls are usually excellent predictors of election results. Reputable analyses could not find and explanation of the discrepancy between exit polls and results of the 2004 presidential election.
12. A Diebold subsidiary employed 5 convicted felons as senior managers and developers. These people helped write the central compiler computer code that counted 50% of the votes in 30 states.
13. Jeff Dean, senior programmer on Diebold's central compiler code, was convicted of 23 counts of felony theft in the first degree.
14. Jeff Dean was served jail time for planting back doors in his client's accounting software and using a "high degree of sophistication" to evade detection over a period of 2 years.
15. None of the international election observers were allowed in the polls in Ohio.
16. California banned the use of Diebold machines because the security was so bad. Despite Diebold's claims that the audit logs could not be hacked, a chimpanzee was able to do it!
17. All -- not some -- but all the voting machine errors detected and reported in Florida went in favor of Bush or Republican candidates.
18. 18. Serious voting anomalies in Florida -- again always favoring Bush -- have been mathematically demonstrated and experts are recommending further investigation.