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...starting at the manufacturer, and including private corporation personnel doing maintenance, patches, and other fixes and repairs, when these machines break down, as they often do. The private corporation designs and installs the "trade secret" proprietary code in the voting machines, tabulators and other components, and thereafter generally has sole access to it. The system is made-to-order for insider corporate fraud. Truckers might have access to one set of machines. The manufacturer has on-going, long term access to them all. And that includes all types of electronic voting machines including touchscreens, optiscans, central tabulators, signature-recognition software (for mail-in ballots), auditory machines for the disabled, and other parts of the system. Of late, electronic voter databases have also become part of this election theft system--they may have a different manufacturer, but someone owns and controls the secret code to that as well. Massive, high-speed, invisible election theft is not only possible, it's easy on the manufacturer side of things.
Virtually all security measures in this egregiously non-transparent voting nightmare are aimed at keeping outsider hackers out. Little or no concern is paid to the "elephant in the room"--private corporate insider election theft, by means of their privately owned and controlled "trade secret" code.
And, to make our bad dreams worse, all three of the major corporate voting machine vendors have very close ties to the Republican Party and rightwing causes--and not just donations, but, say, the CEO being a Bush-Cheney campaign chair and major fundraiser (Diebold), the initial funder and a major investor being a rightwing billionaires who gives millions to nutso, witch-burning type extremist 'christian' foundations (ES&S), and the chief sales rep being a former Republican sec of state (Sequoia). They have intense motive and wide-open opportunity. And they have lots of "means"--we've poured billions of our tax dollars into their pockets. They are not only ideologically similar, they have much reason to work in concert, to fix elections, to fix prices, to carve up the states (and the counties in big states) amongst themselves, and drive out or gobble up smaller vendors. They often even control ballot printing (if there is a ballot). See Dan Rather's "The Trouble With Touchscreens," www.HD.net.
King George III couldn't have designed a better counter-revolution. He must be laughing in his grave.
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