Sunday, September 24, 2006

My sympathy’s for the devil

The good reverend says his off-the-cuff remarks were not intended to demonize the Democratic senator from New York:

The Rev. Jerry Falwell says a White House run by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton would energize his base of religious conservatives even more than if the devil were the Democratic nominee.

“I certainly hope that Hillary is the candidate,’’ Falwell told a private prayer breakfast. “Because nothing will energize my (constituency) like Hillary Clinton.’’

“If Lucifer ran, he wouldn’t,’’ Falwell added, drawing a roomful of laughs and cheers.

They should just keep on making her out to be the devil and when people see her in action and find out she’s not, the Falwell crowd won’t know what hit them.

LATER: Falwell’s not sorry, “No, I’ll be saying it over and over again.” Video.

Diebold & Cox

I guess it’s good Cathy lost the gubernatorial primary. From Rolling Stone, Will the Next Election be Hacked?:

Chris Hood remembers the day in August 2002 that he began to question what was really going on in Georgia. An African-American whose parents fought for voting rights in the South during the 1960s, Hood was proud to be working as a consultant for Diebold Election Systems, helping the company promote its new electronic voting machines. During the presidential election two years earlier, more than 94,000 paper ballots had gone uncounted in Georgia - almost double the national average - and Secretary of State Cathy Cox was under pressure to make sure every vote was recorded properly.

Hood had been present in May 2002, when officials with Cox’s office signed a contract with Diebold - paying the company a record $54 million to install 19,000 electronic voting machines across the state. At a restaurant inside Atlanta’s Marriott Hotel, he noticed the firm’s CEO, Walden O’Dell, checking Diebold’s stock price on a laptop computer every five minutes, waiting for a bounce from the announcement.

Hood wondered why Diebold, the world’s third-largest seller of ATMs, had been awarded the contract. The company had barely completed its acquisition of Global Election Systems, a voting-machine firm that owned the technology Diebold was promising to sell Georgia. And its bid was the highest among nine competing vendors. Whispers within the company hinted that a fix was in.

“The Diebold executives had a news conference planned on the day of the award,” Hood recalls, “and we were instructed to stay in our hotel rooms until just hours before the announcement. They didn’t want the competitors to know and possibly file a protest” about the lack of a fair bidding process. It certainly didn’t hurt that Diebold had political clout: Cox’s predecessor as secretary of state, Lewis Massey, was now a lobbyist for the company.

The problem was, Diebold had only five months to install the new machines - a “very narrow window of time to do such a big deployment,” Hood notes. The old systems stored in warehouses had to be replaced with new equipment; dozens of state officials and poll workers had to be trained in how to use the touch-screen machines. “It was pretty much an impossible task,” Hood recalls. There was only one way, he adds, that the job could be done in time - if “the vendor had control over the entire environment.” That is precisely what happened. In late July, to speed deployment of the new machines, Cox quietly signed an agreement with Diebold that effectively privatized Georgia’s entire electoral system. The company was authorized to put together ballots, program machines and train poll workers across the state - all without any official supervision. “We ran the election,” says Hood. “We had 356 people that Diebold brought into the state. Diebold opened and closed the polls and tabulated the votes. Diebold convinced Cox that it would be best if the company ran everything due to the time constraints, and in the interest of a trouble-free election, she let us do it.”

For more on why she shouldn’t have, Larry Lessig points to a demonstration by three Princeton researchers of how a Diebold machine could be hacked and the election results altered. Here‘s a video of the results; Here‘s their report.

I have two fathers

An email from my friend John: “Have you seen this?  stick with it until last verse.  can you imagine this here in this country?”