Kentucky officials convicted of rigging automated poll

Something’s fishy. The tiny Middle Eastern sheikdom of Bahrain wants to renegotiate its aviation pact with RP — for the fifth time in eight years. It wants this done today and tomorrow, the start of Christian Holy Week. And it expects to be given its demands by the departing Arroyo administration.

Bahrain is a tiny island in the Arabian Gulf with a population of 490,000. It hosts 31,077 Filipino workers, significantly fewer than the 1.4 million in Saudi Arabia, 225,000 in Dubai, 140,000 in Abu Dhabi, or 640,000 in Europe (that also sends 318,000 tourists per year to RP).

Yet Bahrain wants to increase its roundtrips to Manila to 21 a week from the present 14. That’s much more than the nine flights per week from Saudi Arabia, 14 from Dubai, 12 from Abu Dhabi, or seven from Europe. It’s thrice the seven flights from Canada, which hosts 570,000 Filipinos and produces 100,000 tourists a year. And almost double the 12 from Australia, which hosts 286,000 Filipinos and yields 100,000 tourists a year. The demanded increase comes at a time when Gulf Air, Bahrain’s main airline, is cutting its flights from 14 to ten a week due to low passenger traffic.

The strange part is that the RP government acceded to holding the new air talks. Why?

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Filipinos believe in technology. Four of every five voters (81%) polled by Social Weather Stations expect automated elections to be more accurate and easier than manual counting.

Hopefully the Comelec meets their outlook. If not, people power revolt would erupt, according to half (48%) of respondents in the recent survey.

Yet that unreformed agency still harbors the 2004 and 2007 election riggers. The perpetrators of the MegaPacific automation fraud of 2003 have even been promoted. Sellers of party-list accreditations and sure-wins are still at it. Dagdag-bawas (tally padding-shaving) operators have adapted to the electronic canvassing.

Automated election fraud is always an inside job. It can happen even in America, where 95 percent of balloting is computerized. This story jolted the U.S. last Friday:

“Clay County, KY Election Officials Found Guilty of Election Fraud, Vote Buying

“Convicted high-ranking officials include circuit court judge, county clerk and school superintendent

“Each face up to 20 years in broad conspiracy that included manipulation of electronic voting machines...

“All eight defendants in Clay County, Kentucky’s election fraud trial have been found guilty today by a federal jury. Six of those eight were high-ranking election officials, including the county clerk, a circuit judge and the school superintendent. The conspirators were charged with having manipulated federal elections in 2002, 2004 and 2006 by buying and selling votes and manipulating electronic voting machines.

“According to AP, each of the now-convicted felons could face up to 20 years in prison for what prosecutors had described as a conspiracy to manipulate elections for decades in the rural, heavily Republican county.

“In addition to federal racketeering, several of the defendants were also convicted of charges that included mail fraud, extortion and laundering money used to buy votes.”

The Brad Blog has followed the story since the conspirators were arrested in Mar. 2009. The election officials had manipulated ES&S iVotronic touch-screen voting machines. The blog noted:

“Supporters of unverifiable electronic voting, such as election officials and voting machines companies, had long argued that, though manipulation of such systems was possible, nobody had actually ever done so. While that dubious argument was difficult to independently verify one way or another — since the private vendors make public oversight of such systems virtually impossible by blocking citizen inspection and oversight of such systems due to claims of ‘trade secrecy’ — the ‘denialists’’ arguments are no longer valid.

“Furthermore, the verdict underscores what many critics of e-voting have long argued: the greatest security threat to such systems come from election insiders, not from the voting public and dubious claims of ‘voter fraud’.

“We recently detailed the testimony of one of the witnesses in the case who described how she was trained by the county’s chief election official, Clerk Freddy Thompson (one of those convicted today), to change votes cast by voters on the county’s ES&S touch-screen voting systems after they’d left the voting booth. The witness, Wanda White also detailed how she was instructed to change her own voter registration from Republican to Democratic so that she could serve as a Democratic precinct official.

“The ES&S iVotronic touch-screen systems secretly manipulated by the cabal of election officials in Kentucky to change voter’s votes are used in a total of 18 states, including Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Missouri, Mississippi, North Carolina, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Wisconsin and West Virginia.

“And, just for good measure, we’ll take this opportunity to remind readers, yet again, that the community organization ACORN — who has long been used as a red-herring by the Republican Party to suggest the existence of massive Democratic ‘voter fraud’ — has never been charged with, or found guilty of aiding in the illegal casting of a single vote. Ever. Anywhere. No actual evidence has ever been presented in support of such a charge either.

“Nonetheless, a recent survey by the non-partisan polling outfit Research 2000 found that one in five (21%) self-identified Republicans believe that ACORN stole the 2008 election for Barack Obama. Another 55% are ‘not sure’ if they did or not.”

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 “If suffering seems to overwhelm you, focus on Jesus on the Cross.” Shafts of Light, Fr. Guido Arguelles, SJ

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