Cannabis fought Diebold .... guess who won??!
by Reb Kaplan
Mon Jul 16, 2007 at 06:36:52 PM PDT
Cannabis fought Diebold, and Cannabis Won!
In a local election in Berkeley, CA, a Measure was on the ballot, in support of wider availability of medical marijuana dispensaries. According to elections officials, the measure lost by a very very small margin.
The advocates of the measure sought a re-count, but the re-count could not be conducted, because the records could not be properly retrieved from the Diebold Machines!
{more fun below...)
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But, the great kicker is, that a judge has now issued a public ruling, which shows that County voting officials have been sending data back to Diebold, rather than holding it locally. And, it appears this may be a nation-wide problem -- a private, republican-sponsoring corporation, apparently not only takes back its hardware after the elections, it also retains the only back-up copy of the actual vote records...
See Chron story:
An Alameda County judge said Friday she may void election results for a failed 2004 Berkeley medical marijuana measure and order it returned to the ballot because county election officials failed to hand over data from voting machines.
Superior Court Judge Winifred Smith also indicated that she may force county officials to pay attorneys' fees and reimburse a medical marijuana group more than $22,000 for the costs it incurred during a disputed recount shortly after the November 2004 election.
Smith accused county officials of coming up with a "shaggy dog story" and of having "stonewalled for a very long time" on why they failed to retrieve backup data from electronic voting machines, logs of activity on the machines and other records.
Most of that information was destroyed when the county returned the devices to their manufacturer, Diebold Election Systems, after the measure's advocates had sued the county seeking access to the data.
link
I find it fascinating and compelling that medical marijuana advocates have managed to shine a light on the problem, in real practice, with these voting machines. Medical marijuana advocates, like people speaking out about climate change until very recently, have been ignored or laughed at -- even when they were demonstrably right on the facts.
Also, it makes the link clear between medical marijuana and democracy. Which is a crucial link -- after all, numerous States have voted, often by wide margins, to legalize medical marijuana. While this is not the only time the Administration has ignored a vote of the people -- it is demonstrative of a wider principle. If we were really living in a democracy, then medical marijuana would be legal here. The fact that patients are still persecuted, is evidence of our failure of democracy. The fact that a local measure was blocked by problems with Diebold is also demonstrative of a problem that is going on in many more places.
Tags: Diebold, election fraud, medical marijuana, California, election integrity, Rescued (all tags)
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