Liberal Repercussion

http://www.axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/article_5796.shtml

March 17, 2004 - The subject line on yesterday’s email read: “Another
mysterious accident solves a Bush problem. Athan Gibbs dead, Diebold
lives.” The attached news story briefly described the untimely Friday,
March 12th death of perhaps America’s most influential advocate of a
verified voting paper trail in the era of touch screen computer voting.
Gibbs, an accountant for more than 30 years and the inventor of the
TruVote system, died when his vehicle collided with an 18-wheeled truck
which rolled his Chevy Blazer several times and forced it over the
highway retaining wall where it came to rest on its roof.

Coincidence theorists will simply dismiss the death of Gibbs as a tragic
accident –
**snip***

Gibbs’ death bears heightened scrutiny because of the way he lived his
life after the 2000 Florida election debacle. I interviewed Athan Gibbs in
January of this year. “I’ve been an accountant, an auditor, for more than
thirty years. Electronic voting machines that don’t supply a paper trail go
against every principle of accounting and auditing that’s being taught in
American business schools,” he insisted.

“These machines are set up to provide paper trails. No business in
America would buy a machine that didn’t provide a paper trail to audit and
verify its transaction. Now, they want the people to purchase machines
that you can’t audit? It’s absurd.”

Gibbs was in Columbus, Ohio proudly displaying his TruVote machine that
offered a “VVPAT, that’s a voter verified paper audit trail” he noted.
***snip***

Gibbs’ TruVote machine is a marvel. After voters touch the screen, a
paper ballot prints out under plexiglass and once the voter compares it to
his actual vote and approves it, the ballot drops into a lockbox and is
issued a numbered receipt. The voter’s receipt allows the track his
particular vote to make sure that it was transferred from the polling place
to the election tabulation center.

My encounter with Gibbs led to a cover story in the Columbus Free Press
March-April issue, entitled, “Diebold, electronic voting and the vast
right-wing conspiracy.” The thesis I advanced in the Free Press article
(www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2004/834) is that some of the
same right-wing individuals who backed the CIA’s covert actions and
overthrowing of democratic elections in the Third World in the 1980s are
now involved in privatized touch screen voting. Additionally I co-wrote an
article with Harvey Wasserman that was posted at MotherJones.com
(www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2004/03/03_200.html) on
March 5, 2004. Both articles outlined ties between far right elements of the
Republican Party and Diebold and ES&S, which count the majority of the
nation’s electronic votes.

As I wrote in the Free Press article, “Proponents of a paper trail were
emboldened when Athan Gibbs, President and CEO of TruVote
International, demonstrated a voting machine at a vendor’s fair in
Columbus that provides two separate voting receipts.”

In an interview on WVKO radio, Gibbs calmly and methodically explained
the dangers of “black box” touch screen voting. “It absolutely makes no
sense to buy electronic voting machines that can’t produce a paper trail.
Inevitably, computers mess up. How are you going to have a recount, or
correct malfunctions without a paper trail?

Now, the man asking the obvious question, and demonstrating an obvious
tangible solution is dead in another tragic accident, a week after both
articles were in circulation.
***snip***

Gibbs’ last words to me were “How do you explain what happened to
Senator Max Cleland in Georgia. How do you explain that? The Maryland
study and the Johns Hopkins scientists have warned us against ‘blind
faith voting.’ These systems can be hacked into. They found patches in
Georgia and the people servicing the machine had entered the machines
during the voting process. How can we the people accept this? No more
blind faith voting.”

***snip***

posted by Rei Toei @ 3:40 p.m.