British Expatriate Network

That's how I think of this country. The higher up you go, the more you feel entitled to and take.

However, there is hope and that keeps my spirits up.

We have 'renegade' attorney generals in some states who don't appeart to have been bought and actually do their jobs. Of course, they are accused of playing to the gallery or feathering their nests for future steps up but it doesn't phase them.

We also have the General Accounting Office who in my opinion are one of the finest organisations in the world. Their investigative reporting is second to none and puts almost all media organisations to shame - certainly, they stand out in comparison to most governmental organisations.

So shame on this country for ignoring much of what they report - for example, the excessive charges from Kellog, Brown & Root for fuel that the military used in Iraq, which was just approved for almost full payment by the Pentagon, despite the findings of the GAO.

Additionally, there was the report issued towards the end of last year by the GAO which clearly underlined the 57,000 or so complaints that were received in regards to the 2004 election. For some reason, this report was largely swept under the carpet at the time and little was made of it but it did reiterate that the electronic voting machines are clearly insecure, unecrypted and easily manipulated to sway votes, with some simple changes from a single programmer. John Kerry's minus-250,000 votes in a precinct with a fraction of that many qualified voters was really only the tip of the iceberg and explained away at the time as "human error" - unlikely, said many, including the GAO who questioned why humans would be involved in electronic vote counting.

So if I ever bother to get citizenship, I'm going to refuse to vote electronically unless the system contains some kind of transparent auditing system, along with a paper receipt issued to the voter.

Such a system did exist before the 2004 elections - Athan Gibbs TruVote system was able to verify votes and you could even go online and check that your vote was recorded correctly. However, Athan Gibbs died eight months before the 2004 elections in a 'road accident' and his company, TruVote appear to have disappeared since then. How convenient.......

So 'Corruption Central' rumbles on, with the odd glimpse of sanity now and again.

I think when or if I do vote, I'll do a write-in vote for the General Accounting Office to be President and every other job in the higher echelons of power.

When I saw this I thought you were talking about Illinois! Unlicensed truck drivers causing kids to be biurnt to death leads directly to the former gov. in court...

I'll just keep my UK postal vote, thank you very much.

I'm extremely surprised by the level of corruption in American poltiical campaigns. I know that many people feel the 2000 election was stolen, and were extremely uncomfortable with electronic voting machines, but nothing takes the biscuit than the 2000 Republican primaries. In know that you (Pilgrim) have mentioned the crap that McCain took before, and it really is astonishing how bad it was. After McCain had easily claimed New Hampshire, he and Bush headed to South Carolina at which point South Carolinians began recieving phone calls from an "indpendent polling company" that wanted to ask voters how they felt about certain issues. My favorite was this one -

"If you knew that Senator John McCain had fathered an illegitimate black child, would you be more likely to vote for him, or less likely to vote for him?"

On Fox the question was asked as to whether the rumor was true! McCain does have an adopted Bangladeshi daughter so that's probably why the rumor took root. Other things that appeared in campaign commercials were questions as to whether McCain had fathered an illegitimate child with a female Vietcong soldier during his time in Vietnam, and whether his wife had warrants for supplying alcohol to 12 year olds. It's hardly difficult to guess who was spreading such rumors but nothing happened.

I'm amazed at the level of campaign corruption here. In the UK you just say that the other person's policies will damn us all. Here you accuse them of molesting church goers.

Is America so very different from other countries?

I take the view that GB is pretty special when it comes to fair-play in politics. Take a look at a few other democracies

I think on Berlusconi in Italy - formed a political party to stay out of jail and bought himself to power. Don't forget a former PM (Andreotti) was a mafia member.

Charles Haughey was broke when he became PM of Ireland - but was the riches man in Ireland by the time he left office.

Take a close look at how politics works in places like India and Thailand - it's all pretty grubby.

On the whole UK politicians are fairly restrained compared to the rape and pillage that takes place elsewhere. I think Brit thinking is warped because Uk is one of a small group of countries where politics is pretty clean...

Some good points raised there.

Maybe it is the somewhat selective British sense of fair play? Or maybe it's easier to get caught in Britain?

How about your state? Do you see much corruption at that level? I'm not really aware of excessive situations in Oregon but the odd blip on the radar appears now and then. I view Ohio as a corrupt state from the top down, based upon what I have seen and read over the past few years and have second hand knowledge of the corrupton that is going on in Columbus, the state capitol.

Anyone who votes electronically needs to re-evaluate what on earth they are doing. Would they be happy buying something in a store where the clerk added it up in their heads and didn't give them a receipt at the end of the transaction?

Absolutely. My father-in-law experienced it first hand as he worked for the state and lost his job as he wouldn't 'play ball'. :evil:

I also have no faith in the voting machines here. All of the machines have become electronic now. They were built by a Republican donor company who had dealings with Ken Blackwell the current Secretary of State, who just happens to be running for governer this year. What a surprise it'll be if he wins... :roll:

Way too easy to meddle with those machines. The manufacturers are somehow able to claim the code is proprietary which is absolutely unacceptable - except here in USA.

The code for one of the machines is available online. Someone leaked it a while ago and it even has a backdoor into the machines - yet no one presses to have the manufacturer explain what that is for. It is secondary to the actual administrative log-in.

Some think that the minus 250,000 votes for Kerry in 2004 was either a hacker or an employee trying to send a message that the votes were being fixed. The figure is way too high to be taken seriously and to have applied them for any candidate might be explained away. A "minus" vote for a candidate is something that you cannot explain away easily.

Just voted in the primary here using the new electronic machine its was easy to use and the last page you could go down the whole list and change whatever you wanted before pressing * vote * making it final .

can thses machines be fixed any more than those of the past ?? i dont know

But i do know that when ever the vote is close crys of it being fixed always come out of the losing sides mouth and the closer it is the louder they shout .

. both parties do this .

In the kennedy narrow majority win cries of fixing by the minors in W VA was shouted about by the losers republicans .
Will it be any differant with theses new machines if there is narrow victory be either party in the next election ???
I doubt it its part of the election process here in the US

I do and the answer is yes.

There are a few ways to manipulate the tabulated results but they are very quick, very easy and basically untraceable. You can either do it at the machine itself or at the point where the data is sent.

Such a system does not fill me with confidence. A system like TruVote is vastly superior so why aren't we all demmanding it?

There will always be corruption of some kind. It used to be a joke that Democrats vote early and often. In some of the wards, the dead and the newborn were registered and did vote. i think it still happens. the republicans counter this by setting up barriers such as demanding forms of ID not generally in the hands of the poor.

In the UK, you get to choose between party candidates selected by the party central committees, although they occasionally allow the local party to have some say. Here, you get caucuses or primaries, you help to pick the candidates for the party. I used to live in Paddington, and it was decided that Jimmy Edwards would run for the Conservatives; I was so insulted that I voted labour for the first time and I wrote and told the Tories so.

The corruption in the UK, for me was on two levels at the local level, local authority work orders always seemed to go to some councillor's brother-in-law, who also did work at cut rates for the other councillors. The other level is the class system. the parties are run by the "Upper Class". The front bench of the party of the working man is loaded with the products of public schools. Bring back Nye Bevan, Ernie Bevin and Manny Shinwell, etc. I was a conservative in those days but I enjoyed the pull and push.

I agree corruption will always occur - it occurs in a small scale, possibly in our everyday lives so it is just as likely to occur everywhere else as well.

If you do a search on the internet for the "Live Free or Diebold" voting blackboxes, Diebold themselves and various elections offices around the country are under a lot of pressure right now and fighting fires left, right and centre.

It seems that not everyone is happy with this "faith based voting" system and there's even a whistleblower case down in California, where an actual, true patriot (yes they do actually exist folks, believe it or not) came across highly incriminating documents whilst working as a temp at Diebold's California attorneys office and stole them. They were subsequently used in a criminal (dropped) and civil case (won) against Diebold, by the state of California.

Of course, now the law firm are gunning for the whistleblower and have him in their sights for three years jailtime - yet, if he is a whistleblower, which he clearly is as what he removed was incriminating of the law firm and Diebold, then there is no case to answer.

The corruption continues........

I'm pretty pissed off that the Dems pushed Paul Hackett out of the senate race here in Ohio in favour of the establishment candidate Sherrod Brown :evil: I don't think I'm pissed off enough to vote for the Republican candidate, but I've written a few choice words to the Democratic party here... :smile:

This is part of af article regarding voting machines. For the the rest of the article
http//www.commondreams.org/views03/0131-01.htm

"If You Want To Win An Election, Just Control The Voting Machines"
by Thom Hartmann
Maybe Nebraska Republican Chuck Hagel honestly won two US Senate elections. Maybe it's true that the citizens of Georgia simply decided that incumbent Democratic Senator Max Cleland, a wildly popular war veteran who lost three limbs in Vietnam, was, as his successful Republican challenger suggested in his campaign ads, too unpatriotic to remain in the Senate. Maybe George W. Bush, Alabama's new Republican governor Bob Riley, and a small but congressionally decisive handful of other long-shot Republican candidates really did win those states where conventional wisdom and straw polls showed them losing in the last few election cycles.
You'd be wrong.
The respected Washington, DC publication The Hill () has confirmed that former conservative radio talk-show host and now Republican U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel was the head of, and continues to own part interest in, the company that owns the company that installed, programmed, and largely ran the voting machines that were used by most of the citizens of Nebraska.
Back when Hagel first ran there for the U.S. Senate in 1996, his company's computer-controlled voting machines showed he'd won stunning upsets in both the primaries and the general election. The Washington Post (1/13/1997) said Hagel's "Senate victory against an incumbent Democratic governor was the major Republican upset in the November election." According to Bev Harris of , Hagel won virtually every demographic group, including many largely Black communities that had never before voted Republican. Hagel was the first Republican in 24 years to win a Senate seat in Nebraska.

He who votes, decides nothing.
He who counts the vote, decides everything.

Joseph Stalin

A few thousand Haitians put the United States to shame.

They may be poor but they know vote fraud when they smell it and were not afraid to stand up and say "No Way!" last month.