Interested in maladministration. Estd. 2005
RTEs Sarah McInerney ? Fianna Fail supporter? Anthony
Joe Duffy is dishonest and untrustworthy Anthony
Robert Watt complaint: Time for decision by SIPO Anthony
RTE in breach of its own editorial principles Anthony
Waiting for SIPO Anthony
Public Inquiry >>
Indymedia Ireland is a volunteer-run non-commercial open publishing website for local and international news, opinion & analysis, press releases and events. Its main objective is to enable the public to participate in reporting and analysis of the news and other important events and aspects of our daily lives and thereby give a voice to people.
Julian Assange is finally free ! Tue Jun 25, 2024 21:11 | indy
Stand With Palestine: Workplace Day of Action on Naksa Day Thu May 30, 2024 21:55 | indy
It is Chemtrails Month and Time to Visit this Topic Thu May 30, 2024 00:01 | indy
Hamburg 14.05. "Rote" Flora Reoccupied By Internationalists Wed May 15, 2024 15:49 | Internationalist left
Eddie Hobbs Breaks the Silence Exposing the Hidden Agenda Behind the WHO Treaty Sat May 11, 2024 22:41 | indy
Human Rights in Ireland >>
Biden Proposes Sweeping Supreme Court Reforms as He Attacks ?Extreme? Judges Tue Jul 30, 2024 19:00 | Will Jones
Joe Biden has proposed sweeping reforms to the U.S. Supreme Court accusing it of making "dangerous and extreme decisions" and losing the public?s trust.
The post Biden Proposes Sweeping Supreme Court Reforms as He Attacks “Extreme” Judges appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
Reeves Scraps Winter Fuel Payments for 10 Million Pensioners to Fund Public Sector Wage Rise Tue Jul 30, 2024 17:00 | Will Jones
Rachel Reeves is to scrap winter fuel payments for 10 million pensioners and ditch a cap on social care costs to fund a public sector wage rise, it has been announced.
The post Reeves Scraps Winter Fuel Payments for 10 Million Pensioners to Fund Public Sector Wage Rise appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
A Summary of Why the Czech Republic Vaccine Data are So Devastating to the ?Safe and Effective? Narr... Tue Jul 30, 2024 15:00 | Will Jones
The Czech Republic record-level vaccine data are devastating to the "safe and effective" narrative, says Steve Kirsch, as he provides a new overview that explains why.
The post A Summary of Why the Czech Republic Vaccine Data are So Devastating to the “Safe and Effective” Narrative appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
Keir Starmer?s Anti-Israel Policies Are Now No Different to Jeremy Corbyn?s Tue Jul 30, 2024 13:00 | Will Jones
Unlike Jeremy Corbyn, Keir Starmer has never described Hezbollah as his friends. But other than that, when it comes to Israel there is now little of consequence to differentiate them, says Stephen Pollard.
The post Keir Starmer’s Anti-Israel Policies Are Now No Different to Jeremy Corbyn’s appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
Is the Muslim Vote Abandoning Labour? Tue Jul 30, 2024 11:00 | Frank Haviland
Is the 'Muslim vote' set to abandon Labour? With three quarters of British Muslims refusing to believe Hamas committed atrocities on October 7th, it's hard to see how Labour can retain them, says Frank Haviland.
The post Is the Muslim Vote Abandoning Labour? appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
Lockdown Skeptics >>
Voltaire, international edition
Netanyahu soon to appear before the US Congress? It will be decisive for the suc... Thu Jul 04, 2024 04:44 | en
Voltaire, International Newsletter N°93 Fri Jun 28, 2024 14:49 | en
Will Israel succeed in attacking Lebanon and pushing the United States to nuke I... Fri Jun 28, 2024 14:40 | en
Will Netanyahu launch tactical nuclear bombs (sic) against Hezbollah, with US su... Thu Jun 27, 2024 12:09 | en
Will Israel provoke a cataclysm?, by Thierry Meyssan Tue Jun 25, 2024 06:59 | en
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Jump To Comment: 1 2"Democratic precincts---enjoying record turnouts---were deprived ofsufficient numbers of polling stations and voting machines, and many ofthe machines they had kept breaking down. After waiting long hours manypeople went home without voting. Pro-Bush precincts almost always hadenough voting machines, all working well to make voting quick andconvenient.
---A similar pattern was observed with student populations in severalstates: students at conservative Christian colleges had little or nowait at the polls, while students from liberal arts colleges were forcedto line up for as long as ten hours, causing many to give up.
---In Lucas County, Ohio, one polling place never opened; the voting machines were locked in an office and no one could find the key. In Hamilton County many absentee voters could not cast a Democratic vote for president because John Kerry's name had been "accidentally" removed when Ralph Nader was taken off the ballot.
---A polling station in a conservative evangelical church in Miami County, Ohio, recorded an impossibly high turnout of 98 percent, while apolling place in Democratic inner-city Cleveland recorded an impossiblylow turnout of 7 percent.
---Latino, Native American, and African American voters in New Mexico who favored Kerry by two to one were five times more likely to have their ballots spoiled and discarded in districts supervised by Republican election officials. Many were given provisional ballots that subsequently were never counted. In these same Democratic areas Bush "won" an astonishing 68 to 31 percent upset victory. One Republican judge in New Mexico discarded hundreds of provisional ballots cast for Kerry, accepting only those that were for Bush.
---Cadres of rightwing activists, many of them religious fundamentalists, were financed by the Republican Party. Deployed to key Democratic precincts, they handed out flyers warning that voters who had unpaid parking tickets, an arrest record, or owed child support would be arrested at the polls---all untrue. They went door to door offering to"deliver" absentee ballots to the proper office, and announcing that Republicans were to vote on Tuesday (election day) and Democrats on Wednesday.
---Democratic poll watchers in Ohio, Arizona, and other states, who tried to monitor election night vote counting, were menaced and shut outby squads of GOP toughs. In Warren County, Ohio, immediately after thepolls closed Republican officials announced a "terrorist attack" alert, and ordered the press to leave. They then moved all ballots to a warehouse where the counting was conducted in secret, producing anamazingly high tally for Bush, some 14,000 more votes than he hadreceived in 2000. It wasn't the terrorists who attacked Warren County.
---Bush did remarkably well with phantom populations. The number of his votes in Perry and Cuyahoga counties in Ohio, exceeded the number of registered voters, creating turnout rates as high as 124 percent. In Miami County nearly 19,000 additional votes eerily appeared in Bush's column after all precincts had reported. In a small conservative suburban precinct of Columbus, where only 638 people were registered,the touchscreen machines tallied 4,258 votes for Bush.
---In almost half of New Mexico's counties, more votes were reported than were recorded as being cast, and the tallies were consistently in Bush's favor. These ghostly results were dismissed by New Mexico's Republican Secretary of State as an "administrative lapse."
Exit polls showed Kerry solidly ahead of Bush in both the popular vote and the electoral college. Exit polls are an exceptionally accurate measure of elections. In the last three elections in Germany, for example, exit polls were never off by more than three-tenths of one percent.
Unlike ordinary opinion polls, the exit sample is drawn from people who have actually just voted. It rules out those who say they will vote but never make it to the polls, those who cannot be sampled because they have no telephone or otherwise cannot be reached at home, those who are undecided or who change their minds about whom to support, and those who are turned away at the polls for one reason or another.
Exit polls have come to be considered so reliable that international organizations use them to validate election results in countries around the world.
Republicans argued that in 2004 the exit polls were inaccurate becausethey were taken only in the morning when Kerry voters came out ingreater numbers. (Apparently Bush voters sleep late.) In fact, the polling was done at random intervals all through the day, and the evening results were as much favoring Kerry as the early results.
It was also argued that pollsters focused more on women (who favored Kerry) than men, or maybe large numbers of grumpy Republicans were less inclined than cheery Democrats to talk to pollsters. No evidence was put forth to substantiate these fanciful speculations.
Most revealing, the discrepancies between exit polls and official tallies were never random but worked to Bush's advantage in ten of eleven swing states that were too close to call, sometimes by as much as9.5 percent as in New Hampshire, an unheard of margin of error for an exit poll. In Nevada, Ohio, New Mexico, and Iowa exit polls registered solid victories for Kerry, yet the official tally in each case went to Bush, a mystifying outcome.
In states that were not hotly contested the exit polls proved quite accurate. Thus exit polls in Utah predicted a Bush victory of 70.8 to 26.4 percent; the actual result was 71.1 to 26.4 percent. In Missouri,where the exit polls predicted a Bush victory of 54 to 46 percent, the final result was 53 to 46 percent.
One explanation for the strange anomalies in vote tallies was found in the widespread use of touch screen electronic voting machines. These machines produced results that consistently favored Bush over Kerry, often in chillingly consistent contradiction to exit polls.
In 2003 more than 900 computer professionals had signed a petition urging that all touchscreen systems include a verifiable audit trail.Touchscreen voting machines can be easily programmed to go dead on election day or throw votes to the wrong candidate or make votes disappear while leaving the impression that everything is working fine.
A tiny number of operatives can easily access the entire computer network through one machine and thereby change votes at will. The touchscreen machines use trade secret code, and are tested, reviewed,and certified in complete secrecy. Verified counts are impossible because the machines leave no reliable paper trail.
Since the introduction of touchscreen voting, mysterious congressional election results have been increasing. In 2000 and 2002, Senate and House contests and state legislative races in North Carolina, Nebraska, Alabama, Minnesota, Colorado, and elsewhere produced dramatic and puzzling upsets, always at the expense of Democrats who were ahead in the polls.
In some counties in Texas, Virginia, and Ohio, voters who pressed the Democrat's name found that the Republican candidate was chosen. In Cormal County, Texas, three GOP candidates won by exactly 18,181 votes apiece, a near statistical impossibility.
All of Georgia's voters used Diebold touchscreen machines in 2002, and Georgia's incumbent Democratic governor and incumbent Democratic senator, who were both well ahead in the polls just before the election, lost in amazing double-digit voting shifts.
This may be the most telling datum of all: In New Mexico in 2004 Kerry lost all precincts equipped with touchscreen machines, irrespective of income levels, ethnicity, and past voting patterns. The only thing that consistently correlated with his defeat in those precincts was the presence of the touchscreen machine itself.
In Florida Bush registered inexplicably sharp jumps in his vote(compared to 2000) in counties that used touchscreen machines.
Companies like Diebold, Sequoia, and ES&S that market the touchscreen machines are owned by militant supporters of the Republican party. These companies have consistently refused to implement a paper-trail to dispel suspicions and give instant validation to the results of electronic voting. They prefer to keep things secret, claiming proprietary rights,a claim that has been backed in court.
Election officials are not allowed to evaluate the secret software. Apparently corporate trade secrets are more important than voting rights. In effect, corporations have privatized the electoral system,leaving it easily susceptible to fixed outcomes. Given this situation,it is not likely that the GOP will lose control of Congress come November 2006. The two-party monopoly threatens to become an even worse one-party tyranny."
A Princeton University computer science professor has added new fuel to claims that electronic voting machines used across much of the country are vulnerable to hacking that could alter vote totals or disable machines.
In a paper posted on the university's website, Edward Felten and two graduate students described how they had tested a Diebold AccuVote-TS machine they obtained, found ways to quickly upload malicious programs and even developed a computer virus able to spread such programs between machines.