The Persecution has Begun, Folks!

Patrick, over at Shakespere's Sister, asks the question " Who is Roxanne Jekot?, and why is she being persecuted?" The story is on The Pacific Northwest Inlander Online

A few weeks after Election Night 2002, Roxanne Jekot, a computer programmer who lives in Cumming, Ga., began fearing demons lingering in the state's voting machines. The midterm election had been a historic one: Georgia became the first state to use electronic touch-screen voting machines in every one of its precincts. The 51-year-old Jekot, who has a grandmotherly bearing but describes herself as a "typical computer geek," was initially excited about the new system. "I thought it was the coolest thing we could have done," she says.

But the election also brought sweeping victories for Republicans, including, most stunningly, one for Sonny Perdue, who defeated Roy Barnes, the incumbent Democrat, to become Georgia's first Republican governor in 135 years, while Rep. Saxby Chambliss upset Vietnam veteran Sen. Max Cleland. The convergence of these two developments — the introduction of new voting machines and the surprising GOP wins — began to eat away at Jekot. Like many of her fellow angry Democrats on the Internet discussion forums she frequented, she had a hard time believing the Republicans had won legitimately. Instead, Jekot began searching for her explanation in the source code used in the new voting machines.

What she found alarmed her. The machines were state-of-the-art products from an Ohio company called Diebold. But the computer code — which a friend of Jekot's had found on the Internet — was anything but flawless, Jekot says. It was amateurish and pocked with security problems.

"I expected sophistication and some fairly difficult to understand advanced coding," Jekot said one evening this fall at a restaurant near her home. But she saw "a hodgepodge of commands thrown all over the source code" — an indication, she said, that the programmers were careless. Along with technical commands, Diebold's engineers had written English comments documenting the various functions their software performed — and these comments "made my hair stand on end," Jekot said. The programmers would say things like "this doesn't work because that doesn't work and neither one of them work together." They seemed to know that their software was flawed.

To Jekot, there appeared to be method in the incompetence. Professional programmers could not be so sloppy; it had to be deliberate. "They specifically opened doors that need not be opened," Jekot said, suggesting the possibility that Diebold wanted to leave its voting machines open to fraud. And, ominously, the electronic voting systems used in Georgia, like most of the new machines installed in the United States since the 2000 election, do not produce a "paper trail" — every vote cast in the state's midterm election was recorded, tabulated, checked and stored by computers whose internal workings are owned by Diebold, a private corporation. Jekot was particularly alarmed — and outraged — to learn that company CEO Walden O'Dell is one of the GOP's biggest fundraisers in his home state of Ohio and nationally.

~ snip

Jekot says: "since October 2005:

1. We paid the taxes on our home (of 12 years) through an escrow account maintained by the lender. Despite that, the State foreclosed on and sold the home, and forced us to move to the above rental
2. The license plates on our vehicles have been cancelled/suspended
3. My drivers license has been suspended
4. Our voter registration has been moved to inactive status


Do these people have no shame?? Oh yes, they're in power, so - nope, they don't.