Analyst's note: Absolutely must read and carefully consider the impact on our U.S. national security. No wonder Mr. Obama did not seem all that interested in the recent debate with Mr. Romney. We have our own Department of Defense involved in limiting military voters being able to cast their votes. We also have the possibility of foreign governments who may now be able to impact our votes electonically thru a foreign owned company (SCYTL) in our own elections and thus undermine the national security interests of the United States, either directly or indirectly. This is not to mention the very real possibility of fraudulent donors to the Obama campaign.
As for me, I do not believe in coincidences of this sort described in this article. Note the staggering low numbers associated with states known to swing a presidential election. We best get ready, because this is election is going to be contested - especially if Mr. Obama loses. I ask you to read this and ask yourself, "What could possibly go wrong here?" Just remember, every vote counts -- we've already seen this truth in past presidential elections.
During one of the most hotly contested elections in recent U.S. history, the number of military absentee ballot requests is strangely down by staggering numbers compared to the 2008 election.
[....] The Defense Department has been coming under fire after reports of an exponentially low number of requests for military absentee ballots this year compared to the 2008 election.
The Military Voter Protection Project last week released the results of a study listing the number of requests in key states such as Virginia, where military absentee ballot requests are down 92 percent compared to 2008. In Ohio, only 9,700 absentee ballots have been requested as of late September compared to more than 32,000 in 2008.
Florida so far has 37,953 requested ballots as of last month as opposed to 86,926 in 2008 – a difference of 48,973. North Carolina only has 1,859 requests listed compared to 13,508 in 2008.
Just this week, a Military Times survey of military forces showed Republican nominee Mitt Romney with a 26-percent lead over the president. The Times survey follows an earlier Rasmussen poll that showed a 59 to 35 percent lead for Romney among military service voters.
The low number of military requests perplex Republican lawmakers who in 2009 pushed and passed the Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment Act, which was supposed to make it easier for overseas military personnel to vote.
The law required a voter assistance office at every military installation. It also automatically provides military voters with an opportunity to update their voter information during the check-in process at their duty stations.
However, last month the Defense Department’s Inspector General reported that the Pentagon was not complying with the 2009 law, citing information that only about half of overseas locations had functioning voter assistance offices.
[....] The states that used SCYTL’s technologies during the 2010 midterms were New York, Texas, Washington, California, Florida, Alabama, Missouri, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, New Mexico, Nebraska, West Virginia and Washington, D.C.
Just prior to the midterms, Washington, D.C., tested its own new electronic-voting system and discovered it had been hacked.
As a program security trial, the D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics reportedly encouraged outside parties to hack and find flaws in its new online balloting system. A group of University of Michigan students then hacked into the site and commanded it to play the school’s fight song upon casting a vote.
This is not the first time SCYTL’s systems have been called into question.
Voter Action, an advocacy group that seeks elections integrity in the U.S., sent a lengthy complaint to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission in April 2010 charging the integration of SCYTL systems “raises national security concerns.”
“Foreign governments may also seek to undermine the national security interests of the United States, either directly or through other organizations,” Voter Action charged.
The document notes that SCYTL was founded in 2001 as a spinoff from a research group at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, which was partially funded by the Spanish government’s Ministry of Science and Technology.
SCYTL’s headquarters are in Barcelona with offices in Washington, D.C., Singapore, Bratislava and Athens [....]
