Freep Heroes - Students at Swarthmore College

They are our heroes for staging an “electronic civil disobedience” campaign against Ohio-based voting machine maker Diebold Election Systems. Diebold has been sending out “cease and desist” letters in order to prevent website owners from linking to or posting some 15,000 internal Diebold memos that reveal the company was aware of massive security flaws in its e-voting software. What this means is that Diebold machines are easily hacked into – leading to an apparent large unexplained vote shift that delivered the Florida 2000 election to Bush. How do we know? Hackers invaded Diebold’s computers and leaked their internal memos to journalists and voting activists. Swarthmore students are pledging to keep access to these memos alive by disobeying Diebold’s letters.

The Free Press Salutes - Global democracy activists

The Freep salutes the activists who demonstrated for global democracy and against the World Trade Organization at its recent Cancun, Mexico meeting. Pressure created by the demonstrators helped the representatives from developing nations resist the injustice and double standards forced on their economies by Western-based corporations.

The Free Press Salutes - Bev Harris, author, Black Box Voting & scoop.co.nz

The most important book written this year is Black Box Voting: Ballot-Tampering in the 21st Century by Bev Harris. And the most important website in the world, if you believe in democracy, is scoop.co.nz. Their investigative work has uncovered the paper and memo trail that proves without doubt that the Bush family and their shadowy friends have destroyed American democracy and brought the CIA’s dreaded tactic of rigged “demonstration elections” to our country.

Enemy of the People - Wally O’Dell of Diebold Inc.

Upper Arlington resident and Bush devotee Wally O’Dell raises hundreds of thousands of dollars for the Resident while promising to deliver Ohio’s electoral votes to Bush in 2004. The problem is, his company, Diebold, Inc. is heavily involved in the electronic voting industry. It’s the second largest supplier of touch screen voting machines – over 33,000 Diebold computers are installed throughout 30 states. He hosted a $10,000-a-plate at his Coswold Manor this past summer. Diebold is in the forefront of Bush’s plan to corporatize and privatize voting. All the better for O’Dell to guarantee the vote.

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