Los Angeles Indymedia : Activist News

DIEBOLD WHISTLEBLOWER STRIKES PLEA DEAL ON FELONY CHARGES...Stephen Heller Agrees to Plead Guilty, Pay $10,000, Apologize and Receive Three Years Probation After Being Charged with 'Burglary' for Sharing Diebold Lawfirm's Privileged Documents with Newspaper, Election Integrity Activists Tells BRAD BLOG He Has 'No Assets Left, Other Than House' and Deal is Meant to Protect Him and His Wife as 'Best Deal I Could Get Based on the Circumstances".

Read: PUNISHMENT FOR GOOD DEEDS

When Governor Schwarzenegger ran for office in 2003 he promised to work for the people of California and not for the special interest, now in 2006 Arnold Schwarzenegger has become the champion of special interest groups. The 2006 bond and tax package, presented by the governor and the state legislature, is the worst package ever offered to California voters in the state's history. Read the details.

This paper presents a fully independent security study of a Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machine, including its hardware and software. We obtained the machine from a private party. Analysis of the machine, in light of real election procedures, shows that it is vulnerable to extremely serious attacks. For example, an attacker who gets physical access to a machine or its removable memory card for as little as one minute could install malicious code; malicious code on a machine could steal votes undetectably, modifying all records, logs, and counters to be consistent with the fraudulent vote count it creates. An attacker could also create malicious code that spreads automatically and silently from machine to machine during normal election activities -- a voting-machine virus. We have constructed working demonstrations of these attacks in our lab. Mitigating these threats will require changes to the voting machine's hardware and software and the adoption of more rigorous election procedures. Read Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine.

The Socialist Equality Party candidate John Burton is seeking office in the 29th Congressional district, however, the County Registrar has rejected some 3,600 of their required petition signatures. Read the full story.

The 29th district was rocked earlier this year when two progressive, anti-war candidates, Bill Paparian and Bob McCloskey, campaigned to make headway against longtime incumbent Adam Schiff, who supported the war, is friendly to business interests, and keeps his family's primary residence outside of the district. Recent gerrymandering put more liberal parts of the west San Gabriel Valley into the district, shifting the balance toward liberal Pasadena, against the traditional conservative base in Burbank and Glendale.

LOS ANGELES, April 26, 2006 -- Peace Activist Cindy Sheehan came to a rally to support Marcy Winograd this Tuesday. Winograd is challenging incumbent Jane Harman in the 36th District for congress. Harman has been a supporter of the war in Iraq and Bush policy. Winograd is running on an End the war in Iraq, Bring the troops home now, platform. She is also challenging Harman on her vote for the patriot act and her support for Bush's domestic spying program. Progressive Democrats are hoping to defeat Harman in the Primary elections this June 6th. From the Newswire