Fractelle,

You must be careful about revolutions. The only one that has ever been any good was the Glorious one of 1689 that gave us our Bill of Rights. Whilst ever our polity remains that of our Constitutional Monarchy, we can continue to benefit from the afterglow of that bloodless revolution. We do not need another revolution, merely to be freed from a grand deception that has come to be with respect to the electoral process.

As we have been talking about 1984, metabureaucrats, and revolutions, perhaps this quote is pertinent.

Quote of the day on this web page: http://tinyurl.com/ce5o5h , a link posted by GrahamY with this tweet: "Forget Cap and Trade, the US looks at Carbon Prohibition"

"The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites.

The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.

Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power." George Orwell - 1984.

Is it reasonable in the present context to identify Orwell's 'Party' with the 'Australian' metabureaucracy?

Suspect so.

All this metab' talk makes me think I should re-read Machiavelli's "The Prince", I'm sure there's relevant observations there, I just can't remember them, it's been too long. As I recall, he was making some points about the addictive and endless nature of the search for Power.

Fractelle,

All this speculation with respect to the identity of possible metabureaucrats has brought to mind something that happened back in the eighties. Wasn't it then that Kodak Australia received around $60M courtesy of the Australian taxpayer, in order to be able to remain viable in its Australian operations? I have a recollection that it was around 1986, to be a bit more specific.

I don't know whether Endata Pty Ltd (the company that provided the optical mark reading equipment and the outsourced marked electoral roll scanning services the AEC used when it first trialled, and subsequently introduced, the automation of the production of the 'mark-back' roll) had any links, official or otherwise, to the Eastman Kodak Corporation before it was taken over in 1991 by Hermes Precisa Australia. I do recall seeing the birthplace of one of its founding directors as being Denver, Colorado, USA on a company search document, which might suggest some such connection. I also recall a claim being made in a paper delivered to a Technology in Government conference some time in the late 1980s that the contract for custom built OMR equipment required for the 1987 Federal elections was approved under a 'certificate of expediency' and delivered within a five week period.

Could it be, do you think, that $60M of Australian taxpayers money may have funded the development and deployment of this technology not only for use in the Australian electoral context, but for wider deployment in introducing electronic vote recording and counting in the US electoral system?

It seems to me that that would be the sort of lead time necessary to produce the technological environment that permitted the so evidently manipulable results around the year 2000 in the US that are now the subject of such suspicion.

I have no knowledge as to the corporate links of Software Improvements Pty Ltd, the supplier of the eVACS® system, which I might be seen as championing, but the fact that it is claimed to have been formed in 1992, in the above context, is of some concern.

Forrest I do vaguely recall the bailing of Kodak. I used to live in Coburg which if I recall was the head office for Kodak in Australia. I remember hearing that it had been 'saved' and then a few short years later it was as dead as the cemetery it was built next to.

I don't have any of the background you have supplied here. Nor do I believe in fully cohesive world wide conspiracies - yes conspiracies occur but they tend, by their nature, to be disparate and only appear to be working in unison when goals meet in accidental synchronicity. This is why Al Qaeda has not managed to be as big a threat as it could be given that there is much inter-faction friction.

Also I see the left/right pendulum swinging from the right towards the centre, therefore I remain optimistic.

However, vigilance is essential. Now that they are named, so shall they be identified - METABUREAUCRATS - OUT ONE TODAY.

ERROR! ERROR! ERROR!

In my post of Friday, 17 April 2009 at 7:05:15 PM, I have unintentionally misled viewers. I posted:

"It is important to remind ourselves that the eVACS® system produced a printed ballot paper recording each such assisted elector's vote, those ballot papers being duly accounted for and counted by scrutiny as provided by existing law. Expressed differently, eVACS® fitted in with the EXISTING paper ballot system of recording and counting of votes."

THIS IS NOT STRICTLY CORRECT.

A careful re-read of the content of this link to an AEC page: http://www.aec.gov.au/Voting/e_voting/low_vision.htm , one I have given before, reveals that the eVACS® system does NOT fit in with the existing paper ballot system because it does not produce a humanly readable ballot paper.

Under the sub-heading 'The way the system works' is this statement:

"Once the voter had made their selections, the voter’s preferences were printed on a small laser printer next to the electronic voting machine. The preferences were contained within a two-dimensional barcode to preserve the secrecy of the vote in the polling place. These barcodes were decoded later and the votes counted along with all other pre poll votes. At no time were the voter’s preferences able to be associated with the identity of the voter."

The issue of secrecy of the vote would be easily able to be addressed by the use of a paper having a textural difference between back and front such that a visually-impaired person could by feel determine how to fold a humanly-readable printed ballot paper in the conventional way that a sighted person does, such that a polling official can see that the ballot paper is inserted into an envelope. The envelope could then be deposited in the locked or sealed ballot box, by the sight-impaired voter, by feel, if necessary or desired.

With an encoded ballot paper, the count is at the mercy of a computer program, and there is also prospect of an unauthorised progressive count occurring.