"The discrepancies between paper and electronic voting could be the result of simple technological glitches. But some experts detect something more sinister: outright vote fixing by interference with voting machine and tabulation software.

"Meacher reported that Diebold company voting machines and optical scanners may not be tamper-proof from hacking, particularly via remote modems. Diebold machines were used in counting a substantial proportion of the 2004 votes and will be used again in next week's presidential poll.

"Two US computer security experts, in their book Black Box Voting, state that "by entering a two-digit code in a hidden location, a second set of votes is created; and this set of votes can be changed in a matter of seconds, so that it no longer matches the correct votes".

"This is entirely possible, according to Clinton Curtis, a Florida computer programmer. He has confirmed that in 2000 he designed an undetectable programme for Republican congressman Tom Feeney. It was created to rig elections by covertly switching votes from one candidate to another to ensure a predetermined ballot outcome. See a video of his sworn testimony here.

"As Robert F Kennedy Jr, nephew of JFK, has exposed, the US is one of the few democracies that allow private, partisan companies to secretly count votes using their own proprietary software."

The second article concerns the criminal Bush regime packing the federal appeals courts with extreme conservatives.

This was recently evident when the US Sixth District Court of Appeals upheld the Republican lawsuit but its politically motivated decision was rejected by the Supreme Court   Of the 16 active judges on that US district appeals court, eight were appointed by Dubya.

From the NYTimes: "After a group of doctors challenged a South Dakota law forcing them to inform women that abortions "terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique living human being" ”using exactly that language” President Bush's appointees to the federal appeals courts took control.

"A federal trial judge, stating that whether a fetus is human life is a matter of debate, had blocked the state from enforcing the 2005 law as a likely violation of doctors' First Amendment rights. And an appeals court panel had upheld the injunction.

"But this past June, the full United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit voted 7 to 4 to overrule those decisions and allow the statute to take immediate effect. The majority argued that it is objectively true that human life begins at conception, and that the state can force doctors to say so.

"Mr. Bush had appointed six of the seven judges in the conservative majority. His administration has transformed the nation's federal appeals courts, advancing a conservative legal revolution that began nearly three decades ago under President Ronald Reagan.

"A study in 2006 confirmed that the judges appointed by Republicans beginning with the Reagan administration are, as the Federalist Society's president, Eugene Meyer, put it, "a very different type of judge."

"The study, overseen by Cass Sunstein, a Harvard Law School professor who is now an adviser to Mr. Obama, analyzed whether judges voted for a liberal or a conservative outcome in 20,000 appeals court cases. It found that as a group the appellate judges appointed by Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard M. Nixon and Gerald Ford voted for a conservative outcome in 52 percent of their cases. Mr. Clinton's judges had an identical record.

"By contrast, the appeals court judges appointed by Reagan and the two Presidents Bush took the conservative position in 62 percent of cases. And that number was larger in certain ideologically charged areas, like abortion, affirmative action, environmental protection and whether states have sovereign immunity from federal lawsuits.

"Sheldon Goldman, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, said recent Republican judges had consistently nudged the law rightward in those cases where they could exercise some discretion. Over time, Mr. Goldman said, this can result in "enormous influence."

An Obama administration would halt and reform the anti-voting rights and touch screen voting machine illegalities perpetrated by the voter suppression Republican Party.

An Obama administration would reverse the right wing conservative federal court system created by the criminal Bush regime.