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This observation became apparent Christmas week as California’s Secretary of State ordered both the controversial voting machine manufacturer Diebold and federal testing labs to "clean up their acts" following actions taken by Black Box Voting, a citizen-led voting fraud group.

This past November, the citizens group requested to examine California’s Diebold Election Systems component, the programmed "electronic ballot box" memory cards used in optical scan and touch screen voting systems.

At first, Black Box member, attorney John Baker and others were invited to hack away at some Diebold voting systems, setting the official test date for Nov. 30, 2005, states a recent news release issued by Black Box.

But specific testing protocol was to be provided by Diebold and the California Secretary of State’s office without participation by the citizens group, hence delaying the test.

At issue was Diebold’s insistence on being involved in setting up the testing procedures, and Diebold’s provision of hand-picked machines, using new voting systems not currently in use in California.

Three recent activities lead up to the California stand, Black Box leaders assert:

• Bev Harris’s recent book, Black Box Voting, took state examiners to task as she published interviews with state voting machine examiners "exposing slipshod state certification that relies on the flawed premise of strong federal certification."

• A Riverside (Calif.) computer programmer Jeremiah Akin wrote of Independent Testing Authority or ITA failure during testing of Sequoia voting software, finding "major security flaws in software" and asserting that Riverside had run elections on software that was later found to contain "major security vulnerabilities that were not spotted in the certification process."

• Susan Pynchon, an ordinary citizen who now runs the Florida Fair Elections Coalition, was able to demonstrate a breakdown in Florida's state certification process.

The struggle to vote and to have the vote fairly counted isn’t new, and is a theme running throughout U.S. history, says the co-author of two civil rights books.

"After the Civil War, as more blacks tried to register and vote, lynching picked up around the country particularly in the South and especially in Mississippi.

"And so by the 1870’s, Mississippi was setting new records for lynching more black people than any other state, as many whites felt that the freed blacks were getting away with too much freedom and felt they needed to be controlled," Fred Klopfer said.

Mississippi had the highest lynching number from 1882 to 1968 with 581. Georgia was second with 531, and Texas was third with 493. Some 79% of lynching happened in the South, researchers at Berea College reported in 1997, according to Klopfer. Lynching soon became a prominent activity in all Mississippi counties and December is a month that goes down in the state’s history:

In their research, Susan Orr-Klopfer and Fred Klopfer found that in two days alone in 1874 – December 7 through 8 – over 26 black citizens of Vicksburg were slaughtered by whites seeking to push black elected officials from office.

"One black man affected by this increased brutality was Charles Caldwell. Born a slave and later elected to the state Senate, Caldwell was blamed for killing the son of a white Mississippi judge in 1868.

"Caldwell argued self-defense in front of an all-white jury and was acquitted – the first black charged with killing a white in Mississippi and going free after a trial.

"But seven years later, on Christmas Day 1875, a white gang shot Caldwell to death."

Meanwhile, Black Box officials assert two recent Diebold events indicate more trouble ahead:

The voting machine company "admitted to mis-stating ATM sales revenues in a stockholder conference call. Diebold's stock dropped again in late September upon the release of a glum sales forecast based on additional problems with its ATM division."