Tepidly, Republicans Reject Trump's Ideas About Stealing The Election-- Too Tepidly... And Unconvincingly

 

I watched yesterday to see which Republicans would reject Trump's bullshit about a transfer of power. The first two I saw were Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Ben Sasse (R-NE) and then late in the day a half-assed whimper from Lindsey Graham. But luckily, Paul Kane and Rachel Bade watched the same thing more consistently and even wrote a story about it for the Washington Post last night: GOP senators reject Trump’s assertion about transfer of power-- with no direct criticism of the president. Of course with no direct criticism of Trumpanzee... they're all afraid of him. "Republicans," they reported, "with almost no direct criticism of Trump’s statements, uniformly asserted that if Joe Biden wins the election, they will support a peaceful transition to the Democrat’s inauguration in January." That's at least what they want the voting public to think... but can you trust them?

“The winner of the November 3rd election will be inaugurated on January 20th. There will be an orderly transition just as there has been every four years since 1792,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) tweeted early Thursday, following the president’s comments late Wednesday night.

He declined to further address the controversial statements. “Did you see my tweet? That pretty well sums it up,” McConnell told reporters in the Capitol.

Most Republicans tried to dodge how they would respond if the president refused to accept the results if he lost and stoked violence among his supporters, either calling it a hypothetical they would not contemplate or saying Trump just talks like that but does not follow through on such threats.

“The president says crazy stuff. We’ve always had a peaceful transition of power. It’s not going to change,” Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE) said.

Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) credited the controversy to Trump’s tendency to speak in “very extreme manners occasionally” and dismissed the latest controversy as part of that trend.

A few Republicans, however, did pledge to stand up to Trump if Biden is the clear winner and the president refuses to accept the results.

“No question that all the people sworn to support the Constitution would assure that there would be a peaceful transition of power,” Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) told reporters.

“Well, Republicans believe in the rule of law, we believe in the Constitution, and that’s what dictates what happens,” Sen. John Thune (R-SD), McConnell’s deputy in the leadership team, told reporters.

The Tipping Point by Nancy Ohanian

...Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) has reached out to GOP colleagues to encourage them to hold the line for democracy. Murphy said Republicans are in denial that the president would ever ignore the results of the election. But Democrats, he said, are trying to get them to acknowledge that every absentee ballot should be counted, fearful that the president could try to head off the results by contesting mail-in ballots.

“The president’s made very clear that he’s not going to acknowledge the results... His ability to get away with that will be largely dependent on whether the Republican Party goes with him, so you know a lot of what we’re doing now is just talking to our colleagues to make sure they’re ready for a potential transition,” Murphy said Thursday.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) offered a harsher assessment.

“Usually dictators don’t announce in advance what their plans are. He wants to be named a president for life, king to the contrary. That’s not how our democracy works. It is up to Democrats and Republicans, and independents, it is up to all Americans to make clear that we are a democracy,” she said.

In interviews, along with statements and social media posts, more than two dozen Senate Republicans pledged support for a peaceful transition should Biden win, yet Romney was the only one who, again without naming Trump, took on his statements.

Meanwhile, Colorado's fierce, 35 year old Secretary of State, Jena Griswold used Twitter to teach Señor Trumpanzee a little lesson in basic civics. Here it is as a couple of paragraphs:

39 days out from the most important election in my lifetime and yesterday, the President of the United States refused to commit to a “peaceful transfer of power.” As Colorado’s chief election official, let me set the record straight. [Donald] will not circumvent the law in Colorado. Under Colorado law, the presidential candidate that receives the most votes WILL receive our electoral votes. Colorado has enforced this law in the past and will enforce it again. Just a few months ago, the Supreme Court unanimously agreed with Colorado that a state can remove presidential electors who ignore state law & the vote of the people. Colorado took our case to the Supreme Court to stop bribery and political chaos from ensuing. That’s called planning ahead.

We’ve seen [Donald] use similar reprehensible tactics to undermine confidence in our elections: From telling his supporters to vote twice to attacking what historically has been the most trusted institution in America, the US Postal Service, for political gain. Instead of sowing doubt in our democracy and tasking the Department of Justice to try to help him steal the election, a real leader would ask voters to:

1. Double check your local voting deadlines
2. Register to vote
3. Make a plan to vote
4. Vote early

One of the reasons that I am proud to serve as Colorado's Secretary of State is that we have the best voting system in the nation. I’ll always fight so that all Americans can have their voice heard in safe, secure, and accessible elections.

Tomorrow's The Day In North Carolina-- Another Fascist In Congress... Or A Somewhat Less Horrible Blue Dog?

It's exceedingly rare that elections that are decided by vote theft get overturned. But the swingy southern-tier district of North Carolina, stretching from Elizabethtown and Fayetteville in the east, out through Lumberton, Laurinburg, Wadesboro and the southern Charlotte suburbs as far as the Central Piedmont Community College campus in the west, still doesn't have a representative in Congress. The PVI is a daunting R+8, but independents and moderate Republicans in the suburbs abandoned anyone tainted with Trump-- as Harris is-- in droves. (Trump beat Hillary in the 9th by nearly a dozen points-- 54.4% to 42.8%.)

Tomorrow-- finally-- the North Carolina Board of Elections will hold its long-awaited public evidentiary hearing in Raleigh into the Mark Harris fraud case. It starts at 10 AM and is expected to last as long as 3 days. The five-member board will consider testimony from its own investigators and experts, plus witnesses representing Mark Harris (R) and Dan McCready (Blue Dog). There are 3 Dems and 2 Republicans on the board. It would take 3 votes to certify Harris-- who leads by 905 votes (including thousands of fraudulent ballots)-- or 4 votes to call a new election. In other words, the Dems would have to get at least one of the Republicans to vote with them for a do-over. Or, the Republicans would need at least one Democrat to agree with them that the election was stolen fair and square. A decision is expected by Wednesday. If the Board of Elections can't reach a decision, either Gov. Roy Cooper (D) or the U.S. House will have to decide and there is little doubt that either would call for a new election.

Harris is trying to turn the hearing into a circus in the hopes of discrediting the decision, which no one expects to go his way. His attorney has demanded McCready appear to explain a comment he made last month on TV: "This is for the State Board to decide-- I think there are two options here. Either [Harris] knew what was going on, which I don't know how you wouldn't, and he should be in jail... or he turned a blind eye to fraud. He built a culture of corruption that represents the worst in our politics."

Early this month, Charlotte Observer political reporter Jim Morrill explained why McCready would have a commanding head start over Harris. It's mostly money. McCready's got $338,000 in his coffers compared to Harris $19,000.

This past Friday Morrill reported that McCready's case is based on the obvious, that Harris' ballot harvesting operation tainted more ballots than the current margin The Election Board can call for a new election if "irregularities or improprieties occurred to such an extent that they taint the results of the entire election and cast doubt on its fairness," which is clearly the case here.

The McCready campaign argues that the number of ballots affected by Leslie McCrae Dowless-- a Bladen County political operative and elected official who was hired at Harris’ direction to conduct get-out-the-vote work-- could be as high as 2,500, citing the 1,364 absentee-by-mail ballots cast in Bladen and Robeson and the 1,169 absentee-by-mail ballots sent to voters that were not returned and who did not vote in another way.

...Dowless, whose work in the 2016 election led to multiple ongoing investigations, is alleged to have paid workers to collect requests for mail-in absentee ballots, which is legal, and to have paid workers to collect completed or incomplete mail-in absentee ballots, which is illegal.

“While only Dowless may ever know the breadth of his scheme, the evidence is conclusive: Dowless’s operation tainted a far greater number of ballots than the apparent margin in the CD-9 race, and he was aided and abetted by elections officials along the way,” the McCready campaign said in its brief.

Dowless himself turned in requests for 590 mail-in absentee ballots in Bladen County, according to data released by the state board. McCready’s legal brief says that Dowless and his associates made “well over 700” requests in Bladen County.

As for the unreturned ballots, the McCready campaign argues their rate was “exceedingly high” in Bladen and Robeson and claims that Dowless and his associates discarded ballots they had collected.


The McCready campaign also said that Bladen County election officials released early vote totals to Dowless, gave him access to unredacted ballot request forms and provided him regular reports with voter information connected to mail-in absentee ballots.

McCready’s argument-- that more than 905 ballots were affected-- seems designed to rebut claims by the Harris campaign that the state board should certify his victory because there are not enough ballots to overcome the current deficit.

“Irregularity or misconduct alone does not mean a protest moves forward. The State Board must decide whether the irregularity is sufficient to cast doubt on the results of the election,” Harris’ attorneys wrote in their filing to the board. “If irregularity or misconduct-- no matter its nature or egregiousness-- does not cast doubt on the result, the protest should be dismissed.”

The Harris campaign has denied knowing about Dowless’ criminal history or about allegations of improper actions in 2016 until news reports after the election.

The previous nine-member board was disbanded in late December due to a separate legal challenge, but staff continued its investigation into the election results. The new board, made up of three Democrats and two Republicans, was appointed Jan. 31. Members got their first in-depth look at the evidence gathered by staff last week.

There are several reasons Democrats around the country are rooting for-- and contributing to-- McCready. First, of course, is the tribal mentality which defines this as a team sport and sees McCready in a blue uniform and Harris in a red one. A more valid reason is because Harris is a extremist lunatic who will be a 100% rubber stamp for Trump or even someone pushing Trump further right. But the best reason is because there are already too many crooked politicians in Congress and Harris clearly hired a known election fraud mastermind and paid him to steal the election./ He belongs in prison, not in Congress.

That said, I want to warn progressives about McCready. Not only is he a Blue Dog, but on most crucial issues the Republicans will be able to count on him to support their positions. The Democrats don't need another vote to elect a Speaker and organize the House-- the usual lame argument for support crap lesser-of-two-evils candidates like McCready. In fact, McCready will be another voice within the caucus, pushing the caucus to water down progressive proposals. Progressives are actually better off if McCready loses.

These are 10 freshman Blue Dogs with their ProgressivePunch ratings so far. Aside from having joined the Blue Dog caucus, you'll notice what they all have in common. McCready is considerably to the right of most of them:

• Anthony Brindisi (NY)- F
• Ed Case (HI)- F
• Joe Cunningham (SC)- F
• Kendra Horn (OK)- F
• Ben McAdams (UT)- F
• Max Rose (NY)- F
• Mikie Sherrill (NJ)- F
• Abigail Spanberger (VA)- F
• Xopchitl Torres Small (NM)- F
• Jeff Van Drew (NJ)- F

Illegal Ballot Destruction In The Midst Of A Law Suit Means Wasserman Schultz Stole The FL-23 Primary Election Afterall

Donna Edwards became a member of Congress-- one of the best members of Congress-- in 2008. But, truth be told, her constituents elected her in 2006... only to see the victory snatched out of her hands on election night with last minute stuffed ballot boxes from corrupt conservative Al Wynn and his Machine. Donna got to work on the 2008 campaign the next day and after Donna eviscerated him in the primary-- 59% to 37%-- he resigned to become a corporate lobbyist.

Last year Tim Canova ran a similar grassroots progressive race against the female counterpart to Wynn-- Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the same crook who, as DNC chair, was fired for fixing the primaries for Hillary Clinton. She fixed the election for Hillary; did she fix her own election against Canova? He always thought so but the media and DC establishment went bonkers when he mentioned it and nearly drove this good man out of politics with all their vitriol and venom. Polling was showing him ahead but on primary day Wasserman Schultz beat him 28,809 to 21,907 in a very low turnout election.

Friday, Marc Caputo broke the a story at Politico about how Brenda Snipes a crooked Wasserman Schultz crony and ally and the Broward County elections chief broke the law by destroying ballots cast in the tight primary election between Wasserman Schultz and Tim Canova after Canova sued to get access to the ballots. Canova, according to Caputo "wanted to inspect the optical-scan ballots cast in his Aug. 30 primary race against Wasserman Schultz because he had concerns about the integrity of the elections office."

Under longstanding federal law, ballots cast in a congressional race aren’t supposed to be destroyed until 22 months after the election. And under state law, a public record sought in a court case is not supposed to be destroyed without a judge’s order.

Snipes’ office, however, destroyed the paper ballots in question in October-- in the middle of Canova’s lawsuit-- but says it’s lawful because the office made high-quality electronic copies. Canova’s legal team found out after the fact last month.

“The documents were not destroyed because they were maintained in an electronic format,” Snipes’ attorney, Burnadette Norris-Weeks, told Politico. “They have the documents... They did a two-day inspection of the ballots.”

But Canova, a Nova Southeastern University law professor, and his attorney say they wanted originals to make sure they weren’t tampered with. Digital copies can be altered, they said.

Seven election-law lawyers interviewed by Politico do not share Snipes' attorney's interpretation of the statute. Nor does the Department of Justice’s voting division, which is in charge of enforcing the federal law.

“If it’s a federal election, i.e., there is at least one federal candidate on the ballot, the custodian must keep the ballots for 22 months,” Brett Kappel, a Washington lawyer with Akerman LLP, said in an email to Politico. “State law may require a shorter time for retention, but federal law would pre-empt any such state law with regard to ballots cast for federal candidates.”

Kappel said evidence in an active court case should never be unilaterally destroyed. He said actual paper ballots are superior to imaged copies, and he pointed to the legal wrangling over Florida’s now-discarded punch-card ballots that were banned after the disputed 2000 presidential elections in Florida.

...Hans von Spakovsky, an elections expert with the conservative Heritage Foundation, said the ballots must be preserved in paper form for 22 months. He said there’s a simple reason that original ballots are superior to an electronic image: “These electronic systems can be hacked.”

According to Snipes’ office, however, the ballot copies are of high quality for a review. Her attorney also dismissed Canova as a sore loser who’s trying to create a name for himself as he challenges Wasserman Schultz a second time.

“Mr. Canova lost this election,” she said. “He’s been all over Washington and has been trying to do a documentary because he’s upset he lost the election.”

In one hearing, Norris-Weeks insisted that she “certainly could get [a sworn statement] from Debbie Wasserman Schultz” to say that “she knows that they're preparing a documentary, and they're running all around talking to different people trying to do that.”

But Canova said the accusation was false.

“I’m not working on a documentary,” he said. “It is unfortunate that counsel for the Supervisor of Elections has to make things up to somehow justify the office’s illegal actions.”

Wasserman Schultz’s office declined to comment, but she has said she looks forward to again facing Canova, whom she beat by 13.6 percentage points last year.

Canova didn’t want to comment about his specific motivations for the suit, but acknowledged he has concerns about the race against Wasserman Schultz. Canova’s interest in the ballots was piqued by Lulu Friesdat, a documentary filmmaker and activist with a group called the Election Integrity network, which filed the first records request to inspect or copy the ballots in March.

A month later, Snipes’ office responded to the records request by saying it would cost $71,868.87 to sort and produce the ballots for inspection. Canova soon got involved with his attorney, Leonard Collins, and eventually they negotiated a price reduction that brought the cost down to about $3,000. But relations soured, and Canova sued in June.

Snipes’ office, meanwhile, is involved in two other lawsuits and has been plagued by errors and controversies over public records and paperwork.

One of the reasons Donald Trump is in the White House is because the Democratic Party was saddled with a corrupt party head, Wasserman Schultz, whose entire career, going back to her days in the Florida state legislature, have been marked with blatant and persistent corruption. She has long been the poster child of everything plaguing the Democratic Party. She has smeared and slimed Canova non-stop from the moment he dared to challenge here reelection. And now its getting closer and closer to the day when she will be, not just fired as the worst DNC chair in history but fired from Congress itself. Please consider helping Canova's campaign by clicking on the Blue America thermometer on the right. Meanwhile, this was the statement he issued after Caputo's explosive report yesterday:

In ordering the destruction of ballots, the Supervisor not only violated federal law requiring ballots be maintained for 22 months. Snipes also certified that the ballots were not subject to a pending lawsuit, which she knew was a complete falsehood given that Snipes had been personally served as the defendant in our lawsuit nearly three months earlier and even though we had already made public records requests and pre-trial discovery demands to inspect the ballots.

The ballot destruction raises serious questions:  Why engage in this blatant lawbreaking? To cover up something worse? What has the Supervisor of Elections been hiding? We demand state and federal investigations into the ballot destruction and prosecution of illegal wrongdoing.

Destruction of ballots prevents any reliable audit of the election results. We are left dependent on scanned ballot images created and sorted by scanning software that requires inspection by software experts. But the scanning software is considered proprietary software, owned and controlled by the private vendors, and often protected from independent inspection and analysis.

This destruction of ballots undermines people's faith and confidence in the integrity of our elections and this election in particular. To restore confidence, Congress must investigate and hold public hearings on the circumstances of my primary, including inspection and analysis of the scanned ballot images and the scanning software. Congress should also investigate the relationships between the vendors that control the electronic voting machines and software, their officers and directors, the Broward Supervisor of Elections office, Democratic party officials, and candidates for public office.

The Democratic Party will never be a real alternative to the Republican Party nor a welcoming home for good government reformers, with people like Wasserman Schultz exercising leadership roles in it. This person isn't even the lesser of two evils, which is all the Democrats can claim half the time anyway. She is what makes contemporary politics disgusting and she is the embodiment of what keeps decent people from wanting to get involved with politics.

Time For Paper Ballots-- So The Kremlin Can’t Steal The Next Election The Way They Stole 2016 For Trump. (Oh, You Didn’t Hear?)

Naive people-- really naive people-- have believed an American establishment desperate to pretend that the Kremlin didn’t steal the election for Trump. I’ve always thought they were fools and that Putin certainly stole the election for Trump, while Obama sat by with his dick in his hand. And then participated in a massive coverup to make Americans think their voting system was just fine and that all Putin did was hack the criminally-minded Debbie Wassermann Schultz-- she desreved it and worse, right?-- and release some silly e-mails and get some Albanian and Macedonian kids to monkey around with Facebook. Yeah, wanna buy a bridge?

A low key article in the NY Times yesterday scratched the surface of how Putin delivered America the devastating, debilitating blow of a Trumpanzee White House. Nicole Perlroth, Michael Wines and Matthew Rosenberg began their report in Durham. North Carolina is a swing state. Hillary was competitive there. Trump won the state’s crucial 15 electoral votes 2,339,603 (50.5%) to 2,162,074 (46.7%). Not that close. How’d that happen? Durham is a blue county. After winning the state in 2008, Obama lost North Carolina in 2012 2,275,853 (51%) to 2,178,388 (48%). But he kicked ass in Durham County-- 109,185 (76%) to 33,326 (23%) for Romney. Running against a sociopathic racist Hillary had every reason too think she would do better than Obama had-- and she did-- 118,783 (78.9%) to 27,879 (18.5%). She should have done even better, but… Durham County, of all counties, was targeted for some trouble.

The problems, wrote Perlroth, Wines and Rosenberg, "involved electronic poll books-- tablets and laptops, loaded with check-in software, that have increasingly replaced the thick binders of paper used to verify voters’ identities and registration status. [Susan Greenhalgh, a troubleshooter at a nonpartisan election monitoring group] knew that the company that provided Durham’s software, VR Systems, had been penetrated by Russian hackers months before. 'It felt like tampering, or some kind of cyberattack,' Ms. Greenhalgh said about the voting troubles in Durham."

[M]onths later, for Ms. Greenhalgh, other election security experts and some state officials, questions still linger about what happened that day in Durham as well as other counties in North Carolina, Virginia, Georgia and Arizona.

After a presidential campaign scarred by Russian meddling, local, state and federal agencies have conducted little of the type of digital forensic investigation required to assess the impact, if any, on voting in at least 21 states whose election systems were targeted by Russian hackers, according to interviews with nearly two dozen national security and state officials and election technology specialists.

The assaults on the vast back-end election apparatus-- voter-registration operations, state and local election databases, e-poll books and other equipment-- have received far less attention than other aspects of the Russian interference, such as the hacking of Democratic emails and spreading of false or damaging information about Mrs. Clinton. Yet the hacking of electoral systems was more extensive than previously disclosed, the New York Times found.

Beyond VR Systems, hackers breached at least two other providers of critical election services well ahead of the 2016 voting, said current and former intelligence officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because the information is classified. The officials would not disclose the names of the companies.

Intelligence officials in January reassured Americans that there was no indication that Russian hackers had altered the vote count on Election Day, the bottom-line outcome. But the assurances stopped there.

Government officials said that they intentionally did not address the security of the back-end election systems, whose disruption could prevent voters from even casting ballots.

That’s partly because states control elections; they have fewer resources than the federal government but have long been loath to allow even cursory federal intrusions into the voting process.

That, along with legal constraints on intelligence agencies’ involvement in domestic issues, has hobbled any broad examination of Russian efforts to compromise American election systems. Those attempts include combing through voter databases, scanning for vulnerabilities or seeking to alter data, which have been identified in multiple states. Current congressional inquiries and the special counsel’s Russia investigation have not focused on the matter.

“We don’t know if any of the problems were an accident, or the random problems you get with computer systems, or whether it was a local hacker, or actual malfeasance by a sovereign nation-state,” said Michael Daniel, who served as the cybersecurity coordinator in the Obama White House. “If you really want to know what happened, you’d have to do a lot of forensics, a lot of research and investigation, and you may not find out even then.”

In interviews, academic and private election security experts acknowledged the challenges of such diagnostics but argued that the effort is necessary. They warned about what could come, perhaps as soon as next year’s midterm elections, if the existing mix of outdated voting equipment, haphazard election-verification procedures and array of outside vendors is not improved to build an effective defense against Russian or other hackers.

In Durham, a local firm with limited digital forensics or software engineering expertise produced a confidential report, much of it involving interviews with poll workers, on the county’s election problems. The report was obtained by The Times, and election technology specialists who reviewed it at the Times’ request said the firm had not conducted any malware analysis or checked to see if any of the e-poll book software was altered, adding that the report produced more questions than answers.

Neither VR Systems-- which operates in seven states beyond North Carolina-- nor local officials were warned before Election Day that Russian hackers could have compromised their software. After problems arose, Durham County rebuffed help from the Department of Homeland Security and Free & Fair, a team of digital election-forensics experts who volunteered to conduct a free autopsy. The same was true elsewhere across the country.

…While only a fraction of [Durham Co.] voters were turned away because of the e-poll book difficulties-- more than half of the county cast their ballots days earlier-- plenty of others were affected when the state mandated that the entire county revert to paper rolls on Election Day. People steamed as everything slowed. Voters gave up and left polling places in droves-- there’s no way of knowing the numbers, but they include more than a hundred North Carolina Central University students facing four-hour delays.

At a call center operated by the monitoring group Election Protection, Ms. Greenhalgh was fielding technical complaints from voters in Mississippi, Texas and North Carolina. Only a handful came from the first two states.

Her account of the troubles matches complaints logged in the Election Incident Reporting System, a tracking tool created by nonprofit groups. As the problems mounted, The Charlotte Observer reported that Durham’s e-poll book vendor was Florida-based VR Systems, which Ms. Greenhalgh knew from a CNN report had been hacked earlier by Russians. “Chills went through my spine,” she recalled.

The vendor does not make the touch-screen equipment used to cast or tally votes and does not manage county data. But without the information needed to verify voters’ identities and eligibility, which county officials load onto VR’s poll books, voters cannot cast ballots at all.

Details of the breach did not emerge until June, in a classified National Security Agency report leaked to The Intercept, a national security news site. That report found that hackers from Russia’s military intelligence agency, the G.R.U., had penetrated the company’s computer systems as early as August 2016, then sent “spear-phishing” emails from a fake VR Systems account to 122 state and local election jurisdictions. The emails sought to trick election officials into downloading malicious software to take over their computers.

The N.S.A. analysis did not say whether the hackers had sabotaged voter data. “It is unknown,” the agency concluded, whether Russian phishing “successfully compromised the intended victims, and what potential data could have been accessed.”

VR Systems’ chief operating officer, Ben Martin, said he did not believe Russian hackers were successful. He acknowledged that the vendor was a “juicy target,” given that its systems are used in battleground states including North Carolina, Florida and Virginia. But he said that the company blocked access from its systems to local databases, and employs security protocols to bar intruders and digital triggers that sound alerts if its software is manipulated.

On Election Day, as the e-poll book problems continued, Ms. Greenhalgh urged an Election Protection colleague in North Carolina to warn the state Board of Elections of a cyberattack and suggest that it call in the F.B.I. and Department of Homeland Security. In an email, she also warned a Homeland Security election specialist of the problems. Later, the specialist told her Durham County had rejected the agency’s help.

When Ms. Greenhalgh, who works at Verified Voting, a nonprofit dedicated to election integrity, followed up with the North Carolina colleague, he reported that state officials said they would not require federal help.

“He said: ‘The state does not view this as a problem. There’s nothing we can do, so we’ve moved on to other things,’” Ms. Greenhalgh recalled. “Meanwhile, I’m thinking, ‘What could be more important to move on to?’”

The idea of subverting the American vote by hacking election systems is not new. In an assessment of Russian cyberattacks released in January, intelligence agencies said Kremlin spy services had been collecting information on election processes, technology and equipment in the United States since early 2014.

The Russians shied away from measures that might alter the “tallying” of votes, the report added, a conclusion drawn from American spying and intercepts of Russian officials’ communications and an analysis by the Department of Homeland Security, according to the current and former government officials.

The most obvious way to rig an election-- controlling hundreds or thousands of decentralized voting machines-- is also the most difficult. During a conference of computer hackers last month in Las Vegas, participants had direct access and quickly took over more than 30 voting machines. But remotely infiltrating machines of different makes and models and then covertly changing the vote count is far more challenging.

Beginning in 2015, the American officials said, Russian hackers focused instead on other internet-accessible targets: computers at the Democratic National Committee, state and local voter databases, election websites, e-poll book vendors and other back-end election services.

Apart from the Russian influence campaign intended to undermine Mrs. Clinton and other Democratic officials, the impact of the quieter Russian hacking efforts at the state and county level has not been widely studied. Federal officials have been so tight-lipped that not even many election officials in the 21 states the hackers assaulted know whether their systems were compromised, in part because they have not been granted security clearances to examine the classified evidence.

The January intelligence assessment implied that the Russian hackers had achieved broader access than has been assumed. Without elaborating, the report said the Russians had “obtained and maintained access to multiple U.S. state and local election boards.”

Two previously acknowledged strikes in June 2016 hint at Russian ambitions. In Arizona, Russian hackers successfully stole a username and password for an election official in Gila County. And in Illinois, Russian hackers inserted a malicious program into the Illinois State Board of Elections’ database. According to Ken Menzel, the board’s general counsel, the program tried unsuccessfully “to alter things other than voter data”-- he declined to be more specific-- and managed to illegally download registration files for 90,000 voters before being detected.

On Election Day last year, a number of counties reported problems similar to those in Durham. In North Carolina, e-poll book incidents occurred in the counties that are home to the state’s largest cities, including Raleigh, Winston-Salem, Fayetteville and Charlotte. Three of Virginia’s most populous counties-- Prince William, Loudoun, and Henrico-- as well as Fulton County, Georgia, which includes Atlanta, and Maricopa County, Arizona, which includes Phoenix, also reported difficulties. All were attributed to software glitches.

Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia and vice chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, argued for more scrutiny of suspicious incidents. “We must harden our cyber defenses, and thoroughly educate the American public about the danger posed” by attacks,” he said in an email. “In other words: we are not making our elections any safer by withholding information about the scope and scale of the threat.”

In Durham County, officials have rejected any notion that an intruder sought to alter the election outcome. “We do not believe, and evidence does not suggest, that hacking occurred on Election Day,” Derek Bowens, the election director, said in a recent email.

But last month, after inquiries from reporters and the North Carolina State Board of Elections and Ethics Enforcement, Durham county officials voted to turn over laptops and other devices to the board for further analysis. It was not clear which government agency or private forensics firm, would conduct the investigation.

Ms. Greenhalgh will be watching closely. “What people focus on is, ‘Did someone mess with the vote totals?’” she said. “What they don’t realize is that messing with the e-poll books to keep people from voting is just as effective.’”

The Times, the newspaper of record, is easing its readers into the whole concept of Putin having decided the 2016 election slowly. Wait 'til they get to Russian vote theft in carefully-targeted counties in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Florida and Ohio!

Did Wasserman Schultz Steal Her Reelection Against Tim Canova?

By the final week of the FL-23 congressional primary, blockheads in the media didn't want to talk about anything substantive, nothing about issues or about Debbie Wasserman Schultz's hideous record in Congress or at the DNC. To the small pack of jackel-like reporters covering the race in the final week it was all about one non-issue: "where was Bernie?" Why wasn't he in the district campaigning for Tim? Had he "made a deal?" Totally silly and certainly not what a single south Florida voter needed to be thinking about as they were deciding who to vote for in this potentially momentous primary.

On Tuesday, August 30, I was getting reports all day that Tim Canova was absolutely walking away with the election against the corruption-scarred Wasserman Schultz. The calls and e-mails were similar to the ones that had been coming in during early voting week: massive enthusiasm and unexpectedly large turnout for Tim Canova and there just weren't voters turning out for Wasserman Schultz after her reputation had been shredded by a series of horribly ugly revelations that pointed to both her unsavory character and her pro-corporate/pay-to-play congressional and personal agenda.

The mood among Canova's dedicated volunteers was jubilant as well, although Tim had warned me a week earlier that they had been shut out of the largely Jewish condo complexes where absentee voting was organized and that Wasserman Schultz had that all very tightly wired. He didn't seem to think the absentee ballots would win her reelection though.

Yesterday, the screen shot above arrived in my mailbox. It's the "placeholder page" on NBC channel 6's website at 9:06 pm Monday evening, August 29th, the night before the primary Election Day. Since no votes had yet been counted, the placeholder page shows all the races at 0-0 with 0 precincts reporting, except for one race: Wasserman Schultz 58%, Canova 42% with 69% of precincts reporting. (Keep in the back of your mind that NBC is a subsidiary of Comcast, Wasserman Schultz's single biggest donor-- $28,200 this cycle alone-- after she took their side in the Communication Workers of America strike.)

My sister lives in Hollywood. She called me and then called NBC 6 to ask for an explanation and they hung up on her and quickly rectified the placeholder page to show the FL-23 race to also be 0-0 with 0 reporting, just like every other race. It was disconcerting and neither she nor I could understand what had just happened. She suggested that a U.S. Attorney should be investigating the electronic history of NBC 6, both in posting early returns before ballots were counted-- or even cast-- and in any electronic communications between NBC 6 and the Supervisor of Elections in Broward County. I was just stunned and have been stunned ever since.

And, suddenly, it was over; she won:

• Wasserman Schultz- 28,279 (57%)
• Canova- 21,504 (43%)

Where did those numbers come from? Any of those numbers? Could Wasserman Schultz, who had just spent a year trying to fix the results if the presidential primary in state after state for Hillary, really steal the election in her own district? And would she if she could? Undermine democracy itself like that? Short of Rahm Emanuel, I can't think of a single more likely culprit to suspect of that kind of behavior.

Let's hope Tim runs again in 2018. This whole episode reminds me of what happened to Donna Edwards whence ran against a similar corrupt Democrat in Maryland the first time. The whole Democratic establishment ganged up against Donna in favor of Al Wynn and when it looked like Donna won on election night, Wynn's thugs showed up at the last minute with a ballot box that had been "found," stuffed with ballots for him, enough to swing the close election. She ran against him 2 years later and kicked his ass out of Congress and onto K Street.

Meet the new face of the Republican Party: Fairfax County (VA) Electoral Board imbecile-liar Brian W. Schoeneman

State Sen. Mark Herring, Virginia's apparent AG-elect

by Ken

In the end I decided to go conventional and lead with a photo of Virginia State Sen. Mark Herring, the Democratic provisional winner of the race for Virginia state attorney general. Most of the way, though, my plan was to lead with the tweet reproduced below, with the caption (from Alex Rogers's Time "Swampland" report (see below): "While Brian W. Schoeneman, a Republican member of the Fairfax Electoral Board, protested through Twitter that all [absentee ballots] had been counted, upon further review, state election officials found that a tabulation machine had broken and the votes on a replacement machine weren't counted."

Oh, I assume there'll be a recount, since state law provides that if the margin of victory is less than ½ percent the state pays for a recount, which means it should be more or less automatic. And especially in the case of a result this close, everyone should have an interest in getting the vote count correct.

However, as we can already see, there's one group of Virginians that have no interest in getting the count, but only getting it their way. You could say it's just coincidence that the major vote-counting errors that have turned up so far all favored the Republican candidate. What you can't say is that Virginia Republicans gave rat's ass about anything except getting the result they want. Which brings us to my nominee for the man who most closely represents what the Republican Party stands for in the year 2013, imbecile-liar Brian W. Schoeneman.

Consider this portion of from Alex Rogers's Time "Swampland" report, "With 164 Vote Attorney General Victory, Virginia Democrats Sweep State":

Episodes occurred in Fairfax and Richmond counties, two of the most populous in the state. Among other election observers, Michael McDonald, an associate professor of government and politics at George Mason University, found that absentee turnout from Fairfax didn't match his prediction. While Brian W. Schoeneman, a Republican member of the Fairfax Electoral Board, protested through Twitter that all had been counted, upon further review, state election officials found that a tabulation machine had broken and the votes on a replacement machine weren't counted. Around 3,000 votes were then reviewed, and a large majority went to Herring, who at that point was losing in the unofficial tally. "I don’t know if they would have caught it," said McDonald, who joked that Schoeneman "is going to regret for all of his life" that "infamous tweet."

In Richmond, state officials failed to enter more than 200 votes, throwing the aforementioned 17-vote lead for Obenshain to the razor-slim 117-vote margin for Herring. In this case, officials realized their mistake well before it hit social media.

These errors have an easier chance of being reported and caught by outside observers in Virginia, due to the state's "unusually transparent" electoral process, according to McDonald, because the state releases not only overall numbers, but also breakdowns in how a vote is cast (including absentee) and in what precinct. That openness, combined with the high level of interest due to the closeness of the campaign, can lead to a messy, but effective evaluation.

"These are common errors for certification across the entire country," says McDonald. "Usually you don't get to see into the factory where the sausage is being made."

Now, I don't consider this race a lock, as long as there are still votes to be counted. After all, the Republican Art and Science of Election-Stealing now goes into extra innings. There's always the pre-Election Day Phase (throwing up as many obstacles as possible to The Others' voting for The Others' candidates while making it as easy as possible for Our Voters), the Election Day Operation (the crunch-day version of the same thing, which runs up till the last polling place closes, or the last Other voter has been sent away without voting), and the Vote Miscounting Drill (for those tension-fraught hours, or if necessary days, before a result is announced). If you still haven't nudged the result your way, you may still have a chance if you can slide it into the Recount Circle.

Some of the stuff the R's came up with this time was truly inspired, like ruling -- after all the safely Republican counties had already resolved their lesser problems with provisional ballots -- that anyone who had cast a provisional ballot and had hopes of, you know, having it counted, would have to appear in person to beg for that indulgence. You'd think the folks who came up with that one would be under lock and key by now, but not in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

To belabor the obvious, the problem with imbecile-liar Brian W. Schoeneman isn't that he was wrong about all those votes having been counted, although it's hard to see how that plays in his favor. It's not even in hoping that his candidates prevailed; that goes with the territory. The problem is that he was presented with the powerfully suspicious circumstance detected by Professor McDonald of the near-certain undercount in what I believe I heard described on the radio as the most heavily Democratic part of the state's most populous and most heavily Democratic county. An official with a modicum of competence or honesty (either one would have done it) would have taken the opportunity to recheck his ground. Instead imbecile-liar Brian W. Schoeneman doubled down on his imbecility and dishonesty, not to mention his incompetence.

Professor McDonald suggests that imbecile-liar Brian W. Schoeneman is going to regreat "that infamous tweet" for "all the rest of his life." That's being much too kind.

Nothing will change the fact that enough Virginians voted for statewide candidates who are certifiably insane and thugs to boot to make the gubernatorial race close and the AG race micro-close. Of course the Democrats countered by serving up a gubernatorial candidate nobody could possibly vote for without holding his/her nose. That's a problem for another day. Today's problem is finding a way to have Republicans barred from participating in any aspect of the polling and vote-counting operation. They just can't be trusted.

Ask imbecile-liar Brian W. Schoeneman.

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Authoritarianism And The Nature Of Government: Voting Rights In North Carolina, Obama's Persecution Of Ed Snowden

Governments by nature tend towards the authoritarian. Even when a liberalish type, like Obama, is elected, its almost inevitable that when something like Ed Snowden happens, the government errs on the side of repression. All governments. European governments are either flipping out or feigning flipping out over Snowden's revelations that the U.S. was relentlessly spying on all of our allies all the time. But have any of these any governments agreed to give Snowden political refuse from the American gulag which is looking to devour him? Françoise Hollande, the Socialist president of France has threatened the U.S-E.U. trade agreement over U.S. spying but has he offered Snowden refuge? Non... although he did bar the plane of Bolivia's President from flying over French airspace yesterday when the CIA claimed Snowden was aboard. Neither has the country founded on the principles of Mahatma Gandhi offered refuge. Wikileaks applied for political asylum for Snowden in 21 countries. So far they've all said NO, including Ecuador, Russia, Poland and liberal democracies like Austria, Finland, India, Brazil, Ireland, Norway, and Spain. Let's see if Bolivia, Cuba, Iceland, Italy, Netherlands, Nicaragua, Venezuela or Switzerland comes through.

And then there's an even uglier kind of authoritarianism when we're not talking about liberals, but about conservatives. It seems that within moments of the very right wing, very partisan Supreme Court majority gutting the Voting Rights Act (because it had accomplished what it set out to do), right-wing state governments proved that it hadn't accomplished anything at all in their hearts; several moved swiftly and with determination to block minorities from being able to vote.

In order to fully understand what the five Republican appointees on the Supreme Court have been up to when they make decisions that affect our democracy, as they did last week on voting rights, you need to understand what the Republican Party has been up to.

The modern GOP is based on an unlikely coalition of wealthy business executives, small business owners, and struggling whites. Its durability depends on the latter two categories believing that the economic stresses they’ve experienced for decades have a lot to do with the government taking their money and giving it to the poor, who are disproportionately black and Latino.

The real reason small business owners and struggling whites haven’t done better is the same most of the rest of America hasn’t done better: Although the output of Americans has continued to rise, almost all the gains have gone to the very top.

Government is implicated, but not in the way wealthy Republicans want the other members of their coalition to believe. Laws that the GOP itself championed (too often with the complicity of some Democrats) have trammeled unions, invited outsourcing abroad, slashed taxes on the rich, encouraged takeovers, allowed monopolization, reduced the real median wage, and deregulated Wall Street.

Four decades ago, the typical household’s income rose in tandem with output. But since the late 1970s, as these laws took hold, most Americans’ incomes have flattened. Had the real median household income continued to keep pace with economic growth it would now be almost $92,000 instead of $50,000.

Obviously, wealthy Republicans would rather other members of their coalition not know any of this-- including, especially, their role in making it happen. Their nightmare is small-business owners and struggling whites joining with the poor and the rest of the middle class to wrest economic power away. So they’ve created a convenient scapegoat in America’s minority underclass, along with a government that supposedly taxes hardworking whites to support them.

This is where the five Republican appointees to the Supreme Court have played, and continue to play, such an important role.

First, wealthy Republicans have to be able to spend as much money as possible to bribe lawmakers to do their bidding, tell their version of history, and promulgate several big lies (the poor are “takers not makers," government keeps them “dependent," the wealthy are “job-creators" so cutting their taxes creates more jobs, unions are bad, regulations reduce economic growth, and so on).

The five Republicans on the Supreme Court have obliged by eviscerating campaign finance laws. Their 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, along with the broad interpretations given it by several appellate judges (also Republican appointees), has opened the money floodgates.

Second, wealthy Republicans want to quietly reduce the impact of any laws that might limit their profits, even though they may help struggling whites as consumers or employees. The easiest way to execute this delicate maneuver is to make it harder to sue under such laws.

Here, too, the five Republicans on the Court have been eager to oblige by tightening requirements for class actions and limiting standing to sue. In their recent Comcast Corp. v. Behrend decision, for example, they threw out $875 million in damages that a group of Philadelphia-area subscribers had sought from the cable giant, reasoning that the subscriber plaintiffs hadn’t proven they constituted a “class" for the purpose of a class action.

Third and finally, wealthy Republicans want to minimize the votes of poor and minority citizens – and further propagate the myth that these people are responsible for the economic problems of struggling whites – through state redistricting and gerrymandering, voter-identification requirements at polling stations, and the use of almost any pretext to purge minority voters from voting lists.

The five Republicans on the Court obliged last week by striking down a section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that sets the formula under which states with a long history of discrimination must ask the federal government or a judge for approval before changing their voting procedures.

The significance of Shelby County, Alabama vs. Holder was made plain Thursday when the Court effectively nullified two cases involving Texas voter laws by sending them back to lower courts to reconsider in light of Shelby. One was a voter identification requirement, enacted in 2011, that a federal judge had rejected on grounds that it imposed a disproportionate burden on lower-income people, many of whom are minorities. The other was a redistricting plan, also rejected by a federal court, in part because it would block minorities from gaining a majority vote in almost all districts.

But now both are effectively reinstated, as are the efforts of several other states to suppress votes.

Supreme Court justices are appointed for life in order to ensure their independence from politics. But when it comes to the core political strategy of the Republican Party, the five Republican appointees are, in effect, an extension of the GOP. 

And no state has moved with greater malice towards implementing that Supreme Court's anti-democracy diktat than North Carolina. The right-wing GOP legislature and governor want to use the Supreme Court decision to disenfranchise young people, Hispanics, poor people and, most of all, African Americans. Still horrified that they have a Democratic senator and that Obama won in 2008, North Carolina Republicans are taking an ax to voting rights. They're instituting a voter ID law meant to discourage Democrats and they're ending Sunday voting, same day registration and early voting as much as they can get away with.

North Carolina NAACP President William J. Barber II, who has seen generations of black candidates elected thanks to the landmark civil rights-era law, objected to [state Senate Rules Committee Chairman Tom] Apodaca's dismissal of federal protections that had become part of the civil rights fabric of the South. "He refers to a law to undo 250 years of slavery and another 100 years or more of Jim Crow … as a headache," Barber said.

Rosanell Eaton, 92, remembers the humiliation for blacks who sought to cast ballots in North Carolina before the Voting Rights Act. In 1939, she said, she hitched a mule to a wagon and rode to the courthouse in Franklin County, N.C., to register. Three white men, probably illiterate, demanded that she recite the preamble to the U.S. Constitution.

Eaton, the valedictorian at her rural high school, recited the preamble word for word.

"They were so ignorant they didn't know if I said it right or not-- but they registered me," she said.

Last week's Supreme Court decision "starts taking us right back to the old days," she said. "Now it's easier for these Republicans to do anything they want to us, without the controls we had."

The Voting Rights Act changed the South by expanding black voting and black officeholders. In 1965, the 11 Southern states of the Confederacy had three black state legislators. By 2009, the number was 321 of 628 nationwide, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

...The new moves by state officials to adopt ID requirements and other changes in the voting laws can have a critical impact on black voting strength, civil rights leaders say. Blacks represented 22% of North Carolina's registered voters in 2012 but accounted for 34% of voters without a driver's license or state-issued ID this year, according to Democracy North Carolina, a liberal advocacy group. The group says blacks in 2012 made up 29% of early voters and 34% of same-day registration voters.

Since taking control in North Carolina, Republicans have passed or proposed legislation that Democrats say discriminates against minorities. This month, Republicans repealed the Racial Justice Act, passed by a Democratic Legislature and governor. The act allowed death row inmates to be re-sentenced to life in prison without parole if they proved racial discrimination in jury selection or sentencing.

Other Republican-controlled states, from Florida to Alaska aren't even waiting to see if North Carolina can get away with it. They're already moving the same direction. Texas Republicans are petrified of Hispanic voters turning their red bastion blue. So they're coming up with plans to keep them from voting, since they've already figured out that that is a better fit for the party base than trying to win them over to vote for Republicans.

Ed Snowden: "In the end the Obama administration is not afraid of whistleblowers like me, Bradley Manning or Thomas Drake. We are stateless, imprisoned, or powerless. No, the Obama administration is afraid of you. It is afraid of an informed, angry public demanding the constitutional government it was promised-- and it should be."

Right-wingers all over agree: We don't need no stinkin' democracy!

by Ken

In a "Letter from Jerusalem" in the January 21 issue, which appeared just before the January 22 Israeii election, New Yorker editor David Remnick wrote an interesting piece ("The Party Faithful") that I didn't get around to reading until after that election, with its surprisingly un-extreme result. Remnick, in his piece, seemed quite prepared for what most everyone was expecting: the next step in Israel's seemingly unstoppable free fall into the clutches of its demonic Far Right.

The extremist crazies, for their part, seemed pretty confident that Total Victory was within their grasp. (At which point all they would have had to do was fight it out amongst themselves. These people are so deeply unlikable, not to mention crazy, that they all seem to hate one another, meaning that a lot of deeply diseased egos would have to be put in check to sustain any sort of Coalition of the Crazies.) So confident were they that some of them were unexpectedly forthcoming about their goals. Or maybe these people are so far gone that this measure of frankness comes naturally to them.

Meanwhile, Israeli politics continues its seemingly endless trek to the right. Every day, the Web carries the voice of another leader of the settler movement who insists that the settlers are the vanguard now, that the old verities are to be challenged, if not eliminated. Early last year, Benny Katzover, a leader in the settlement of Elon Moreh, told a Chabad paper, Beit Mashiach, "I would say that today Israeli democracy has one central mission, and that is to disappear. Israeli democracy has finished its historical role, and it must be dismantled and bow before Judaism."

This seems to be a common thread among the modern-day Far Right, which in Israel as in a number of other "Western democracies" has increasingly taken over the old Right. One of those other Western democracies I have in mind, of course, is our own. Howie has been keeping us posted on the stunning shenanigans of our own Far Right's breathtaking war on democracy -- election-stealing, voter suppression, the usual works.

Today there is one small but notable piece of good news, which came to me via Virginia's stalwart Not Larry Sabato political blog. In case the name Hans von Spakovsky isn't immediately familiar, it's because he mostly does his evil work in quiet. He is one of the Right's most passionate architect's of election-stealing, who actually served -- via recess appointment by "Chimpy the Prez" Bush -- as a commissioner of the Federal Election Commission. Here's a January 2011 post of Howie's in which Hans von S was featured, and here is Wikipedia's desperate attempt to be fair and balanced about the wildly imbalanced Hans von S, who has devoted his professional life to throwing our electoral system totally out of balance (links and footnotes onsite):

Hans Anatol von Spakovsky (born March 11, 1959) is an American attorney and a former member of the Federal Election Commission (FEC). He was nominated to the FEC by President George W. Bush on December 15, 2005 and was appointed by recess appointment on January 4, 2006.[1]

However, von Spakovsky's nomination was opposed by Senate Democrats, who argued that his oversight of voter laws was unacceptably partisan and that he had consistently acted to disenfranchise poor and minority voters.[2][3] Opposition to the nomination was bolstered by objections from career Justice Department staff, who accused von Spakovsky of politicizing his nominally non-partisan office to an unprecedented degree.[4]

While von Spakovsky and the Bush Administration denied the accusations of partisanship, the nomination was withdrawn on May 15, 2008.[5] Von Spakovsky subsequently joined the staff of the Heritage Foundation, a politically conservative think tank.

Here's the news (again, links onsite):

Fairfax County's Nightmare Is Over!!!

Great news breaking in Fairfax County this morning. Electoral Boards are split 2-1 in Virginia, one Republican, one Democrat and one member of the Governor's party. When Bob McDonnell was elected, the Fairfax GOP placed noted voter-fraud conspiracy theorist Hans Von Spakovsky on the electoral board in the largest county in Virginia.

The result was massive lines at polling places with minority (Democratic) voters, while most GOP leaning precincts were able to go in and quickly vote with little wait time.

It was time to reappoint this month. The parties get to nominate three candidates, but judges usually take the first choice of the party. In Fairfax -- judges have never bypassed the top choice of a party in the last 50 years (which is as far back as I could find people that remembered). Also the judges making the decision were all selected for the bench by Republicans in the General Assembly. 

So what did these GOP judges decide to do?  In an unprecedented move in Fairfax County -- judges for the first time in modern history have rejected the top choice of a political party for one of these positions. Instead, GOP lawyer Brian Schoeneman was appointed to the Board. 

The GOP is already having a meltdown over this decision from the judges they appointed. Get out the popcorn, this is going to be fun to watch.

These judges deserve a lot of credit for standing up for voters and not the political party that put them on the bench.

UPDATE: In case it wasn't clear above -- Hans Von Spakovsky was the GOP's top choice who was rejected.

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Gerrymandering-- Both Sides Do It... True But Only One Side Does It Enough To Base Its Entire Future On

Earlier today we took a look at some pretty good news from North Carolina which, admittedly, has been pretty depressing lately for progressives. Though not as depressing as it once was. Sunday, David Frum, in his review of Robert Norrell's biography of Booker T. Washington, Up From History, reminded us how racist sociopath Alfred Waddell became mayor of Wilmington back when the Democrats were the party of bigotry and racism and the Republicans were still vaguely anti-racist.

Alfred Waddell, an out-of-favor politician remaking himself as a white-nationalist leader, became the most vitriolic nativist firebrand. 'You are Anglo-Saxons,' Waddell told a crowd. 'Go to the polls tomorrow, and if you find the negro out voting tell him to leave the polls, and if he refuses, kill him, shoot him down in his tracks.' In early November tens of thousands of black men were too frightened to vote, and the Democrats regained control of North Carolina. Two days after the election, Waddell led a mob in destroying [Wilmington's leading black newspaper]. They gathered the resignation of all Republican city officials at gunpoint, and Waddell was named mayor.

Waddell's mob swelled to 2,000 men, including whites from all classes and vocations. When a shot hit one of them, the mob raged through Wilmington, with whites hunting down blacks in running gun battles through the city streets. The gunfire alerted militias and vigilante groups from outside the city to join the attack. Literally thousands of blacks ran for their lives. As many as 300 African Americans may have been killed. Eyewitnesses later recounted seeing wagon carts piled high with dead black bodies being removed from the city… The riot depopulated Wilmington of its large black majority.

That was in the late 1800s, when the Southern racists were busy undoing the advances African-Americans had made right after the Civil War. As Frum points out, "The 1890s were the decade in which Jim Crow had been formalized; in the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court rejected a constitutional challenge to the segregation of public conveyances and inscribed the phrase 'separate but equal' into American law... Since the withdrawal of federal troops in the 1870s, these [former Confederate] states had asserted an increasingly extreme white domination over the former slaves. State governments had deprived freed blacks of the right to vote and sit on juries. They had sliced contributions to black education to pitiful fractions of the small enough investment in the education of white children. They had adopted increasingly formalized rules of racial subordination in public places. This system of domination was enforced by violence and the threat of violence. The violence was usually informal-- 'racial terrorism' as Robert Norrell aptly calls it-- but not always. Local authorities actively connived in it. State governments accepted it. And while the federal government might occasional issue some deploring statement, it seldom if ever did anything to prevent the violence."

Today, the political racism of conservatives is manifest differently-- although with similar results. Despicable and unevolved self-serving rightists still get elected to office by screaming "Nigger" and dividing working people so they'll vote against their own families well-being. No matter how many times you've watched this, you haven't watched it frequently enough:



In Sunday's NY Times, Sam Wang explained how the Republican Party has made racism work for itself politically... and not just in the Old slave states it now completely dominates.

Having the first modern democracy comes with bugs. Normally we would expect more seats in Congress to go to the political party that receives more votes, but the last election confounded expectations. Democrats received 1.4 million more votes for the House of Representatives, yet Republicans won control of the House by a 234 to 201 margin.

...Through artful drawing of district boundaries, it is possible to put large groups of voters on the losing side of every election. The Republican State Leadership Committee, a Washington-based political group dedicated to electing state officeholders, recently issued a progress report on Redmap, its multiyear plan to influence redistricting. The $30 million strategy consists of two steps for tilting the playing field: take over state legislatures before the decennial Census, then redraw state and Congressional districts to lock in partisan advantages. The plan was highly successful.

...In North Carolina, where the two-party House vote was 51 percent Democratic, 49 percent Republican, the average simulated delegation was seven Democrats and six Republicans. The actual outcome? Four Democrats, nine Republicans-- a split that occurred in less than 1 percent of simulations. If districts were drawn fairly, this lopsided discrepancy would hardly ever occur.

Confounding conventional wisdom, partisan redistricting is not symmetrical between the political parties. By my seat-discrepancy criterion, 10 states are out of whack: the five I have mentioned [Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin], plus Virginia, Ohio, Florida, Illinois and Texas. Arizona was redistricted by an independent commission, Texas was a combination of Republican and federal court efforts, and Illinois was controlled by Democrats. Republicans designed the other seven maps. Both sides may do it, but one side does it more often.

...Gerrymandering is a major form of disenfranchisement. In the seven states where Republicans redrew the districts, 16.7 million votes were cast for Republicans and 16.4 million votes were cast for Democrats. This elected 73 Republicans and 34 Democrats. Given the average percentage of the vote it takes to elect representatives elsewhere in the country, that combination would normally require only 14.7 million Democratic votes. Or put another way, 1.7 million votes (16.4 minus 14.7) were effectively packed into Democratic districts and wasted.

...Some legislators have flirted with the idea of gerrymandering the presidency itself under the guise of Electoral College reform. In one short-lived plan, Virginia State Senator Charles Carrico sponsored legislation to allocate electoral votes by Congressional district. In contrast to the current winner-take-all system, which usually elects the popular vote winner, Mr. Carrico’s proposal applied nationwide would have elected Mitt Romney, despite the fact that he won five million fewer votes than Mr. Obama. This is basically an admission of defeat by Republicans in swing states. Mr. Carrico’s constituents might well ask whether these changes serve their interests or those of the Republican National Committee.

To preserve majority rule and minority representation, redistricting must be brought into fairer balance. I propose two plans. First, let’s establish nonpartisan redistricting commissions in all 50 states. In Ohio, one such ballot measure failed in November, in part because of a poorly financed campaign. Maybe those who prodded voters to turn out could support future initiatives.

Second, we need to adopt a statistically robust judicial standard for partisan gerrymandering. In the Supreme Court’s Vieth v. Jubelirer case, in 2004, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy voted against intervention in chicanery in Pennsylvania, but left the door open for future remedies elsewhere if a clear standard could be established.

The great gerrymander of 2012 came 200 years after the first use of this curious word, which comes from the salamander-shaped districts signed into law by Governor Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts. Gov. Gerry’s party engineered its electoral coup using paper maps and ink. But the advent of inexpensive computing and free software has placed the tools for fighting politicians who draw absurd districts into the hands of citizens like you and me.

Politicians, especially Republicans facing demographic and ideological changes in the electorate, use redistricting to cling to power. It’s up to us to take control of the process, slay the gerrymander, and put the people back in charge of what is, after all, our House.