GOP 101-- Stealing Elections

Donald And The Purple Crayon

Although decline-to-state voters (independents) now out-number Republicans in California, the party isn't dead in the state. Republicans no longer win any statewide races-- and even a weak candidate like Hillary beat Trump in the state 8,753,788 (61.73%) to 4,483,810 (31.62%). 2020 looks like a year in which Trump won't get out of the 20s. And last year the GOP lost 7 of it's remaining congressional seats. Now 5 more Republican seats are on the line, which would leave the party with just 2 (out of 53). The state Senate consists of 29 Democrats and 11 Republicans and the Assembly has 61 Democrats and just 18 Republicans. Pretty sad! That anti-Latino/anti-immigrants jihad worked out badly for them.

Over the weekend a scraggly group of wealthy Republicans descended on the Renaissance Indian Wells Resort and Spa for the state party convention. The top speakers were Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale, defeated Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and laughing stock Energy Secretary Rick Perry.

"Attendees," reported Politico, "could choose from no fewer than 35 different sessions on subjects ranging from 'Engaging Hispanic Communities' to 'Surviving on Liberal College Campuses,' with at least five 'Trump Victory Leadership Initiative' classes designed to teach field organizing, volunteer recruitment, the mechanics of 'ballot harvesting,' and introduce new tools for voter registration." Parscale-- apparently practicing for a career in stand up comedy-- told the crowd that "the Trumps will be a dynasty that lasts for decades." Like the thousand year Reich!

But going back to ballot harvesting-- which is what got them in trouble in North Carolina-- and "new tools for voter registration," that's all short hand among Republicans for voter suppression. And as Jennifer Cohn explained in an essay she wrote for Medium yesterday, America’s Electronic Voting System is Corrupted to the Core. California Republicans were studying the dark underbelly of America’s staggeringly insecure voting system because they need to understand it to know how to tamper with it. Cohn, of course, had a different perspective: "Without knowledge of the facts, the American public is at grave risk of being scammed by pretend fixes to a system that is corrupted to the core."

Just two vendors-- Election Systems & Software, LLC (ES&S) and Dominion Voting-- account for eighty percent of US election equipment. Thus, corrupt insiders or foreign hackers could wreak havoc on elections throughout the United States by infiltrating either of these vendors.

ES&S and Dominion are both owned by private equity, which means we don’t know who funds and controls them. And what little we do know is concerning.

ES&S, which by itself accounts for 44 percent of US election equipment, received its initial financing from the families of Nelson Bunker Hunt and Howard Ahmanson, Jr., right-wing billionaires who also contributed substantially to the Chalcedon Foundation, Christian Reconstruction’s main think tank.

Hunt and Ahmanson were also prominent early members of the Council for National Policy, a networking group for the Religious Right and billionaires whose recent members have included Kelly Anne Conway, Steve Bannon, Mike Pence, Richard DeVos, Wayne LaPierre of the NRA, Robert and Rebekka Mercer, and Bob Dallas, a convicted embezzler whose nonprofits have been closely linked to massive voter data leaks.

In 2000, ES&S’s founder, Bob Urosevich, was appointed President and Chief Operating Officer of another mega-vendor, Global Election Systems, which later changed its name to Diebold and was acquired by ES&S in 2009. Urosevich’s brother remained at ES&S the whole time as a Senior VP.

It was a Global/Diebold voting machine that “lost” 16,000 Gore votes in the 2000 presidential election in which George W. Bush was declared victorious over Al Gore by just 537 votes in Florida. The “Volusia error” was discovered only because an alert poll worker happened to notice Gore’s total dropping which should never happen--  absent fraud or error. It is unknown whether other machines experienced similar issues because Bush--  with an assist from future Supreme Court Justices Brett Kavanaugh and John Roberts--  succeeded in stopping the recount.

Global’s largest shareholder & Senior Vice President was Jeffrey Dean, a convicted embezzler who programmed voting machines for the company. According to the Guardian, Dean programmed ⅓ of the machines in 37 states used in the 2004 presidential election.

In August 2004, the Department of Homeland Security issued a Cyber Security Bulletin regarding Diebold’s “GEMS” central tabulator, stating that “a vulnerability exists due to an undocumented backdoor account, which could [allow] a local or remote authenticated user [to] modify votes.”

The control cards that transfer the vote totals from the precincts to the central tabulators are another potential target for bad actors. From 2000 through at least 2017, ES&S got its control cards from a company called Vikant whose owner refused to tell an investigative reporter where the cards were made.

Meanwhile, as reported in Bloomberg and Salon and highlighted during a recent election-security panel by SMARTelections.us, ES&S (Diebold) voting machines in both Tennessee and Georgia seem to be “losing” large numbers of votes from predominantly black neighborhoods. It was concerned citizens, rather than election officials or campaigns, who discovered these problems by reviewing precinct totals (as shown on precinct poll tapes).

...Dominion was a Canadian company that became a major player in US elections when the Department of Justice forced ES&S to sell some of Diebold’s assets because the combined ES&S/Diebold company had accounted for a whopping 70 percent of US election equipment.

It was Dominion that rose from obscurity to buy those Diebold assets in 2010. We don’t know if Dominion is related to ES&S, or if it’s a legitimate competitor because it is also owned by private equity.

What we do know is that Dominion does its programming in Serbia. And a former executive of GTech/IGT-- an international gaming company and former Paul Manafort client-- joined Dominion as a Senior Vice President in June 2016.

Another former executive of GTech/IGT, Donald Sweitzer, sits on the Board of the International Foundation for Electoral Systems with Ken Blackwell (infamous former Ohio Secretary of State) and Tad DeVine (Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign advisor).

These connections are concerning because, among other reasons, DeVine worked with Paul Manafort and Rick Gates (Manafort’s partner) as recently as 2014 to promote Vladimir Putin’s candidate and other interests in Ukraine and also advised the 2014 campaign of pro-Putin Aleksandar Vučić in Serbia.

As for Blackwell, he infamously hired Mike Connell (owner of GovTech and New Media Communications) and Jeff Averbeck (owner of Smartech and Airnet)-- who were partners of Manafort’s lobbying/PR company called 3eDC-- to re-route Ohio’s 2004 presidential election results through a backup server in Tennessee on election night. George W. Bush was declared the victor of that election, defying the exit polls, which Blackwell had attempted to block in Ohio.

John Kerry has since said that his own campaign suspected electronic vote tally manipulation during the 2004 election in Ohio, but decided against “dividing the country” with a court challenge.

(It was election attorney and journalist Bob Fitrakis of the Columbus Free Press in Ohio that made the connection between Connel/Averbeck and Manafort.)

In 2006, Ohio had a new Secretary of State, Jennifer Brunner (D), who attempted to clean up after Blackwell by, among other things, firing members of a county election board (after the criminal convictions of two members for rigging the 2004 Ohio recount), commissioning a study that revealed alarming ES&S vulnerabilities, and suing Diebold for damages.

But by 2012, Ohio’s Secretary of State was John Husted (R), who was caught allowing ES&S to install uncertified software patches throughout Ohio just before the election. Fitrakis, who made this alarming discovery as well, sued to compel Husted to remove the patches. Although the court dismissed the case as premature (no damages), she said that she would be “happy” to consider ordering a recount after the election. Fitrakis apparently deemed this unnecessary when Barack Obama won re-election, triggering the infamous on air melt down of political consultant Karl Rove (George W. Bush’s former senior advisor) when Ohio didn’t go as Rove had expected.

Husted, however, was undeterred in his quest to undermine the integrity of Ohio’s elections. In 2016, citizen advocates discovered that he had allowed election officials throughout Ohio to disable voting machines’ “ballot image” audit functions. Litigation again ensued, and the court again ruled in Husted’s favor. Trump proceeded to defy the exit polls and win the state in 2016.

Ohio’s current Secretary of State is Frank LaRose who chose Ken Blackwell to lead his transition team and is in the midst of purging more than 200,000 supposedly “inactive” voters from the state’s voter rolls despite numerous concerns, including the recent discovery that 1600 active voters were mistakenly included on the purge list. The vendor responsible for this “mistake”? ES&S.

The National Election Defense Coalition, Public Citizen, OSET, the NAACP, the League of Women Voters and other election-integrity groups have asked the House Administration Committee, which is chaired by Representative Zoe Lofgren, to conduct a hearing and call the vendors to provide testimony, presumably about ownership and other security concerns. But it is not at all clear that the Committee will oblige.

Even if it does subpoena the vendors, it is unclear how deep the Democratic House majority will be willing to dig. The House majority leader, Steny Hoyer (D), co-wrote the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA), which allocated billions of dollars for new voting machines without requiring a paper trail. Not only that, Hoyer joined with Mitch McConnell and Bob Ney-- who later went to prison for accepting bribes from Diebold lobbyist Jack Abramoff-- to defeat legislation that would have included such a requirement. Hoyer also sits on the International Foundation for Electoral Systems with Dan Sweitzer, Tad DeVine, and Ken Blackwell.

Voting machine vendors have an alarming history of deception. In July 2018, cybersecurity journalist Kim Zetter reported that, despite ES&S’s prior denials, ES&S’s election-management system (EMS) computers were sold with remote access software between 2000 and 2006. ES&S won’t say where it installed the remote access software that it lied about, but claims it’s been removed. According to Zetter’s article, Diebold’s EMS computers were sold with remote access software as well, and Dominion refused to comment.

The installation of remote access software in EMS computers is a big deal because these are centralized county or state computers used to program all voting machines in the county or state. According to Zetter’s reporting, some of these computers also include the central tabulators that aggregate all precinct totals.

But the vendor lies don’t end there. On August 8, 2019, Zetter further reported that ES&S’s EMS computers also connect to the internet, something else that ES&S had said was not the case but that leading election-security experts had long suspected.

Meanwhile, ES&S installed wireless modems in ballot scanners in Florida, Wisconsin, and Illinois starting in about 2015. Although some election officials claimed that these modems do not connect to the internet, this too was a lie, as further reported by Zetter.

In terms of solutions, experts say that the only way to know for sure if electronic vote totals have been altered is to compare a hand tally of the paper ballots to the electronic totals.

But over the past several years vendors, have changed the meaning of “paper ballot” to include not only unhackable hand marked paper ballots, but also hackable machine-marked summary cards with barcodes from expensive new electronic ballot marking devices (BMDs). The barcode, which voters can’t read, is the only part of the printout counted as your vote.

Although the printouts also include a human readable summary, the BMDs can be hacked to change or omit the selections on the summary.

We’ve seen the problems with vote-flipping touch screen voting machines in Mississippi, Georgia, and Texas. The situation will be no better if voters notice vote flipping or deletions on the paper printouts marked by these new BMDs. As before, the concern will not be the voters who notice and correct problems, but rather those who don’t.

This is extremely problematic because any manual audit or recount based on a corrupted paper trail will produce a corrupted result. Thus, according to leading election-security experts, BMDs cannot assure the will of the voters and should be purchased only for those voters who are unable to hand mark their ballots.

The critical takeaway here is that, if election officials or lawmakers don’t mention the “hand marked” prefix, they are probably about to scam the public with machine-marked summary cards with barcodes from pricey and insecure BMDs.

Despite objections from leading election-security experts and advocates, jurisdictions throughout the United States are flocking to these new barcode BMDs and purchasing them for use by all voters. It appears that corruption is enabling and fueling many of these decisions. Here are some indicators of this corruption:

• ES&S has donated $30,000 to the Republican State Leadership Committee-- which houses the Republican Secretary of State’s Association-- since 2013.
• Both ES&S and Dominion have made donations to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s campaign. He, in turn, is blocking all federal election-security legislation, including the SAFE Act, which would ban barcode BMDs altogether.
• South Carolina’s top election official sat on voting machine vendor ES&S’s secret advisory board & received trips, lodging, & dining worth $20,000 from ES&S. The entire state recently signed a $51 million contract for ES&S’s ExpressVote barcode BMDs.
• New York City’s top election official also sat on ES&S’s secret gift-giving advisory board and is pushing the City to buy ES&S’s ExpressVote XL barcode hybrid BMDs for early voting.
• The Pennsylvania Auditor General reported earlier this year that election officials in at least 18 Pennsylvania counties have accepted gifts from voting machine vendors.
• ES&S used lobbyists to make donations to the two decision markers in Philadelphia who ignored leading experts and election-security advocates by choosing ES&S’s risky barcode “hybrid” BMDs, rather than hand marked paper ballots.
• Dallas County, Texas rejected unhackable hand marked paper ballots in favor of hackable machine-marked printouts with barcodes from ES&S’s ExpressVote machines after the county’s election administrator attended a lavish ES&S boondoggle in Las Vegas.
• Voting machine vendor ES&S’s agent in North Carolina, Printelect, has also sweetened the pot with donations to the governor of North Carolina and many others in the state. A few weeks ago, the North Carolina Board of Elections ignored leading experts and election-security advocates by certifying the ExpressVote barcode BMD system.

The only election-security bills in the Senate with any traction are the Secure Elections Act (SEA) and the SAFE Act. The SAFE Act would ban barcode BMDs, require that jurisdictions give voters the option to vote with hand marked paper ballots, and require robust manual audits. The SEA would do none of these things. It would provide a false sense of security.

But the SEA is the only bill with bipartisan support thus far. Although it failed in the senate’s last session, Republicans for the Rule of Law have been promoting it, and Senator Lankford (R) said in August that it will be re-introduced and that Mitch McConnell is open to it.

Voters should demand, at a minimum, that lawmakers amend the Secure Elections Act to ban barcode BMDs and to require that all voters have the option to use hand marked paper ballots at the polling place.

In 2017, a U.S. Air Force veteran and NSA contractor named Reality Winner leaked a classified report, which showed that Russia had successfully penetrated three election-service providers, one of which was VR Systems, which services eight states. The next day, the Election Assistance Commission, which is responsible for certifying voting equipment, tweeted out election-security guidance and recommendations, using the #RealityWinner hashtag. Key state election officials told the media that they had been unaware of Russian hacking before Reality Winner leaked the report.

The leaked report also seems to have been the catalyst for election officials in North Carolina to finally submit its VR Systems electronic poll books, which had failed spectacularly in 2016 in Durham County, to the Department of Homeland Security for forensic analysis.

But the US government opposes such transparency. It imprisoned Reality Winner for five years due to the leak and won’t disclose the names of the other two vendors that were breached by Russia. Nor will it tell the public the name of the second Florida county whose voter registration system is confirmed to have been penetrated by Russia. It is unclear whether it will tell the public the result of its forensic analysis of North Carolina’s electronic poll books.

As noted by journalist Sue Halpern in an election-security piece for the New Yorker, there is indeed a school of thought that telling the public the truth about hacking and election-system vulnerabilities will depress voter turnout. But in a Harris poll conducted in 2018, voters said they were more likely to vote due to concerns about hacking. Thus, the apparent rationale for keeping the public in the dark on these vital issues may be a fallacy.

Not only that, this lack of transparency may actually hinder meaningful change by dampening the outrage that apparently is needed to overcome the corruption plaguing the system.

Thus, in addition to demanding that election-security legislation prioritize hand marked paper ballots and robust manual audits (and ban barcode voting), voters should insist that Representative Zoe Lofgren and other members of the House subpoena the vendors to testify under oath about ownership, past security lapses, and where and when they have installed remote access software and wireless modems.

Sure-- Trump "Misspoke" And The Russians Didn't Hack The Voting Machines

In 75 years the U.S. government will issue the real report about the Russian hacking that put Donald Trump in the White House-- and Facebook was just a small part of it. Voting machines weren't. No, they were a big part of it, almost all of it-- in key precincts in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, perhaps Florida, Ohio and Iowa as well. So let's re-assemble in 2091 and go through the nuts and bolts of the stolen election no government could ever release today without completely undermining our democracy-- a Putin goal-- and which a new Ipsos poll shows just half Americans (51%) believe is based on fair elections. They sense something is rotten in the state of Denmark Waukesha, but they don't know what it is.

I was telling this to a friend yesterday and he insisted that voting machines can't be hacked. He's a smart guy, a school teacher who pays attention and follows the news closely. So how come he didn't know? Do you know? Voting machines are very hackable. People-- including really smart people-- don't understand that so-called voting machines "not connected to the internet" can certainly be hacked-- and have been, over and over again.

It's been written about many times but never enough times, because people seem impervious to it. This week, Kim Zetter explained it for Motherboard readers. "Remote-access software and modems on election equipment," wrote Letter, "'is the worst decision for security short of leaving ballot boxes on a Moscow street corner.'" Election Systems and Software, the nation's top voting machine maker admitted in a letter to Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) that "the company installed remote-access software on election-management systems it sold over a period of six years, raising questions about the security of those systems and the integrity of elections that were conducted with them." Previously ES&S had vigorously denied they had done that. This was the old line-- as told to the NY Times in February: "None of the employees… including long-tenured employees, has any knowledge that our voting systems have ever been sold with remote-access software."

ES&S did not respond on Monday to questions from Motherboard, and it’s not clear why the company changed its response between February and April. Lawmakers, however, have subpoena powers that can compel a company to hand over documents or provide sworn testimony on a matter lawmakers are investigating, and a statement made to lawmakers that is later proven false can have greater consequence for a company than one made to reporters.

Election-management systems are not the voting terminals that voters use to cast their ballots, but are just as critical: they sit in county election offices and contain software that in some counties is used to program all the voting machines used in the county; the systems also tabulate final results aggregated from voting machines.

If I were a GRU officer with an unlimited budget and an order to make sure Donald Trump wins the election, election-management systems, are exactly what I would hack into-- especially in key flippable counties in states like... oh, let's say Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, perhaps Florida, Ohio and Iowa.

Software like pcAnywhere is used by system administrators to access and control systems from a remote location to conduct maintenance or upgrade or alter software. But election-management systems and voting machines are supposed to be air-gapped for security reasons—that is, disconnected from the internet and from any other systems that are connected to the internet. ES&S customers who had pcAnywhere installed also had modems on their election-management systems so ES&S technicians could dial into the systems and use the software to troubleshoot, thereby creating a potential port of entry for hackers as well.

In May 2006 in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, ES&S technicians used the pcAnywhere software installed on that county's election-management system for hours trying to reconcile vote discrepancies in a local election, according to a report filed at the time. And in a contract with Michigan, which covered 2006 to 2009, ES&S discussed its use of pcAnywhere and modems for this purpose.

"In some cases, the Technical Support representative accesses the customer’s system through PCAnywhere—off-the-shelf software which allows immediate access to the customer’s data and network system from a remote location—to gain insight into the issue and offer precise solutions," ES&S wrote in a June 2007 addendum to the contract. "ES&S technicians can use PCAnywhere to view a client computer, assess the exact situation that caused a software issue and to view data files."

Motherboard asked a Michigan spokesman if any officials in his state ever installed the pcAnywhere software that ES&S recommended they install, but got no response.

The presence of such software makes a system more vulnerable to attack from hackers, especially if the remote-access software itself contains security vulnerabilities. If an attacker can gain remote access to an election-management system through the modem and take control of it using the pcAnywhere software installed on it, he can introduce malicious code that gets passed to voting machines to disrupt an election or alter results.

Wyden told Motherboard that installing remote-access software and modems on election equipment “is the worst decision for security short of leaving ballot boxes on a Moscow street corner.”

In 2006, the same period when ES&S says it was still installing pcAnywhere on election systems, hackers stole the source code for the pcAnyhere software, though the public didn’t learn of this until years later in 2012 when a hacker posted some of the source code online, forcing Symantec, the distributor of pcAnywhere, to admit that it had been stolen years earlier. Source code is invaluable to hackers because it allows them to examine the code to find security flaws they can exploit. When Symantec admitted to the theft in 2012, it took the unprecedented step of warning users to disable or uninstall the software until it could make sure that any security flaws in the software had been patched.

Around this same time, security researchers discovered a critical vulnerability in pcAnywhere that would allow an attacker to seize control of a system that had the software installed on it, without needing to authenticate themselves to the system with a password. And other researchers with the security firm Rapid7 scanned the internet for any computers that were online and had pcAnywhere installed on them and found nearly 150,000 were configured in a way that would allow direct access to them.

It’s not clear if election officials who had pcAnywhere installed on their systems, ever patched this and other security flaws that were in the software.

“[I]t's very unlikely that jurisdictions that had to use this software … updated it very often,” says Joseph Lorenzo Hall, chief technologist for the Center for Democracy and Technology, “meaning it's likely that a non-trivial number of them were exposed to some of the flaws found both in terms of configuration ... but also flaws that were found when the source code to that software was stolen in 2006.”

ES&S said in its letter to Wyden that the modems it installed on its election-management systems for use with pcAnywhere were configured only to dial out, not receive calls, so that only election officials could initiate connections with ES&S. But when Wyden's office asked in a letter to ES&S in March what settings were used to secure the communications, whether the system used hard-coded or default passwords and whether ES&S or anyone else had conducted a security audit around the use of pcAnywhere to ensure that the communication was done in a secure manner, the company did not provide responses to any of these questions.

Even if ES&S and its customers configured their remote connections to ES&S in a secure manner, the recent US indictments against Russian state hackers who tried to interfere in the 2016 presidential elections, show that they targeted companies in the US that make software for the administration of elections. An attacker would only have had to hack ES&S and then use its network to slip into a county's election-management system when the two systems made a remote connection.

In its letter to Wyden, ES&S defended its installation of pcAnywhere, saying that during the time it installed the software on customer machines prior to 2006, this was "considered an accepted practice by numerous technology companies, including other voting system manufacturers."

Motherboard contacted two of the top vendors-- Hart InterCivic and Dominion—to verify this, but neither responded. However, Douglas Jones, professor of computer science at the University of Iowa and a longtime expert on voting machines confirmed that other companies did routinely install remote-access software during this period.

“Certainly, [Diebold Election Systems] did the same, and I'd assume the others did too,” he told Motherboard. “In the case of [Diebold], many of their contracts with customers included the requirement of a remote-login port allowing [the company] to have remote access to the customer system in order to allow customer support.”

He notes that election officials who purchased the systems likely were not aware of the potential risks they were taking in allowing this and didn’t understand the threat landscape to make intelligent decisions about installing such software.

All of this raises questions about how many counties across the US had remote-access software installed-- in addition to ES&S customers-- and whether intruders had ever leveraged it to subvert elections.

Although Wyden's office asked ES&S to identify which of its customers were sold systems with pcAnywhere installed, the company did not respond. ES&S would only say that it had confirmed with customers who had the software installed that they "no longer have this application installed."

The company didn't respond to questions from Motherboard asking when these customers removed the software-- whether ES&S had instructed them to do so back in 2007 when the company says it stopped installing the software on new systems it sold or whether it had only recently told customers to remove it following concerns raised in the 2016 presidential elections that Russian hackers were targeting election networks in the US. As late as 2011 pcAnywhere was still being used on at least one ES&S customer's election-management system in Venango County, Pennsylvania.

ES&S wrote in its letter to Wyden that it would be willing to meet privately in his office to discuss election security. But when the company was asked to attend a hearing on election security last week before the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration, ES&S declined to send anyone to answer Senate questions.

Like I said... meet you in 75 years when they open the files. Drinks are on me.

Israel Is Right To Distrust Chuck Hagel-- But For Entirely Different Reasons

Unless AIPAC can force Obama to change his mind-- or talk enough of the senators they control into defeating the nomination-- it looks like Chuck Hagel will be the next Secretary of Defense. Let's leave his long record of ugly homophobia out of the discussion for now, although "he consistently voted against legislation that would have expanded hate-crime protections to LGBT Americans [and], according to the Human Rights Campaign Congressional Scorecard, he earned a 0 percent for the 107th, 108th and 109th sessions of Congress."

Many Democrats like him because he was the first Republican to oppose John Bolton’s nomination to be Bush's UN ambassador, because he voted with the Democrats on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence to begin an investigation into the pre-Iraq war intelligence and because he came out against Bush's unprovoked attack on Iraq when few other Republicans dared. In 2008, he opposed his old colleague, John McCain and endorsed Obama for president. Fine, fine... but there's something else to consider that has long been swept under the rug, especially Inside the Beltway-- how Hagel's electronic theft of his Senate election set the stage for Bush stealing the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. Early in 2003, Thom Hartmann helped expose how Hagel cheated to win his reelection 2 months earlier.

Maybe Nebraska Republican Chuck Hagel honestly won two US Senate elections. Maybe it's true that the citizens of Georgia simply decided that incumbent Democratic Senator Max Cleland, a wildly popular war veteran who lost three limbs in Vietnam, was, as his successful Republican challenger suggested in his campaign ads, too unpatriotic to remain in the Senate. Maybe George W. Bush, Alabama's new Republican governor Bob Riley, and a small but congressionally decisive handful of other long-shot Republican candidates really did win those states where conventional wisdom and straw polls showed them losing in the last few election cycles.

Perhaps, after a half-century of fine-tuning exit polling to such a science that it's now sometimes used to verify how clean elections are in Third World countries, it really did suddenly become inaccurate in the United States in the past six years and just won't work here anymore. Perhaps it's just a coincidence that the sudden rise of inaccurate exit polls happened around the same time corporate-programmed, computer-controlled, modem-capable voting machines began recording and tabulating ballots.

But if any of this is true, there's not much of a paper trail from the voters' hand to prove it.

You'd think in an open democracy that the government-- answerable to all its citizens rather than a handful of corporate officers and stockholders-- would program, repair, and control the voting machines. You'd think the computers that handle our cherished ballots would be open and their software and programming available for public scrutiny. You'd think there would be a paper trail of the vote, which could be followed and audited if a there was evidence of voting fraud or if exit polls disagreed with computerized vote counts.

You'd be wrong.

The respected Washington, DC publication The Hill has confirmed that former conservative radio talk-show host and now Republican U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel was the head of, and continues to own part interest in, the company that owns the company that installed, programmed, and largely ran the voting machines that were used by most of the citizens of Nebraska.

Back when Hagel first ran there for the U.S. Senate in 1996, his company's computer-controlled voting machines showed he'd won stunning upsets in both the primaries and the general election. The Washington Post (1/13/1997) said Hagel's "Senate victory against an incumbent Democratic governor was the major Republican upset in the November election." According to Bev Harris of www.blackboxvoting.org, Hagel won virtually every demographic group, including many largely Black communities that had never before voted Republican. Hagel was the first Republican in 24 years to win a Senate seat in Nebraska.

Six years later Hagel ran again, this time against Democrat Charlie Matulka in 2002, and won in a landslide. As his website says, Hagel "was re-elected to his second term in the United States Senate on November 5, 2002 with 83% of the vote. That represents the biggest political victory in the history of Nebraska."

What Hagel's website fails to disclose is that about 80 percent of those votes were counted by computer-controlled voting machines put in place by the company affiliated with Hagel. Built by that company. Programmed by that company.

"This is a big story, bigger than Watergate ever was," said Hagel's Democratic opponent in the 2002 Senate race, Charlie Matulka. "They say Hagel shocked the world, but he didn't shock me."

Is Matulka the sore loser the Hagel campaign paints him as, or is he democracy's proverbial canary in the mineshaft?

..."The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which all other rights are protected," wrote Thomas Paine over 200 years ago. "To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery."

That slavery, according to Hagel's last opponent Charlie Matulka, is at our doorstep.

"They can take over our country without firing a shot," Matulka said, "just by taking over our election systems."

Taking over our election systems? Is that really possible in the USA?

Bev Harris of www.talion.com and www.blackboxvoting.org has looked into the situation in depth and thinks Matulka may be on to something. The company tied to Hagel even threatened her with legal action when she went public about his company having built the machines that counted his landslide votes. (Her response was to put the law firm's threat letter on her website and send a press release to 4000 editors, inviting them to check it out.

"I suspect they're getting ready to do this all across all the states," Matulka said in a January 30, 2003 interview. "God help us if Bush gets his touch screens all across the country," he added, "because they leave no paper trail. These corporations are taking over America, and they just about have control of our voting machines."

...Many citizens believe, however, that turning the programming and maintenance of voting over to private, for-profit corporations, answerable only to their owners, officers, and stockholders, puts democracy itself at peril.

And, argues Charlie Matulka, for a former officer of one of those corporations to then place himself into an election without disclosing such an apparent conflict of interest is to create a parody of democracy.

Perhaps Matulka's been reading too many conspiracy theory tracts. Or maybe he's on to something. We won't know until a truly independent government agency looks into the matter.

When Bev Harris and The Hill's Alexander Bolton pressed the Chief Counsel and Director of the Senate Ethics Committee, the man responsible for ensuring that FEC disclosures are complete, asking him why he'd not questioned Hagel's 1995, 1996, and 2001 failures to disclose the details of his ownership in the company that owned the voting machine company when he ran for the Senate, the Director reportedly met with Hagel's office on Friday, January 25, 2003 and Monday, January 27, 2003. After the second meeting, on the afternoon of January 27th, the Director of the Senate Ethics Committee resigned his job.

Meanwhile, back in Nebraska, Charlie Matulka had requested a hand count of the vote in the election he lost to Hagel. He just learned his request was denied because, he said, Nebraska has a just-passed law that prohibits government-employee election workers from looking at the ballots, even in a recount. The only machines permitted to count votes in Nebraska, he said, are those made and programmed by the corporation formerly run by Hagel.

Matulka shared his news with me, then sighed loud and long on the phone, as if he were watching his children's future evaporate.

"If you want to win the election," he finally said, "just control the machines."

Well, at least he didn't piss off the yentas on the ridiculous Sunday morning TV gab-fests. This is as good a time as any to bring up Barney Frank's new thought piece on the new mandate for the Defense Department, in which he points out that progressives need to stay strong on cutting back on military spending. Remember, Barney was one of the 22 in the group of bipartisan congressmembers who signed a letter this week demanding the military budget be "on the table" in the Grand Bargain deficit reduction negotiations.

There were so many encouraging signs for liberals in the election results this year that one of the most significant has been overlooked. For the first time in my memory, a Democratic candidate for President argued for less military spending against a Republican candidate who called for great increases-- and the Democrat won. George McGovern was the last Democratic candidate to talk about spending less on the military. Subsequently, every Democratic presidential candidate was told that he had better look sufficiently tough on national security because a perception that Democrats were too weak vis-à-vis the Soviet Union was a major point of vulnerability. That is why Michael Dukakis, a public official with an extremely distinguished record, and a man of great dignity and integrity, staged an ill-conceived photo-op of himself wearing a helmet and riding in a tank, which became a negative factor in his campaign.

...In the past few years, with President Obama having completed the withdrawal from Iraq, with the killing of Osama bin Laden, and with the announcement of a plan to withdraw from Afghanistan in 2014 (too late, but an improvement over the open-ended commitment Obama inherited), it has become possible to get some political traction for our efforts to cut military spending. Because so much of that spending stems from overreach advocated by those who believe that America should be the enforcer of order everywhere in the world-- and because we subsidize our wealthy European and Asian allies by providing a defense for them so they need not spend much on their own-- there has been increasing conservative support for reining in the military budget. Ron Paul, who goes far beyond most liberals in his eagerness to impose severe military cuts, was a popular figure with a significant base of GOP support not despite taking this position but in part because of it.

Earlier this year, for the first time that I can recall, a majority of the House of Representatives voted to reduce the military appropriation recommended by the House Appropriations Committee. The cut was only $1.1 billion-- less than it should have been-- but it was a decision that froze spending at the previous year’s level, and it passed by a vote of 247-167, with the support of both an overwhelming majority of Democrats (158-21) and a significant minority of Republicans (89-146).

Deficit reduction over the long term must include significant reductions in military spending along with tax increases on the very wealthy if we are to avoid devastating virtually everything we do to promote the quality of life at home. A realistic reassessment of our true national security needs would mean a military budget significantly lower not only than the one President Obama inherited, but that which he now proposes. That is, by next year, we no longer should be forced to spend additional funds-- close to $200 billion a year at their peak-- in Afghanistan and Iraq. Additionally, we can reduce the base budget by approximately $1 trillion over a ten-year period (this includes the $487 billion reduction that President Obama proposed in early 2012) while maintaining more than enough military strength to fully protect our security and those of our allies that genuinely need help because they are too poor and weak in the face of powerful enemies. (Should the nation decide in a democratic way to go to war again, that would require an increase in the military budget, and I would hope, in taxation to pay for it.)

Getting the military budget down to that level-- which would mean a reduction of about $250 billion from what it was in the first year of the Obama Administration-- faced two obstacles at the beginning of this past year. First was the traditional political concern that the Republican presidential candidate would have an advantage over the Democrat on the question of who can better protect our national security. Fortunately, Obama understood that things have changed, and that the American people are ready for a reduction in military spending. Governor Romney, operating in the traditional conservative mode, missed it. One of the most important signs that the public was ready to support a rational-- i.e., significantly reduced-- military budget came during Clint Eastwood’s ramble at the Republican National Convention. One of the few coherent things he said in that memorable debate that he lost to a chair was that the President should have announced his willingness to pull out of Afghanistan altogether. This criticism of the President from an antiwar position elicited cheers from the Republican delegates.

...Given the numbers involved, the major trade-off in putting together a total deficit reduction package is between the military and health care, by far the biggest nondefense spending item in our budget. Reductions in Medicare, Medicaid, grants from the National Institutes of Health, aid to hospitals, etc., clearly will have far worse social consequences than equivalent cuts in the military and, I believe, more damaging economic effects, because there is more of an economic multiplier from the health expenditures than from military spending.

...[B]eing the strongest nation in the world can be achieved much less expensively than at current levels. Obama deserves a great deal of credit for ending the war in Iraq, for committing to ending the war in Afghanistan, and for successfully withstanding Republican pressure to spend more on the military. But I believe he underestimates the extent to which the public is willing to support even further reductions, and I believe that he may appear to be overly influenced by being told that as President, he has the duty to continue to lead the indispensable nation.

The United States was indispensable in 1945 and for many years thereafter, given the weakness of other nations, including our closest allies, and the strength of the Soviet Union. But things have changed. We can no longer afford to be the indispensable nation extending a military umbrella over many allies on whom it is not raining-- and who can well afford their own protective gear if it does. Fortunately, there is no longer any need for us to play that role, and that in turn is fortunate because, for a number of reasons, we cannot succeed at the job when we try.

This all means that a major political task going forward for liberals is pushing for further reductions in military spending, an objective that we now know is not only socially and economically necessary but also politically achievable.

Republican Vote Rigging... Helpful To Marcy Kaptur Too?

I have to admit I don't get all that worked up over the fact that the GOP Establishment has been stealing the nomination for Romney in state after state. But I should be worked up-- and not only because they're likely to also tamper with election results in November's general election when it will matter more. It's all part of the Republican Party War Against Democracy. Rachel gets into it a bit in the video above-- not the vote rigging, but the barriers the GOP is putting up to keep poor people and students and others likely to vote for Democrats from voting. At the same time, the BradBlog is looking at the vote rigging. And the part that did get me most interested was the vote rigging that seems to have played a role in depriving Dennis Kucinich of a seat in Congress.

It started with a venal Republican state legislature gerrymandering his district in such a way that he was forced into a primary with Democratic colleague Marcy Kaptur, who was given a larger share of the new district. Brad was astounded by the results in Lucas County (Toledo), where Kucinich only won 3.7% of the vote. Is that even possible? Sure it is-- when voting is done on easily hackable Diebold machines that offer no verification whatsoever. And, as Brad warns, "Some 20 to 30% of voters across the nation will still be forced-- shamefully, even after all that we now know about these oft-failed, easily-hacked machines-- to cast their ballots on the very same and other similarly 100% unverifiable voting systems on Election Day during the 2012 Presidential Election."


Here's a 10 page document, evidence of algorithm vote flipping in GOP primary elections, much of it in New Hampshire, South Carolina and Florida. I spoke to a Member of Congress about it, mostly because of my concern that if Republicans can do it now-- and it's rare that anyone ever gets punished for it-- they'll do it in November as well. He responded with an article by Robert Kennedy, Jr, for Rolling Stone (impossible to access there, so here's a link to the article preserved by Common Dreams). Here's the part that deals with Lucas County:

Blackwell authorized only one investigation of registration errors after the election-- in Toledo-- but the report by his own inspectors offers a disturbing snapshot of the malfeasance and incompetence that plagued the entire state. The top elections official in Toledo was a partisan in the Blackwell mold: Bernadette Noe, who chaired both the county board of elections and the county Republican Party. The GOP post was previously held by her husband, Tom Noe, who currently faces felony charges for embezzling state funds and illegally laundering $45,400 of his own money through intermediaries to the Bush campaign.

State inspectors who investigated the elections operation in Toledo discovered "areas of grave concern." With less than a month to go before the election, Bernadette Noe and her board had yet to process 20,000 voter registration cards. Board officials arbitrarily decided that mail-in cards (mostly from the Republican suburbs) would be processed first, while registrations dropped off at the board's office (the fruit of intensive Democratic registration drives in the city) would be processed last. When a grass-roots group called Project Vote delivered a batch of nearly 10,000 cards just before the October 4th deadline, an elections official casually remarked, "We may not get to them." The same official then instructed employees to date-stamp an entire box containing thousands of forms, rather than marking each individual card, as required by law.) When the box was opened, officials had no way of confirming that the forms were filed prior to the deadline-- an error, state inspectors concluded, that could have disenfranchised "several thousand" voters from Democratic strongholds.

The most troubling incident uncovered by the investigation was Noe's decision to allow Republican partisans behind the counter in the board of elections office to make photocopies of postcards sent to confirm voter registrations-- records that could have been used in the GOP's caging efforts. On their second day in the office, the operatives were caught by an elections official tampering with the documents. Investigators slammed the elections board for "a series of egregious blunders"' that caused "the destruction, mutilation and damage of public records."

On Election Day, Noe sent a team of Republican volunteers to the county warehouse where blank ballots were kept out in the open, "with no security measures in place." The state's assistant director of elections, who just happened to be observing the ballot distribution, demanded they leave. The GOP operatives refused and ultimately had to be turned away by police.

In April 2005, Noe and the entire Board of Elections were forced to resign. But once again, the damage was done. At a "Victory 2004" rally held in Toledo four days before the election, President Bush himself singled out a pair of "grass-roots" activists for special praise: "I want to thank my friends Bernadette Noe and Tom Noe for their leadership in Lucas County."

The very basis of right-wing politics-- greed and selfishness-- makes it impossible to separate conservatism and corruption. Historically, they have always been bound at the hip and today there is virtually no difference between corruption and conservatism. They are, in effect, the same. (Take a look at the wikipedia page for the above-mentioned GOP Lucas County Chairman, Tom Noe, if you'd like to see the way the Republican Party has turned itself into a criminal operation. Or, better yet, spend an hour going through the DWT archives from 2005, when we were looking into how the Republicans managed to steal the 2004 election for Bush-- mostly in Ohio.

PAC-Man Ate My Ballot

by Noah

Homer Simpson Tries To Vote For Obama

I have been voting in New York City for 30 years. In those 30 years, we have always had the same mechanical voting machines. From the looks of them, my grandparents probably voted with them when they arrived in America in the 1920s.

They worked beautifully. You walked in to a booth, pulled a curtain closed and moved a 3 foot lever to the right. You then looked at all of the columns of names of those competing for the right to collect graft. Each party was given its own column. Next to each name was a little one-inch metal tab that you clicked into either the yes position or left alone. Once you made your selections, you moved the 3 foot lever back into its original position and all of the votes were registered with the machine’s mechanical tabulator. When I say mechanical, I mean just that. It was a marvelous system of gears and levers, harkening back to a simpler time. Forget computers: these babies didn’t even use electricity. No carbon footprint. No chads. No smudges. No fuss. No muss. No conspiracy theories. The machines didn’t lie and they couldn’t be hacked. As long as each machine total was counted and recorded, people could rest assured that the person they voted for was the person who got their vote.
 
It was beautiful. Sigh, that’s all over now. It had to go. Someone, somewhere in our government decided that New York would have to join the dark ages of the 21st century. Come our September Primary, we will be using Optical Scanner voting machines. Instead of one step in a booth, we will fill out pieces of paper with our selections and then take them to a machine that does who knows what with them, but leaves a paper trail. As VP Biden would say, Big Effin Deal! Forget about how many soldiers had to die for our right to vote. Now, it’s how many trees had to die, and, how much electricity had to be used? Maybe our Con Edison Electric Company is behind all of this. Someone probably even got a brand new car just to rubber-stamp all of this. Who knows? Believe it or don’t, but it could be worse. Remember Die Bold? Florida and its hanging chads? Ohio? Georgia?
 
It can get worse and it will. Some states already using a piece of computer crap, made by Sequoia, called the AVC-Edge DRE Voting Machine. I’m not sure what the corporate tools at Sequoia mean by “Edge” but I’m sure it isn’t good. After all, it stores votes on a… wait for it… Computer Memory! Isn’t that soooo cool? Wow! Digital Voting!
 
Back in 2008, this sucker was used in large parts of Louisiana, Missouri, Nevada, and Virginia. Virginia liked the machines so much that they’ve now banned it and you can buy one from them for only $100! Why would you want one, you say? Well, for one thing, you can hack them and use them to play video games. How’s that or security? Why the hell are we plagued with companies that make shit like this? Machines like this should go to countries where there’s only one useless pig of a two-bit dictator on the ballot. Then again, maybe that’s the long-range plan for here and maybe it’s why we are plagued with machines that the likes of Karl Rove and Darth Cheney can hack and play games on while altering election results from somewhere deep in the bowels of Fox News.
 
Here’s what you can do with Sequoia’s machine.

Well, here’s one thing you can do with Sequoia’s machine. You know, if the teabaggers had one ounce of brains, they’d see this for the disaster it can be, but I’m sure, like most Republicans, they will only see this as an Obamuslim Plot to take away their so freely exercised rights to make complete asses of themselves on a daily, no make that hourly, basis.
 
Step One: The AVC Edge has innards similar to PCs from 20 years ago. How’s that for a great start? The election software is stored on an internal flash memory card. You can buy ’em anywhere where newspapers, ciggies and $5.00 porn mags are sold. Wanna modify it? Just take it out and modify it on your PC. Then put it back in. OK. This does take a little time, but what’s time when you have an election to fix? You have to reformat the flash memory card. You have to know how to reconfigure using a config.sys file. It also takes a while to get the software to run without logical block addressing or a math coprocessor. Is this so easy a caveman can do it? I have to admit that I can’t do this but I work with a few people that assure me they can show me how. Gee, I never thought I was much of a computer wiz! If I can do this then, Houston, we’re screwed!
 
Two computer geeks, Alex Halderman from the University of Michigan, and Ari Feldman from Princeton decided to use their talents to reprogram an AVC-Edge to play Pac-Man. Just imagine Pac-Man eating up your votes. They chose Pac-Man as a way to demonstrate the fraud that is this machine because 2010 is the 30th anniversary of Pac-Man. They point out that if you can get the machine to play Pac-Man, you can get it to do more nefarious things, which, of course, they do not endorse. This is what we get for not stomping the Die Bold people into nothingness. We let them get away with Ohio so Sequoia comes along and pushes the envelope. Tampering made easier.



Step Two: Forget it. You’ve already done what you need to do. You didn’t even have to mess with the tamper-evident seals. How cool is that? You can just use a damn screwdriver and open up the machine, thus going around the seals! Talk about security! They thought of everything at Sequoia! Genius! I bet the engineers at Sequoia have just discovered that you can park your ass on a Xerox machine and fax a lovely print of your butt, suitable for framing, to your old high school principle!
 
Feel my sincerity and mark my words; it’s only a matter of time before some 10 year old chooses the President Of The United States by using his Sony Game Thingie in the security of his own bedroom. Welcome to the world of 21st Century technology. Isn’t it grand?

UPDATE

I thought of also including, in my above post, the thought that computer voting will finish the job of making our elections a completely meaningless farce that the corporatocracy is already making them. But then, people might just stop trying and I wouldn't want that. People might stop contributing to and/or working for the few Alan Graysons of the world. When I think of the corporate corruption of so many aspects of our world, I think of shoveling shit against the tide. Are we all just a bunch of Don Quixotes? The thing that is scary is that, for some, the next step past being Don Quixote is being a terrorist or, at least, a total anarchist. Bad things happen when you take everything away from people, including jobs, education for the kids, and even food, to the point where people have nothing to lose. It's a chilling thought that while we, as a society, worry about muslims or mexicans, the biggest threats of violence may just come from what the republicans would call "normal Americans", not "outsiders". The spectre of more McVeighs is looming right in front of us while, being directed to look elsewhere, we refuse to see it.

Will McCain Win After All?

They're working on it everywhere... hard.

Video the Vote

Can McCain Still "Win?"

Sure... just watch:



And it isn't just Rove. It's an across the board Republican Party strategy. People who interfere with voting rights should be tried for treason and, if found guilty, be subject to the death penalty. A few dead Republican creeps and it won't keep happening. And, yes, it's that important. Watch how they're trying to cover up their own voter fraud by demonizing ACORN:

Today Progressive States Network devotes its e-newsletter to "Election Integrity," and reports a dramatic swing back to paper ballots

Did you know that this November a majority of U.S. voters will use paper ballots?

by Ken

The Progressive States Network puts out a twice-weekly e-mail newsletter, which

chronicles the victories and setbacks of the progressive movements in America's states; shine a light on the best practices and the worst schemes; and help legislators, activists, and journalists across the country connect what is happening in their own backyard and across the country.

Today's edition is likely to be of interest to a lot of DWT readers concerned about the growing threat of election-stealing. It's devoted entirely to the broad subject: Election Integrity – How We Lost It and How States are Getting It Back, also the title of Christian Smith-Socaris's lead article. In addition, there are articles on:

* Protecting Ballot Integrity

* Post-Election Audits That Work

* Stopping the Privatization of Elections

Along the way imagine my surprise to learn, for example, that:

(a) The writers consider paper ballots "the only true secure option," judging the problems with VVPATs (electronic voting machines with “voter verified paper audit trails”) too serious to be solvable; and --

(b) Instead of moving toward fancier and fancier electronic equipment, as everyone assumed would be the case with reforms paid for in part by the Help America Vote Act, the country is actually moving back to paper ballots.

This November, for the first time, a majority of voters in the country will cast a paper ballot on election day and just 36% will use electronic machines, marking movement in the direction of more secure paper-based elections. At least one state is also trying to recover funds spent on problem plagued machines, contending that machine companies have not fulfilled their contractual obligations to supply reliable voting equipment. Diebold, the most prominent manufacturer of voting systems has changed the name of its voting technology subsidiary so that voting machine problems don’t effect the reputation of the entire company.

Clearly the move away from electronic voting machines is a tremendous victory for voters and a boon for fair elections. However, other clear threats to the integrity of our elections remain. The controversy over electronic voting machines motivated many to look more closely at the safeguards that protect our election systems from fraud and manipulation, and what has been found is troubling. Paper ballots are clearly not enough to make our elections secure; we also need a reliable way to verify election results. Recognition of this fact has moved the election integrity debate forward into two additional areas: post-election audits and publicly controlled elections.

If you go to the above link to view this issue of Stateside Dispatch, you can also sign up to receive it regularly.

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Don't Count The Chickens...

by Noah


Georgia 2002. Ohio 2004. Numerous Congressional "elections" in 2006. Suspicious elections all. VERY suspicious. But, what of 2008? Have the books already been cooked? Before I proceed, I offer a disclaimer of sorts. I am not an Obama partisan. When it comes to making up my mind as to who I will vote for in November, I am a member of our country's largest party, the Disgruntled American Party. Obama has not won my vote yet. Rest assured, I don't have the bigotries of any kind that would qualify me for membership in the Republican or Libertarian parties, so that rules out McCranky or Barr. Nader? He was right about the Corvair Deathtub, "Unsafe At Any Speed" and all that, but, that was over 40 years ago. What has he done for me (and you) lately? Cynthia McKinney? Well, at least she has called for impeachment. The usurper in the people's White House has assaulted our Constitution, gravely. Everything we have is supposed to come from and start with The Constitution. That goes for the war. Bush musta been AWOL from school the day they taught that. So, with me, it's down to Obama or McKinney. Both have served in Congress, Obama in the Senate, McKinney in the House. Both took an oath to defend the Constitution. You can see my dilemma. Too bad Thom Hartmann isn't running. Obama's gonna have to sell me, not sell me out.

My agenda here is not about Obama first, it is about fair elections first, something we are having less and less of as the years go on and tactics get refined. You will notice that I didn't even bring up Florida, yet. I didn't have to. With one eye on the past, let's take a look with the other eye at what is going on right now and what may be happening in November. When I voted for John Kerry in 2004, he claimed that he would make sure all of the votes were counted. He didn't. I had held my nose and voted for what I feared I was voting for, an insincere charlatan. When the votes weren't counted in New Mexico and Ohio, all of our votes, regardless of who we voted for, were dishonored.

Things are allowed to happen in our voting system that corrupt our voting system. In fact, they are encouraged and enabled. Here's a small list of some of what's going on right now. It's a list of what the Repugs have been up to in order to give themselves four more years in the White House so the top 1% of the economic ladder can tell the bottom 99% to go to hell or eat cake or something like that. That would even include millions of non-one percenters who would vote Repug in defiance of their own interests and those of their own families. The current machinations represent the best of the known Repug efforts at rigging the 2008 election and stepping up their war, not the one in Iraq, but the one here at home on the middle class, the lower class, and The Constitution.

Do you think Karl Rove has been on vacation since leaving the White House? While we're focusing on the Big Oil's war to steal oil in Iraq, our democracy and our freedoms are being stolen at home. One way to do it is to concentrate on rigging the vote in the swing states that Obama will probably need to win in November. How? 1) How about housing foreclosures that are the result of Repug economic policies? You just might need a legal residence to vote. In Nevada and Ohio, a law is sweeping tens of thousands of foreclosure victims off of the voter rolls. Who is most likely to have their home foreclosed? Repug policies do more than just hurt your bank account and raise the price of gas. They also take away your freedoms and your way of life more efficiently than any middle eastern extremist group. 2) Remember how in 2000 in Florida, a sleazeball Bush groupie named Katherine Harris hired contractors to bump people off the rolls just for having a certain kind of "funny name", a name that wasn't likely to belong to a fellow Repug? You know, a name that might begin or end with a vowel, or a name that was similar to someone not named Bush who had once committed a felony. In New Mexico, according to investigative and BBC reporter Greg Palast, half of a dirt poor Hispanic community named Mora have found their legal registrations disappeared into thin air by Repug contractors. It's Florida all over again, but now it's being done to such an extent that hanging chads won't even enter into it. 3) Also according to Palast, in Colorado, the Repug Secretary of State has conducted the biggest purge of voters in history, one fifth of all registrations. They just happen to be in black neighborhoods. The party of Lincoln may have freed black people but they still don't want them to vote. In 2004 in Ohio, the Repug Secretary of State just made sure there weren't enough voting machines in black areas. Now, the Repugs take it a little further. They take away your right to vote and don't provide a voting machine! Sound fair to you? 4) And how about Florida? The Cesspool State! 85,000 new legal registrations, overwhelmingly black, gone into one of the state's famous sinkholes. It's no coincidence that Florida more closely resembles a Latin American dictatorship than the American ideal.

I haven't even discussed voting machine tampering. We live in a country where people are told by a jiveass media that a paper trail for their precinct voting machine is not possible, and, we buy it! Then, they go to the nearest ATM and get a receipt for their transaction. We all know the stories about DieBold and their ilk. That will be a factor, too. 2008 will also be about more than the RNC hiring Sproul & Associates to shred Democrat registrations in six battleground states. It will be about more than the party that claims to support the troops not sending them a ballot, or, having the Pentagon shut down their registration web site. As a Repug idol, Joseph Stalin once said, "It's not who votes but who COUNTS the votes". In 2008, in the USA, one party is having it both ways. Give the Repugs credit for being more efficient than the Commies. This is what happens when you don't have legislative oversight. This is what we get when Bush buddies like Nancy Pelosi take impeachment off the table.

Where are the Democrats on these matters? I'll tell you where. They are either accomplices in their own demise or willing partners in show elections. You end up with elections that are almost as much as a farce as those old elections in the USSR where millions all voted for Khrushchev and no one voted for the other guy. The Commies did it with a complicit state media, Pravda and TASS. Have you heard anything about all of this from our so called mainstream media (MSM)? Have you ever heard that two election officials in Ohio, smaller fish than the main culprits but slippery slimey ones just the same, one an Elections Coordinator, and one a Ballot Manager (gotta love the titles!) are serving time for their roles in the corruption of 2004? Of course not. We may have more media outlets, but the story is the same. Even calling it "mainstream media" is a misnomer intended to deceive. It's Repug media, folks, whether it's openly anti-Obama assclowns like Lush Slimebaugh, Sean Insanity, George Stepinpoopalot, Corporate News Network, Faux News, USA Toadie, the New York Times lying about there being "no evidence of vote theft," the Washington Post declaring that allegations of fraud are "conspiracy theories," or whomever, you'd get more factual news if you just sent your newspaper to thirdworlders to use for toilet paper and disconnected the cable and watched the snow on your screen.

What to do? First triple check and verify that you are indeed registered to vote. You may think you are, but, you don't want to be surprised when it's too late. There's only one possible way for Obama to win. I said to friends, in 2004, that for Senator Kerry to win, Americans would have to vote for him in overwhelming landslide proportions just to offset the DieBold style tampering and voter roll ethnic cleansing so Kerry could come out with a narrow victory. The same is even more true this time around. At least, the Dems have a better candidate this time, but the Repugs have gotten more thorough and more sophisticated. Pay no attention to the polls, Rove's dream of totalitarian one fascist party rule in the United States is still very much alive. Obama may have a lead in the national polls, but, it's state by state that's where the action is, and, if you examine the polls individually by state, we're currently in for a close election even without the rigging. It's all about the Electoral College again. We've come a long way from the dead rising up and voting for JFK in Chicago in 1960. That was child's play, and, in fact, didn't actually alter the end result. Only a pro-Obama turnout the likes of which has never been seen before will win the day for a democratic presidency. My state, New York, will probably go for Obama no matter what. Are you sure about yours?

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