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Post by the Scribe on Mar 13, 2020 9:04:09 GMT
Need I say more? They don't want a paper trail AND an audit for obvious reasons. Sometimes politicians will be pushing for legislation that they know will be blocked but it will look good to their constituents come election time. In fact, they don't want that legislation at all. It will be interesting to find out if the REAL story behind this comes out. The GOP would become the minority party they deserve to be if elections were audited showing they actually lost in race after race. The only way Republicons would agree to free, fair and auditable elections is if they and their candidates were the targets and on the losing side. Even then any inspection would reveal what they have been doing to steal elections. This confirms everything I have been saying about these people, at least in my mind. White House blocks bill that would protect electionsAlexander Nazaryan 4 hours ago . WASHINGTON — A bill that would have significantly bolstered the nation’s defenses against electoral interference has been held up in the Senate at the behest of the White House, which opposed the proposed legislation, according to congressional sources.
The Secure Elections Act, introduced by Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., in December 2017, had co-sponsorship from two of the Senate’s most prominent liberals, Kamala Harris, D-Calif., and Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., as well as from conservative stalwart Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and consummate centrist Susan Collins, R-Me.
Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., was set to conduct a markup of the bill on Wednesday morning in the Senate Rules Committee, which he chairs. The bill had widespread support, including from some of the committee’s Republican members, and was expected to come to a full Senate vote in October. But then the chairman’s mark, as the critical step is known, was canceled, and no explanation was given.
As it currently stands, the legislation would grant every state’s top election official security clearance to receive threat information. It would also formalize the practice of information-sharing between the federal government—in particular, the Department of Homeland Security—and states regarding threats to electoral infrastructure. A technical advisory board would establish best practices related to election cybersecurity. Perhaps most significantly, the law would mandate that every state conduct a statistically significant audit following a federal election. It would also incentivize the purchase of voting machines that leave a paper record of votes cast, as opposed to some all-electronic models that do not. This would signify a marked shift away from all-electronic voting, which was encouraged with the passage of the Help Americans Vote Act in 2002.
“Paper is not antiquated,” Lankford says. “It’s reliable.”
Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., speaks during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Russian interference in the 2016 elections. (Photo: Andrew Harnik/AP)
A paper record could prove effective against hackers if they tried to change the reporting of votes on the internet, as opposed to altering the votes themselves. Election officials needs to be able to say, “‘Nope, we can check this,’” as Lankford puts it. “Here’s the paper, here’s the machine, here’s our poll count.”
In a statement to Yahoo News, White House spokeswoman Lindsay Walters says that while the administration “appreciates Congress’s interest in election security, [the Department of Homeland Security] has all the statutory authority it needs to assist state and local officials to improve the security of existing election infrastructure.”
Under current law, DHS is already able to work with state and local authorities to protect elections, Walters wrote. If Congress pursues the Secure Elections Act, it should avoid duplicating “existing DHS efforts or the imposition of unnecessary requirements” and “not violate the principles of Federalism.”
“We cannot support legislation with inappropriate mandates or that moves power or funding from the states to Washington for the planning and operation of elections,” she added. However, the White House gave no specifics on what parts of the bill it objected to.
In a statement, Klobuchar thanked Blunt and Lankford, making clear that they were both allies in the effort. “They tried valiantly to salvage the votes for this bill on the Republican side,” Klobuchar’s statement said. “In the end we had every single Democrat on the committee committed to vote for the bill. Any changes that were recently made to the bill were made to accommodate the Republican leadership.”
A spokesperson for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who sits on the Rules Committee, declined to say whether the majority leader, widely renowned on Capitol Hill for his backroom tactics, was involved in efforts to hobble the Secure Elections Act.
Blunt’s office would not comment on the record.
The Trump administration has been unable to settle on how elections should be secured, and whom they should be secured against. Despite consensus from the nation’s intelligence agencies that Russia interfered in 2016, President Trump has dismissed the threat, even as others in his administration have issued unambiguous warnings. Trump has instead asserted that millions voted fraudulently in New York and California for Hillary Clinton, thus giving her an edge of some 3 million votes in the 2016 presidential race. No evidence of statistically significant voter fraud has been uncovered.
Senator Roy Blunt (R-MO) speaks with reporters at the U.S. Capitol. (Photo: Joshua Roberts/Reuters)
Lankford, Klobuchar and others had worked for months to persuade their peers that electoral security is a nonpartisan issue. Supporters expected the legislation would make its way out of committee and become law, a rare bipartisan success story in the current Congress. As the chairman’s mark approached, they appeared to have won the votes they needed in the Senate Rule Committee.
Speaking to Yahoo News on Tuesday afternoon, Lankford seemed confident. He acknowledged that the federal government should not encroach on states’ administration of elections, but he also argued that states had to show more awareness of the high stakes involved. “Your election in Delaware affects the entire country,” he said. “Your election in Florida affects the entire country.”
In an earlier television appearance with Lankford, Harris rendered the issue of electoral security, and hacking by foreign powers, in stark terms: “We have to be prepared for wars without blood.”
But some apparently remained unconvinced. A staffer for a Republican senator on the Rules Committee described unease with “certain provisions in the Secure Elections Act” on the part of secretaries of state, who oversee elections. “In order for a truly bipartisan election security bill to reach the floor, additional majority support is necessary.”
The bill’s sponsors disputed the notion that it lacked support, noting that secretaries of state had had plenty of time to comment on the proposed legislation.
Lankford, a rising young Republican legislator, vowed to press on. “The issue of election cybersecurity is very important and more must be done now,” he said in a statement. “Congressional inaction is unacceptable.”
www.yahoo.com/news/white-house-blocks-bill-protect-elections-173459278.html
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 13, 2020 9:04:37 GMT
WHAT ARE REPUBLICONS AFRAID OF?Senator Lankford Floor Speech on the Secure Elections Act
SenatorLankford Published on Aug 22, 2018 On August 22, 2018, Senator James Lankford delivered a speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate about his bipartisan Secure Elections Act and the need for Congress to quickly pass legislation to strengthen our election cybersecurity.Democrats Chant “USA USA!” As Republicans Vote Down Election Cybersecurity Bill
PolitiZoom Media Published on Jul 19, 2018 One would think that approving a bill funding vital security upgrades before the 2018 midterm elections would be a no brainer in light of the further confirmation of Russian interference... bit.ly/2NruLew
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 13, 2020 9:05:41 GMT
North Carolina’s gerrymandered map is unconstitutional, judges rule, and may have to be redrawn before midtermsRobert Barnes 7 hrs agoJ. Scott Applewhite/AP North Carolina legislators are likely to ask the Supreme Court to step in after a panel of three judges said it may require the state to draw new districts before the November elections. A panel of three federal judges held Monday that North Carolina’s congressional districts were unconstitutionally gerrymandered to favor Republicans over Democrats and said it may require new districts before the November elections, possibly affecting control of the House.
The judges acknowledged that primary elections have already produced candidates for the 2018 elections but said they were reluctant to let voting take place in congressional districts that courts twice have found violate constitutional standards.
North Carolina legislators are likely to ask the Supreme Court to step in. The court traditionally does not approve of judicial actions that can affect an election so close to the day voters go to the polls.
Subscribe to the Post Most newsletter: Today’s most popular stories on The Washington Post
But the Supreme Court has just eight members since Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s retirement last month; a tie vote would leave the lower court’s decision in place. Senate hearings on President Trump’s nominee to fill the open seat, Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, commence Sept. 4.
The North Carolina case is a long-running saga, with a federal court in 2016 striking down the legislature’s 2011 map as a racial gerrymander. The legislature then passed a plan that left essentially the same districts in place but said lawmakers were motivated by politics, not race.
The Supreme Court told the three-judge panel to take another look at the North Carolina case in light of the high court’s June decision in a Wisconsin partisan gerrymandering case, in which the justices said those who brought that case did not have legal standing.
But Judge James A. Wynn Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, writing Monday for a special three-judge district court panel, said plaintiffs did have standing under the decision in Wisconsin’s Gill v. Whitford, which he said reinforced the judges’ earlier views that the congressional districts were drawn with improper partisan goals.
He said the court was leaning against giving the North Carolina legislature another chance to draw the congressional districts.
“We continue to lament that North Carolina voters now have been deprived of a constitutional congressional districting plan — and, therefore, constitutional representation in Congress — for six years and three election cycles,” Wynn wrote. “To the extent allowing the General Assembly another opportunity to draw a remedial plan would further delay electing representatives under a constitutional districting plan, that delay weighs heavily against giving the General Assembly another such opportunity.”
He proposed several unusual ideas: appointing a special master to draw new districts, holding general elections without party primaries or even turning the November elections into a primary and holding the general election sometime before the new Congress convenes in January.
Wynn and his fellow judges called for immediate briefing from the parties about which remedy to pursue.
The Supreme Court has never found that a state’s redistricting was so infected with politics that it was unconstitutional. This past term, it passed up the chance to do so with the case from Wisconsin and one in Maryland, disposing of them without deciding the merits.
The North Carolina case presented a stark example of partisan intent, with legislators making clear that the map was drawn to help one party over another.
“I think electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats,” said Rep. David Lewis, a Republican member of the North Carolina General Assembly, addressing fellow legislators when they passed the plan in 2016. “So I drew this map to help foster what I think is better for the country.”
He added: “I propose that we draw the maps to give a partisan advantage to 10 Republicans and three Democrats because I do not believe it’s possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and two Democrats.”
When voters went to the polls that fall, the 10-3 outcome was exactly as Lewis had predicted, even though Republican candidates won just 53 percent of the statewide vote.
Wynn said it should be clear that such partisan gerrymandering is unconstitutional.
more: www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/north-carolina%E2%80%99s-gerrymandered-map-is-unconstitutional-judges-rule-and-may-have-to-be-redrawn-before-midterms/ar-BBMwNT1?li=BBnb7Kz
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 13, 2020 9:06:08 GMT
Greg Palast | How the Republicans Helped Trump Steal the ElectionBY Greg Palast Truthout PUBLISHED January 25, 2018
Author and reporter Greg Palast. (Photo: Rob)
Believe me, the last damn thing I wanted to do was make an update of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.
But you gave me no choice.
The original film, released in 2016, told you in cold terms: “Trump’s going to win and he’s going to win by stealing it.”
But did you listen?
No, MSNBC reported that “Trump has no path to 270,” and they bought their party dresses for Clinton’s inaugural.
Well, the 2 million who saw the film got it — and Truthout readers of my columns got it. But that left 120 million American voters who actually believe Trump won, and marched like sheep to the Trump Casino to be sheered.
So, here’s the skinny: Trump lost not just the popular vote, but also the vote in key swing states — that is, if you counted all the ballots cast and allowed the blocked and purged voters to vote.
How? Well, that’s why I made a new edition to the film, to lay it out cold. And why I tramped through the snows of Michigan and Wisconsin and beyond to explain exactly what happened. The result was the updated film, just released, with a new sub-title: The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: The Case of the Stolen Election.
Take Michigan. Trump officially won the state by 10,700 voters. But dig this: 75,355 ballots were never counted.
Like, huh? Not counted? Yes. Michiganders vote on these ridiculous paper ballots that old machines have a hard time reading. And critically, 87 machines simply broke down and didn’t count the votes at all.
And where were these uncounted ballots and broken machines? I found them in Detroit and Flint, Michigan — two majority-Black cities. Do you think those 75,355 ballots in Detroit and Flint were Trump ballots?
So, why broken machines? As I explain in the update, Detroit and Flint went bankrupt — and so the budgets of those cities were taken over by “managers” appointed by the violently Republican governor. Detroit’s manager was told the machines would break in advance of the election. That the machines were old and couldn’t read all the ballots if marked with red pens or if folks put an “X” instead of filling in a bubble.
But there’s a marvelous machine that can read those uncounted ballots: the human eye. And that is why Jill Stein called for a “recount” — which was actually a count of the ballots previously “spoiled” and uncounted. Trump’s lawyers stopped the recount because he was losing.
And as I illustrate in the film, almost 3 million ballots were disqualified for cockamamie reasons, like not filling in the bubble.
Here’s a frame from the film of a voter who lost her vote because they didn’t fill in the bubble: my mother!
(Image: Courtesy of Greg Palast)
Whose votes get thrown in the ballot dumpster? According to the US Civil Rights Commission, the chance your vote will be disqualified is 900 percent higher if you’re Black than if you’re white.
Do the math. Trump would have lost Ohio, North Carolina, Arizona, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania … the list goes on … if not for the “spoilage” game and blocking legit voters from the polls.
The documentary has special extra reports from Michigan and Georgia — where the trick that was key to Trump’s vote heist also swiped the special election in Georgia’s Sixth Congressional District for the GOP.
And that new trick? It’s called, “Interstate Crosscheck” and it’s run by Trump’s vote-thief-in-chief Kris Kobach, secretary of state for Kansas. The mainstream media discovered Kobach and Crosscheck only after the election.
No reporter confronted Kobach with the evidence of his scheme — except this reporter, working for Rolling Stone. (You will see that confrontation in the film.)
And yet, the mainstream media still don’t get it. Crosscheck wiped out the registration of 1.1 million folks.
And whose money is behind Kobach? Me and my chief investigator Leni Badpenny run the money trail back through half a dozen front groups to the Koch brothers.
The updated film also includes Trump’s appointment of Kobach to his witch-hunting group called, “The Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity” — now disbanded and reformed within the Department of Homeland Security.
So, be afraid. Be very afraid of what Kobach is up to now. Unfortunately, it’s not just a movie; this horror show is for real.
Plus, I had to tell you how those billionaires made out who bought the election for Trump. (No, Trump’s not a billionaire; he just plays one on TV.) And they did fine, indeed.
So that’s why I had no choice but to update The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and give it a new subtitle: The Case of the Stolen Election.
Some folks ask, How much of an update? Oh, say, 15 percent of the film — and the extras are all new. No more was needed because, sadly, we figured out the trickery well before the election.
truthout.org/articles/how-the-republicans-helped-trump-steal-the-election/The Case Of The Stolen Election — Now on Amazon/Amazon Prime!
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 13, 2020 9:06:40 GMT
5 Signs the Election was Hacked for Donald Trump
Dark5 Published on Nov 24, 2016 Top 5 signs the 2016 election was hacked. Computer scientists claim the presidential election may have been hacked in 3 states after an analysis showed Clinton received *7% fewer votes* in counties with electronic voting machines.
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 13, 2020 9:07:11 GMT
This is WHY we need an amendment to the Constitution that guarantees every American citizen of age the right to vote AND to have their votes counted and VERIFIED. Same goes for political primaries with NO SuperDelegates, no Electoral College along with specific policies election results be counted.Americans Have No Constitutional 'Right' to Vote
By Rich Lewis , CP Op-Ed Contributor | Mar 4, 2013 9:45 AM
The online comments on my Jan. 27 column in my local newspaper, The Sentinel, included a spirited debate between me and a reader calling himself "Sokrates" over whether Americans have a constitutional right to vote.
I said we have no such right. He insisted that we do.
"Your claim that there is no constitutional right to vote is shocking, especially when five out of 27 Amendments specifically identify it," he wrote, adding it is "the most strongly substantiated right we have."
This is a good time to revisit that question because the Supreme Court heard arguments this week on whether it should strike down the central provision of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965.
The case, Shelby County v. Holder, is not only important in itself, but also helps to explain how Sokrates and I are both correct.
So let's try to sort this out.
The fact is the Constitution does not contain an affirmative voting right - that is, no positive language stating a right to vote for president or members of Congress.
The Supreme Court itself recognized this in 2000 in Bush v. Gore.
"The individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States," the majority opinion states, "unless and until the state legislature chooses a statewide election as the means to implement its power to appoint members of the Electoral College."
The court then acknowledges that a state legislature could, if it wanted, take the presidential vote away from individual citizens and "select the electors itself." If that happened in your state, you would have no grounds for claiming your constitutional right to vote had been violated - because you don't have one unless the state "chooses" to allow it.
As for the U.S. House and Senate, the Constitution says the members shall be elected "by the people," but states decide just who "the people" are. Blacks, women and 18-year-olds weren't considered "people" for a long time. Some states today deny felons the vote temporarily, some permanently and some never.
So that's my side of the story - we have no affirmative, constitutional right to vote. Any good constitutional lawyer would agree with that statement.
But Sokrates also has a good argument. He cites Article 1 of the Constitution, and the later amendments that outlawed voter discrimination based on race, sex and age - and concludes "the right is in the Constitution, identified in plain language numerous times."
The problem in Article 1 is that part about "the people." And the amendments are negative protections - prohibiting states from deciding you're not one of "the people" for those specific reasons.
However, a determined state could find other reasons.
Which brings us back to the Voting Rights Act.
In 1965, Congress acknowledged that some states would do anything to dodge these negative protections in order to stop black citizens from voting. For example, they imposed poll taxes and literacy tests, which didn't discriminate on the basis of race, sex or age but invariably excluded black voters way more than white voters - which was the goal.
And some states are still at it. A prominent Republican state legislator gleefully boasted last summer that Pennsylvania's voter ID law would suppress the state's Democratic (read: black) vote and ensure Mitt Romney a victory here. A court temporarily blocked the law; President Obama carried the state.
Other states have attempted to keep targeted groups from voting by gerrymandering, selectively purging voter rolls, restricting voting hours, erecting barriers to voter registration and strategically misallocating resources. No sex, race or age discrimination, but effective nonetheless.
The VRA stops states with a history of such behavior by requiring federal review of proposed changes in their voting rules. Advocates say the reviews must continue to protect blacks, Hispanics and other minorities. The New York Times, for example, editorialized that voter-ID laws and similar tactics "offer incontestable proof of the need for strict voting rights laws."
VRA opponents, on the other hand, say the review requirement is based on old data about discrimination and should be struck down. Justice Antonin Scalia called the provision a "perpetuation of racial entitlement."
The key point is that the case arises because we have no affirmative right to vote, and Congress and the courts are continually dealing with efforts to evade that patchwork of negative voting protections.
And yes, those legislative and judicial efforts to protect the vote have been very effective. Legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin believes that all the shenanigans to suppress voting have provoked a legal backlash that "may end up establishing that there is a right to vote in the U.S. after all." Note the word "may."
So in that sense, Sokrates is right - we do have a stitched-together "right" to vote that offers many protections.
But is that really as good as an actual, affirmative right to vote?
Clearly not.
We should just enshrine that right in the Constitution, in plain English.
We could then finally say, without qualification or complicated explanations, "Yes, in the United States, we have a constitutional right to vote."
www.christianpost.com/news/americans-have-no-constitutional-right-to-vote-91185/
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 13, 2020 9:07:46 GMT
This is sheer nonsense that we should be going through this but we do.
The Voting Rights Act Short Definition: Under certain circumstances, minority opportunity districts must be drawn that have at least 50% minority voting-age population (VAP).
How to Determine Compliance in DistrictBuilder: DistrictBuilder's sidebar statistics include the number of minority opportunity districts in the plan used in the past decade and the number in the plan being drawn. Legal plans generally should have at least the same number of minority opportunity districts as the plan used for the past decade.
If and when minority opportunity districts are proposed by a redistricting authority or other organization, such as the NAACP or MALDEF, we hope to make these districts available as a template from which software users can draw the remainder of a state.
The Voting Rights Act is an important federal redistricting requirement that ensures our representatives reflect America's racial and ethnic diversity. It enjoys overwhelming bipartisan congressional support. The U.S. Department of Justice and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund's Redrawing the Lines are excellent sources of information about the Voting Rights Act. Please bear in mind that the law regarding the Voting Rights Act is intricate and cannot possibly be covered in full depth here. Here are some of the important highlights.
Why have a Voting Rights Act?
Following the Civil War, the United States adopted three important amendments to the U.S. constitution. Among these is the 15th Amendment, which states that "right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude."
Immediately following the Civil War, the North occupied the South during a period known as Reconstruction. The North enforced the U.S. constitution, and as a result, many African-Americans were elected to state offices across the South. When the North withdrew its forces, White Southerners regained political power at first through violent intimidation during elections to repress African-American voting. Once in power, Whites amended their state constitutions and adopted election laws designed to prevent African-Americans from voting. Some of these rules may be familiar, such as the poll tax or discriminatory application of voter registration and literacy tests. A more obscure discriminatory device was racial gerrymandering.
The Voting Rights Act addressed all of these discriminatory election rules to ensure that our legislatures at all levels of government reflect the racial and ethnic diversity of the people they represent. Provisions of the Voting Rights Act have been amended and reauthorized several times to address changing legal and political environments. The most recent reauthorization for another twenty-five years passed by wide bipartisan margins in 2007 -- when Republicans controlled the U.S. Congress and George W. Bush was president. The Voting Rights Act is seen as one of the most successful pieces of legislation, being credited with the election of 9,000 African-Americans, 5,000 Latinos, and numerous Native Americans to local, state, and national offices.
The Voting Rights Act applies to redistricting to prevent states and localities from drawing districts that deny minorities a chance to elect a candidate of their choice. There are two important provisions. Section 2 applies nationally, and Section 5 applies only to certain "covered jurisdictions" which are located primarily in the South. These provisions are discussed in detail below. To understand how Section 2 and Section 5 apply, it is first important to understand how racial gerrymandering works.
What is Racial Gerrymandering?
To understand how to do a racial gerrymander, consider a hypothetical state with thirty-six people in it, which we will call Gerryland. Sixteen Gerrylanders are of a racial minority (represented by tan colored circles) and twenty are the racial majority. There are four districts to be drawn. (Thanks for Justin Levitt, formerly at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School, for these diagrams.)
Racially polarized voting is when all the minorities always vote for their preferred candidate and all the majorities always vote for their preferred candidate. If racially polarized voting exists, it is possible to gerrymander with brutal efficiency to ensure minorities have little or no representation in a four-seat legislature. There are two gerrymandering strategies, known as cracking and packing. The same strategies apply to both racial and partisan gerrymandering.
Cracking is when the minority community is fragmented into several districts, none of which have a majority of minorities. When there is racially polarized voting, minorities will be unable to elect a candidate of their choice to the legislature in any district. The cracking strategy in Gerryland might look something like this.
Stacking is when the minority community is concentrated into a small number of districts so that their votes are wasted in a district that their preferred candidate will win by an overwhelming margin. The packing strategy in Gerryland might look something like this, where the minority community is concentrated into one district.
In practice, things are more complicated than the simple Gerryland example. Communities do not fit into nice squares, so the federal courts are fairly lenient on what minorities districts may look like. Some of the ugliest looking district ducklings are beautiful swans in the eyes of the courts. For example, the Illinois 4th Congressional District drawn in the 2000's decade is often called the "earmuff" district for obvious reasons. The western portion of this district actually travels along the northbound lane of Interstate 294! But, this district has a very important purpose. It was initially created in the 1990s to elect the first Latino representative to Congress from the Midwest.
The 4th congressional district has its funny shape because there is an African-American community sandwiched between two Latino communities. The African-American community is represented by the 7th Congressional district, which is designed to elect an African-American candidate of choice. The 4th district was wrapped around the 7th district so that both African-American and Latino communities could have congressional representation.
When Must a Minority Opportunity District Be Draw?
The ideal district has just the right percentage of minorities to elect a minority candidate of choice. The percentage of minorities cannot be too low, lest cracking occurs, and cannot be too high, lest packing occurs. Determining the legally acceptable minority percentage requires the following steps: First, perform a statistical analysis of election results to determine the degree of racially polarized voting. Second, draw a district with enough minority population to elect a minority candidate of choice, given the statistical analysis. The Supreme Court recently ruled in Bartlett v Strickland that in order for a district to be constitutionally required, minorities must constitute at least 50% of a minority opportunity district's voting-age population. Some have further interpreted this to mean that minorities must constitute at least 50% citizen voting-age population of a minority opportunity district. This is not to say that states cannot draw districts what are known as influence districts, where the minority community is a near majority, just that they are not required to do under federal law if they cannot draw a 50% district.
The most accessible population data to assess when a minority opportunity district must be drawn is voting-age population. The Census Bureau releases two types of data: total population, used to ensure districts are of equal population, and voting-age population, to ensure compliance with the Voting Rights Act. In the DistrictBuilder software, we have made available the voting-age population data by race and ethnicity. (The issue of citizen-voting age population is a complicated one; more on this soon.)
There are two important sections of the Voting Rights Act that apply to the creation of minority opportunity districts, Section 2 and Section 5.
Section 2
Section 2 applies nationally. Essentially, Section 2 requires that if there is racially polarized voting and if a minority opportunity district can be drawn, then it must be drawn. (There is a further consideration, known as the "totality of the circumstances," which involves the history of past discrimination in the jurisdiction in question.)
Section 5
Section 5 applies only to covered jurisdictions. These jurisdictions must clear any electoral change -- from moving a polling place to redistricting -- with the Department of Justice or the District Court of DC before it can take effect. (The Department of Justice is the overwhelming pathway of choice.) This federal oversight is intended to ensure that a change does not have a discriminatory effect. In the context of redistricting, Section 5 requires that the number of minority opportunity districts cannot decrease during redistricting. This is called retrogression.
The Department of Justice has 60 days to review a redistricting plan to ensure compliance with Section 5. It may request another 60 days for additional review. If a redistricting plan is not cleared in a timely manner, or worse it is rejected and the state or locality has insufficient time to correct deficiencies, courts may impose their own plans for use in the next election. State law may allow or forbid a subsequent "re-redistricting." Because Section 5 only applies to covered jurisdictions, federal courts are not required to clear their plans before they take effect.
The Department of Justice has released "Guidance Concerning Redistricting Under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act." To underscore the importance of the Public Mapping Project to minority voting interests, the Department of Justice states
In considering whether less-retrogressive alternative plans are available, the Department of Justice looks to plans that were actually considered or drawn by the submitting jurisdiction, as well as alternative plans presented or made known to the submitting jurisdiction by interested citizens or others.
Thus, plans drawn by the public may factor into the Department of Justice's decision to approve a redistricting plan submitted by a covered jurisdiction.
What Is Required in Practice
In practice, Section 2 and Section 5 essentially require that at least the same number of minority opportunity districts in a previous redistricting plan must be drawn in a new redistricting plan. Section 5 explicitly requires this, and Section 2 has been litigated in most parts of the country. There are two exceptions: In areas where minority populations have grown, such as Latino communities in Texas, more minority opportunity districts may be required under Section 2. The Supreme Court has ruled that it is permissible for states and localities to draw such districts to avoid litigation. In areas where minority populations have decreased, it may be impossible to draw a minority opportunity district. In this case, a minority opportunity district may not be required. How and where minority opportunity districts must be drawn will not become clear until racial polarization analyses are conducted, districts are draw, and in certain circumstance, the Department of Justice and the courts review the evidence.
It is beyond the capabilities of most ordinary citizens -- and sometimes even redistricting authorities! -- to comply with all the intricacies of the Voting Rights Act. To provide clues as to whether or not your districts are in compliance, on the statistics sidebar on the righthand side of the plan editor, we report the number of districts with more than 50% minority voting-age population (VAP) in the plan used for the previous decade and the number in the plan you are drawing. Typically, you should have at least the same number in your plan as in the previous plan.
www.publicmapping.org/what-is-redistricting/redistricting-criteria-the-voting-rights-act
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 13, 2020 9:08:37 GMT
This author was on coasttocoastam radio show tonight and he confirmed what I have been saying all throughout this thread. Our electoral system has been consistently rigged for the right wing to steal elections. It has been especially bad since the stolen 2000 presidential election. He has also said that very little has changed and if anything, things are even worse. Like me he doesn't hold out much hope Blue Wave or not, there are so many things in place to tilt the elections state by state to the right wing for victory. I maintain that in order for Dems and Progressives to win they have to go to the polls in record breaking numbers because when election numbers are close it is very easy to steal the way the GOP is doing this. Read his updated book Code Red: codered2014.com/ Between Trump and a Hard Place: The Truth About "Rigged" ElectionsJonathan Simon Truth-out.org
Donald Trump speaks at a fly-in campaign event in Wilmington, Ohio, November 4, 2016. (Photo: Damon Winter / The New York Times)
What happens when a dangerous and serial liar like Donald Trump blunders onto an inconvenient and disruptive truth?
The truth Trump is inadvertently pointing to is not that elections in the United States are rigged, but that our privatized, electronic vote counting system is unobservable and incapable of proving that it is not rigged. This is a true crisis for American democracy. Yet, it would be hard to imagine a more unsuitable and uninformed standard-bearer for electoral integrity than Mr. Trump. His glib debate-night plan to hold America "in suspense" about whether he would accept electoral defeat was coupled with some racially-tinged nonsense about "voter fraud" in the millions, and the nonsensical proposition that Hillary Clinton should not be allowed to run for office because of her email-related issues and other supposed disqualifiers.
Predictably, Trump's message about "rigged" elections immediately resonated with his faithful (a significant bump in his poll numbers was detected). At the same time, it predictably provoked a rousing chorus of official denial, proclaiming the virtues of American democracy and the unquestionable security of our elections. These ringing assurances have come from all quarters of the political and media establishment, from president to pundit.
Lost, though, in the bipartisan condemnation of Trump and passionate renditions of America the Beautiful is an undeniable reality. Our computerized, unobservable vote counting system actually cannot prove or demonstrate that it is fraud-free. It simply cannot answer a challenge to its fidelity from Trump or anyone else, whether the challenge is justified or baseless, sincere or cynical. Keep reading at Truth-Out.org (opens in new tab)
CODE RED: Those Are OUR Fucking Ballots! from Dorothy Fadiman on Vimeo.
Nothing should be more self-evident than the simple statement that for an election to have legitimacy the counting process must be observable. If the votes are counted in secret “behind a curtain,” it does not matter how or by whom, the results lack legitimacy.
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 13, 2020 9:09:06 GMT
Computerized Vote Fraud Q & AIn searching out the truth, be ready for the unexpected, for it is difficult to find and puzzling when you find it. — Heraclitus
Q: What is a DRE?
A: A direct-recording electronic (DRE) voting machine records votes by means of a ballot display provided with mechanical or electro-optical components that can be activated by the voter. DRE’s are also called “touchscreens” because the voters indicate their votes by touching images displayed on the screen.
And why should you care?
A: 1. It offers no paper record 2. It is immune to recounts 3. It is immune to meaningful audit.
Q: In 100 words or so, tell me what you believe is happening with American elections.
A: Computerized vote counting has opened the door wide, over the past 15 years, to large-scale fraud and election theft. Virtually all the vote counting equipment is produced and programmed by a few corporations with right-wing ties. There is strong and pervasive forensic evidence that votecounts are being shifted to the right, altering key election outcomes. Mystifyingly, political intransigence is being electorally rewarded rather than punished. As a result, even as the pendulum appears to swing, American politics has veered inexorably and inexplicably to the right. This amounts to a rolling coup that is transforming America while disenfranchising an unsuspecting public.
To find out more, buy CODE RED at Amazon
Q. Haven’t there always been attempts to steal elections? Why is now any different?
A: Yes, political history is full of skullduggery. But, as IT expert Chuck Herrin memorably put it, “It takes a long time to change 10,000 votes by hand. It takes three seconds to change them in a computer.” What computerized elections have brought us, along with speed and convenience, is the opportunity to alter electoral outcomes strategically, surgically, massively, and covertly. And, because of selective access stemming from partisan control over the equipment itself, it is not equal-opportunity rigging—the evidence has shown that it virtually always goes in the same direction.
The “retail” fraud of the past, although unfortunate, was inefficient, rather overt, and tended to wind up a net wash overall, as it was a game played by both sides. The “wholesale” fraud of computerized rigging is a far more potent and incomparably more dangerous phenomenon.
Q: How do you know the computers on which we vote are so susceptible to fraud?
A: There is virtual unanimity among the experts who have studied electronic voting that insiders or hackers can change the results of elections without leaving a trace—at least not the kind of trace that any election administrator is likely to find. These studies have come from institutions such as Johns Hopkins, Princeton, the University of Michigan, The Brennan Center for Social Justice at NYU, the states of California and Ohio, and even the US Government Accountability Office. White-hat hackers such as Harri Hursti and Alex Halderman have demonstrated how quick and easy it is to swap memory cards in voting machines (inserting cards with malicious code) or break into the networked vote-counting computers increasingly in use.
The level of security of all this equipment is orders of magnitude below that found at major banks, corporations, and governmental institutions, and yet all of those high-security enterprises have been hacked and compromised repeatedly over the past several years, with increasing frequency. How much easier when the “hacker” is working from the inside or has been let in the door by someone who lives in the house.
Why, on what basis; why, by what logic; why, according to what understanding of human nature; why, from what view of history, politics, and the way high-stakes games are played by those high-rollers for whom, in Vince Lombardi’s words, winning is the only thing; why, why, why do we collectively and so blithely assume that hundreds of millions of votes counted in secret, on partisan produced and controlled equipment, will be counted honestly and that the public trust will be honored to the exclusion of any private agenda, however compelling?!
Why and how, in the face of this level of risk, can we just rest easy that all is going well and fairly in the depths of cyberspace where our choices have all become 1s and 0s dancing by the trillions in the dark? That dance is the embodiment of our sovereignty. It is from that dance that our future emerges and whoever programs the computers calls the dance. Setting aside for a moment all evidence of fraud, how can we possibly be OK with that?
To find out more, buy CODE RED at Amazon
Q: If you wanted to alter the outcome of an election, give me an example of how you might do it?
A: It depends upon the type of computer, but there are many ways to manipulate votes. One very basic scheme, where optical scanning voting computers (“opscans”) are in use, would be to set the “zero counters” (the number assigned to the first vote for a candidate, which logically should be “1” but on a computer can be any number) on the memory card in each machine to, say, +100 for the candidate you want to win and -100 for the one marked for defeat. At the end of the day the positive and negative offsets are a wash, so the total of ballots recorded by the opscans matches the total of voters signing the log books, the election officials are satisfied that the election was “clean,” and you have shifted a net of 200 votes on each machine so rigged, PDQ.
This takes just a few lines of programming out of the hundreds of thousands of lines of code on the memory card. It would be detectable only by a very painstaking examination of the card and its code, but the cards are regarded as strictly corporate property, completely off-limits to public inspection; in fact, not even election administrators are allowed to look. The command to alter the zero counters can be written not to take effect until actual vote counting begins on Election Day so that the opscans pass any pre-testing that election administrators might perform, and it can also be written in self-deleting code so that literally no post-election trace remains.
None of this is difficult or beyond the skills of even a high school-level programmer. Nor, for that matter, are rigs that instead work by shifting every nth vote or simply capping one candidate’s vote total and assigning all subsequent votes to her opponent. And, since opscans are programmed to “read” the marks voters make on ballots “geographically,” it is easy enough to alter the code in the ballot definition files to flip votes by reading the area for Candidate A as a Candidate B vote, and vice versa, or to be more or less sensitive to inevitable stray marks on the ballot, so as to selectively void more ballots in precincts known to be strongholds of the candidate(s) targeted for defeat.
Where “touchscreen” (also known as Direct Recording Electronic or “DRE”) computers are in use, their programming can be altered to cause the screen button pushed for “A” to record instead a vote for “B.” DREs that print out a “receipt” for the voter to “verify” (the vaunted “paper trail”) are of little help, as it is a trivial step to program the DRE to print a vote for “A” on the receipt while recording a vote for “B” in its cumulative count. While such a rig would lead to a disparity between the paper trail and the machine count, uncovering that mismatch would require a hand count of the paper-trail and the reality is that both the voter-marked ballots deposited into opscans and the “receipts” generated by paper-trail DREs are off-limits to public inspection and virtually never see the light of day, no matter how suspect an election’s results.
Where the voting equipment is networkable (that is, as is often the case, equipped with a modem), votes can be added, deleted, and shifted at will, as needed, in real time on Election Night. Millions of votes are sent through IP networks off-site and often out-of-state for “processing.” This saves manipulators from having to guess in advance how many votes they will need to shift, and so permits real-time-calibrated, “tidier” rigs—contests stolen with a smaller numerical footprint.
Q: Is it really possible, in a major election, to “count every vote as cast?”
A: In theory, yes; in practice, no. There is going to be a bit of “noise” in any system that attempts to count and aggregate large numbers. So “count every vote as cast” is a quixotic and misleading standard. “Noise” is not The Problem and neither are so-called “voter” frauds or genuine “glitches.” Computerized election rigging is not about miscounting a vote here and there, nor even about a few people voting twice or in the wrong district. Such exploits as double voting and impersonational voting are open to both parties, are at once low-yield and tremendously labor-intensive, virtually never alter electoral outcomes, and in the end, over time and space, wind up a wash. You can’t take over and hold onto America by hand.
Nor will “glitches”—which, with the non-intentionality of a flipped penny, break 50-50, yielding no net advantage—turn that trick (indeed we would accept computerized counting if truly inadvertent “glitches” were the only problem). Only deliberate systemic misrecording of votes and/or deliberate mistabulation at the aggregate level can do it, and only computers and their programmers have that power.
It is beyond ironic that Republican-controlled state legislatures throughout the country, many of which came to power via the highly suspect 2010 election, have in the past few years enacted restrictive Voter-ID laws, several of which have already been ruled unconstitutionally discriminatory by the courts, to deal with a putative epidemic of “voter fraud” that turns out to be virtually nonexistent. Yet manifestly vulnerable secret vote counting by radically partisan corporations goes merrily on its unchallenged way, pervasive red-shift disparities notwithstanding. There is a real Alice-In-Wonderland feel to it all.
Q: How does America stack up against other long-established democracies when it comes to electoral integrity?
Not very well. Indeed, in a joint study conducted by Harvard and the University of Sydney, the US elections of 2012 and 2014 scored dead last among the group of 54 long-established democracies. Particularly revealing was each nation’s electoral integrity score plotted against per capita GDP. To a significant degree, electoral integrity follows national wealth; in essence, free and fair elections are a commodity that wealthier nations can generally better afford. In the graph of all the world’s democracies, the US appears as an egregious outlier far below the wealth/integrity curve: a great deal of wealth not being spent here on democracy, at least on its electoral component. This of course squares with the sadly dilapidated state of America’s voting equipment and with the budgetary impracticality of beefing up the invitingly low levels of administrative scrutiny.
A recent foreign example serves to place in context the low standard of fidelity to which the process of counting votes is held in America. The Constitutional Court of Austria held, on July 1, 2016, that the mere possibility of irregularities in the counting process (counting in some places was begun before the prescribed cast of observers was present) was enough to void that nation’s presidential election results and necessitate a new election. It was not necessary for the challenger to prove fraud or actual manipulation, merely a lapse of full transparency such that outcome-altering manipulation might have occurred unobservably. Quite obviously, if US elections were held to such a standard, our unobservable vote counting process would foster a continual string of electoral re-dos, until it was replaced with an observable process.
To find out more, buy CODE RED at Amazon
Q: Who are these corporations that count our votes? What makes you think they care who wins elections?
A: Democratic elections should by their very nature be a public trust. The fact that virtually the entire vote-counting process in America has been outsourced to a few private corporations that operate behind an impenetrable screen of proprietary legal and administrative protections is bad enough. The actual history of the shape-shifting electronic voting industry and the cast of characters that has controlled it is in no way reassuring. Republican Senator Chuck Hagel owned a good part of the outfit that counted the votes returning him to the US Senate in Nebraska. Walden O’Dell, CEO of Diebold and an active Bush supporter, in 2003 penned a letter to potential donors in which he stated that he was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.” O’Dell was seen to be in a unique position to fulfill his commitment, as Diebold was the supplier and programmer of Ohio’s voting computers in E2004. Right-winger Bob Urosevich, founder of Election Systems and Software (ES&S), was also the first CEO of Diebold Election Systems (a subsidiary of O’Dell’s Diebold, Inc.); his brother, Todd, was Vice-President of ES&S.
As of 2012 the vote-counting corporations had been whittled down to two principals—ES&S and the descriptively named Dominion Voting—which between them controlled the computers that counted the vast majority of the votes in America. When you trace the pedigree of these vendors, every road seems to lead back to the right wing: wealthy Texas oilmen, fanatical Fundamentalists, major Republican donors, and prominent Republican politicians. In fact, Hart Intercivic, a junior partner to ES&S and Dominion, has a board majority controlled by an investment firm known as H.I.G. Capital, which in turn boasts Mitt Romney, his wife, son, and brother as major investors through the closely-held equity fund Solamere. Then there are the satellite corporations that do much of the actual programming, servicing, and deploying of the machines—outfits like Command Central, Triad, LHS, and the late Mike Connell’s own SmarTech—secretive to outright impenetrable.
All the self-promotion and self-congratulation on a sleek website like Dominion’s cannot quite obscure the fact that what these Lords of Elections are really saying is, “You may as well trust us. You have no other choice.” While the privatization of the vote-counting process gives rise to a situation in which electronic thumbs on the scale could in theory be sold to the highest bidder, the manifest partisanship of the outfits that program, distribute, and service the voting equipment is far more likely to translate in practice to politically selective access or, in the language of criminologists, opportunity and means. The consistently one-sided forensic evidence in the elections of the computerized era supports this assessment. It really is the man in the magician’s suit with the “Vote For So-And-So” button, if not on his lapel then on the inside of his sleeve, who takes our ballots and disappears behind the curtain.
Q: You state that virtually all the anomalies, disparities, and shifts are in one direction, favoring the right-wing candidates and positions. But what about 2006, 2008, and 2012? Those were Democratic victories! Why would forces on the right rig to lose?
A: They didn’t rig to lose, they rigged to win—or, more precisely, to maximize winnings and minimize losses within bounds of acceptable risk of detection. With a single very odd exception, to be discussed in the next chapter, every post-HAVA biennial election from 2002 through 2014 has exhibited a red shift both nationally and in the key states and districts. The red shifts in 2006 and 2008 were in fact massive but, in both 2006 and 2008, unexpected 11th-hour events (in 2006 the lurid sex scandals and cover-ups enveloping Republican Congressman Mark Foley and several other prominent right-wingers; and in 2008 the collapse of Lehman Brothers, which ushered in the Great Recession the day after John McCain had proclaimed the economy “strong”), dramatically altered the electoral dynamics.
In 2006, for instance, the Democratic margin in the nonpartisan Cook Generic Congressional Ballot (“On Election Day will you vote for the Republican or Democratic candidate for Congress in your district?”) jumped from 9% in the first week of October to 26% the week of the election, a Republican free-fall of epic proportions; a similar fate overcame McCain in the wake of the economy’s nosedive on Bush’s watch late in 2008. These leftward political sea changes likely swamped a rightward manipulation that turned out, in light of the unforeseen events, to be under-calibrated; and they came too late to permit rescue via recalibration and redeployment of tainted memory cards and malicious code.
The devil is in such details, but these red-shift red flags were ignored, trampled in the Obama victory parade. It is of course possible for Democrats and left-leaning candidates to win elections and there comes a point where, if the margin is large enough, reversing the outcome through computerized rigging, although technically feasible, would no longer pass the smell test. Nor is it necessary, after a certain point, for every vulnerable contest to be targeted for rigging: in bodies such as the US House and most state legislative chambers, a bare majority will suffice for practical partisan control and “padding” becomes a low-reward gambit. But it should be obvious that, in a finely balanced nation such as America, it is a long-term, indeed permanent, losing proposition to be required to poll supermajorities of 55% to 60% in order to eke out electoral victories. Even a relatively light thumb can effectively wreak havoc with the political scales.
It is now comprehended by strategists across the political spectrum that shifting demographic patterns have handed the Democrats a massive and growing electoral advantage nationwide. The radicalization of the Republican Party has only heightened that advantage. To win general elections and hold onto power—barring massive scandals and other egregious political fiascoes—Republicans are now obliged to turn to structural strategies to offset their demographic and political handicaps. Thus we have witnessed a spate of restrictive Voter-ID laws ostensibly passed to combat a nonexistent “epidemic” of “voter” fraud; ruthless gerrymandering of US House and statehouse districts, with emerging proposals to extend the gerrymander’s cynical powers to the presidential contest itself; the financial advantage gained through the US Supreme Court’s 5-to-4 Citizens United and McCutcheon decisions and the torrents of corporate campaign cash to which they opened the floodgates; and of course the “Vote Wednesday” flyers and robocalls and related disinformation campaigns.
Such tactics have served their purpose if they can bring contests within smell-test distance (in tracking and exit polls), where a computerized mistabulation can be outcome-altering without being shocking, and thus suspicion-arousing, in its magnitude. Restoration of the democracy Americans have been led to believe is their birthright will require addressing and reforming in turn each of these thumbs on the scale. If we agree that the most insidious thumb is the most covert, we will begin with the rescue of the votecount itself out of the darkness of cyberspace and into the light of public observation.
To find out more, buy CODE RED at Amazon
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 13, 2020 9:09:47 GMT
Computerized Vote Fraud Q & AQ: And the media? This is potentially the biggest story of their lives. Isn’t the “Fourth Estate” traditionally one of the most important guardians of democracy?
A: Many of us retain a warm spot for the American press still left over from the days of Watergate, when Woodward and Bernstein, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and even the networks seemed to be among the big heroes. It wasn’t that simple in reality, but the impression of both a heroic and a liberal press has been slow to fade, especially with the “liberal” label being flogged mercilessly by the right-wing media machine even as that machine took over talk radio and came to dominate network news and newspaper ownership.
Fast forward to 2014: the mainstream media (MSM) is almost entirely a subsidiary of mega-corporations, news budgets are slashed to the bone, opinions (often shouted) have displaced reporting and investigation, entertainment is the order of the day, and there are some insidious limits on the stuff that is, as the Times continues to put it, “fit to print.” That said, it is still astounding how impervious the MSM has been to this story. We have it, off the record, from several top journalists that their employers have flat-out prohibited them from writing or speaking on the matter of computerized election theft or reviewing any of the evidence that it is occurring.
The MSM has what seems to be a “rule” on this: it’s OK to make noise about the potential vulnerability of the machines in the run-up to elections (Lou Dobbs, for example, was all over this right up through Election Night in 2006; and we witnessed a virtual repeat in the days preceding E2012 and again this year); but following the election, when evidence pointing to actual manipulation is made available, all coverage is verboten. Omerta is the word that comes to mind, an unwritten code of silence. In 2004, when this story was “fresh,” Keith Olbermann had the temerity right after the election to start covering what had happened in Ohio, and actually began to dig into things a bit. He wrote to me that he was “very interested” in the statistical evidence that we had gathered. He devoted several powerful, widely-viewed, and very enthusiastically received segments to it and then . . . POOF! He was off on a two-week vacation of which there had been no prior mention. And when he came back . . . not another word, ever. The biggest story, by a factor of ten, of Olbermann’s professional career and he walks away mid-sentence?! It should be obvious that there are some powerful forces at work here set on making sure this story never gets legs.
And I might as well add that it’s not just the MSM. The progressive media—ranging from The Nation to Mother Jones to The Progressive Populist—have all taken a virtually complete pass. In their pages they continue to discuss—and bemoan—election dynamics and the “new politics” of the Tea Party era, without an iota of attention paid to even the possibility that these bizarre and troublesome results may have something to do with a digital thumb on the electronic counting scale, not so much as a hint that there may be something to question or investigate.
This is perhaps the most mystifying thing of all: watching the progressives of America commit political suicide, as their media buy into a rigged game and seem perpetually to be discussing their own culpability for the latest political setbacks or shocking routs, while their entire agenda goes DOA. As far as I can tell, apart from the Wall Of Denial itself, the fear in these quarters is marginalization, that even mentioning the possibility of actual electronic election rigging will forfeit their hard-earned place at the “serious journalism” table or, in the case of groups such as Common Cause or People For The American Way or the ACLU, the “serious advocacy” table. If that risk seems exaggerated, simply recall the fate of Dan Rather, a titanic media figure permanently exiled after stepping “out of bounds” regarding George W. Bush’s National Guard records. As with the whistle-blowers, even a single such demise sends a powerful and unambiguous message to the rest.
From his place of exile (Dan Rather Reports on the little-watched HDNet), Rather himself took on at least some of the story in a program that aired in October 2011. But journalism is classic groupthink and, until you have more than one brave soul willing to step concurrently into the breach, the story generally dies on the vine. No one followed Rather’s lead. Jon Stewart once questioned the technology in his inimitable way on The Daily Show, Garry Trudeau in Doonesbury, Scott Adams more recently in Dilbert, and I hope they (and/or some of their colleagues) will come back to it. Sporadic eyebrow-raising and throat-clearing is better than total silence, but it goes only so far and that is not close to far enough given the massive inertias involved.
Ironically, among many in the progressive media, the attitude seems to be, “If there were anything seriously wrong, the Democrats would be all over it.” This from the same people who regularly pillory the Democrats as political sellouts? So, in a classic and deadly illustration of Bystander’s Syndrome (action is distasteful or risky and we can each convince ourselves that someone else will “call 911”), everyone sort of sits around waiting for someone else to stick out his or her neck. And about the only press willing to do that are web-based sites such as BradBlog and OpEdNews. They merit very high praise indeed for their persistence. But in America if a story doesn’t make it to the Times or the networks, it’s still a tin-hat conspiracy theory, no matter how well presented and documented. Look at how long it took us to take seriously allegations of performance-enhancing drugs in baseball. Look at how long, even after the whistle-blower Harry Markopolos had stepped forward, Bernie Madoff continued to operate his Ponzi scheme.
With elections the stakes are immensely higher and the fear that everything will fall apart if the truth is rigorously pursued is rather paralyzing. To put it slightly differently, investigation would lead to knowledge and knowledge would mandate action, an inexorable process once begun. But no individual operating within the vast system of American politics can imagine what action he or she might take—both the personal blowback and the national earthquake would be too catastrophic. So the morally compelling but pragmatically daunting “action imperative” itself paradoxically operates to block the road of investigation at its very beginning.
To get back to the media, I wrote in 2004 that when the autopsy of American democracy is performed the cause of death will be given as media silence. What I’ve seen in the dozen years since only strengthens that prediction. To me, in fact, the American press and media are the most wretched villains of the piece. Those actually doing the rigging, whether it’s a Rovean figure playing God or some cadre of true believers, are in a sense “doing their job,” just like a lineman “holding” in football to protect the quarterback. The media’s job is to spot the foul, get at and promulgate the truth. And they are the ones who are not doing their job. Individually by the hundreds, and collectively as a force, they have served as enablers. They appear to be either in deep denial, anaesthetized, or content with a sham democracy, which would of course suit their ultimate corporate masters just fine.
I’m not sure how much intimidation is being meted out or even what quarter it’s coming from, but it is time someone with a following found the courage to risk his or her job, or even his or her life, in service to the truth. That courage is surely not unprecedented in our nation’s history and it is sorely needed now if what the courageous have fought and died for is to survive.
To find out more, buy CODE RED at Amazon
Q: What does it take to know that an election has been honest, that the votes have been counted reasonably accurately given the large numbers involved?
A: It takes an open, transparent, and observable process. There can’t be any point in the counting process where the magician disappears behind the curtain, even for a few seconds, because a few seconds is all it takes to change the outcome of an election inside a computer.
Apologists for the current computerized counting system will point to all the aspects of “openness:” how observers can be present at the polls, how the machines are “certified” and put through a sample ballot test at some point before the election, how when opscans are used all the actual ballots can be counted if there is any question, how with VVPAT (i.e., “paper-trail”) DREs the voter gets to see a receipt!
What they will conveniently leave out of that reassuring presentation are the crucial concealed passages along the pipeline, and the fact that a system is only as transparent as its most concealed point. A computer can without difficulty be programmed to pass any pre-election test with flying colors and still shift votes at the time of the actual election. You can deploy an army of observers at the polling places and central tabulation locations and none of them will be able to see the actual count (or miscount) inside the computers. Where opscans are used, the reality is that the actual ballots are virtually never examined: mere citizens have no right to do so and candidates, where they might have such a right (and noting that it is generally made prohibitively expensive at precisely the stage at which candidates have emptied their campaign chests), are under enormous pressure not to exercise it, lest they be labeled “sore losers” and so torpedo their future political careers. Certain states, following Florida’s lead, have gone even further and outright banned hand counting to verify the machine counts. Finally, touchscreen computers with so-called “paper trails” can easily be programmed to print a vote for “A” on the “receipt” while recording a vote for “B” in the official count, and these receipts for digitally cast votes are even less likely than actual voter-marked ballots to ever see the light of day.
An open and observable process would entail visible counting that could be witnessed by representatives of all candidates and the public at every stage. There would be, as there once was, a “tabulation tree,” with the precinct counts observed directly and publicly posted, and the subsequent aggregations at the town, county, and state levels capable of being reconciled (the process is simple addition) from the lowest level to the highest. No observation or vigilance will ever insure a “perfect” count, but the minor inaccuracies, the “noise,” in the system will break evenly, only extremely rarely affecting electoral outcomes, and those so close that full recounts would be undertaken as a matter of course. Under an observable counting process there would be no opportunity to, in effect, perpetrate a rolling coup and steal a nation.
Q: What can be done? Is there any real prospect of observable and honest elections in the United States?
A: Democracy, contrary to the facile assumptions of those born into it and apt to take both its blessings and its workings for granted, is no sure thing. While political evolution in the modern era has seemed to be inexorably bringing democracy of one sort or another to more and more of the world, the countercurrents—both historical (Hitler, Stalin, Franco, Pinochet, et al) and contemporary (Russia, China, Egypt, etc.)—are very strong and have certainly not ceded the field.
Power, always seeking consolidation and control, has a way of finding the chinks, slipping in the explosives and blowing democracies and genuinely representative governance up. Or, more subtly and patiently, slow-dripping its acid onto the scaffolding that holds democracy upright. We’ve seen in America the metastasis of the security state, the infiltration of big money into politics, and the consolidation of the mainstream media under control of a handful of corporations. All of these developments make America look less democratic. The process may not be explosive, like a coup, but it is visibly erosive.
Election theft is different in that it allows its perpetrators to keep “democracy” perfectly intact and looking like a democracy even after it’s been effectively gutted. It is also something that very few Americans of our time ever thought they’d have to worry about, and something that they’d still very much rather not worry about (as it goes against every premise of positive national identity and esteem), especially if they have a seat at or anywhere near the power table. So we are in a very dark and dangerous place and facing an historical tragedy in the making.
It is not unrealistic to imagine systemic election rigging giving rise to a politics so one-sided or so out of sync with the public will that eventually the inkling that something is very wrong with the whole picture becomes irrepressible.
It is also possible to imagine something ultimately more damning: a carefully titrated rigging strategy that would preserve, perhaps indefinitely, the illusions of a freely swinging pendulum and of public sovereignty.
And finally it is not wholly inconceivable that a hidden game of rigging, thwarting, and counter-rigging—a kind of domestic electoral equivalent of the spy-thriller antics of the Cold War—will come to characterize our best-in-class, made-in-the-USA model of democracy.
It is not yet entirely clear which it will be, though it is becoming clearer. As we will now proceed to examine, the elections of 2010, 2012, 2014, and 2016, taken together, shed a good deal of light on how the electoral computer game is likely to be played as we move further into the New American Century.
To find out more, buy CODE RED at Amazon
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 13, 2020 9:10:20 GMT
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 13, 2020 9:11:06 GMT
The 2018 Midterm Elections are at Risk Use our video resources to learn more about potential problems...
Review film clips, action items and other links related to voting rights
www.electionsatrisk.org/clips.shtml
Watch this feature film
Narrated by Peter Coyote
STEALING AMERICA: Vote by Vote
STEALING AMERICA documents Presidential races that election analysts report had significant irregularities such as suspicious vote totals, voter disenfranchisement and many other signs of manipulation.
Click here to go to the CLIPS PAGE & watch 16 more videos: electionsatrisk.org/clips.shtml
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 13, 2020 9:11:34 GMT
Opinion Brian Kemp, Enemy of DemocracyAn expert on voter suppression, he will help keep Georgia red.By Carol Anderson Dr. Anderson is the author of the forthcoming “One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy.”
Aug. 11, 2018
The Republican nominee for governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, at a rally in July.CreditCreditAudra Melton for The New York Times
The Republican runoff for the governorship in Georgia last month seemed like a cage match to see who could best mimic President Trump. The primary combatants, Secretary of State Brian Kemp and Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle, ran on a platform of a hatred of “illegal” immigrants and a love of guns. It was a race to see who “could be the craziest,” as Mr. Cagle admitted. He thought he would win.
But he lost in a landslide. Shortly before the election, the president endorsed Mr. Kemp, and the political tide turned. He has a skill set that Mr. Trump desperately needed but was curiously silent about in his endorsement: He is a master of voter suppression.
Hackable polling machines, voter roll purges, refusing to register voters until after an election, the use of investigations to intimidate groups registering minorities to vote — Mr. Kemp knows it all.
A supporter at Brian Kemp’s primary election night event in the Georgia governor’s race.CreditMelissa Golden for The New York Times Image
The Georgia state flag used from 1956 to 2001 on display at a polling station in Chickamauga last May.CreditDoug Strickland/Chattanooga Times Free Press, via Associated Press Voter suppression keeps Georgia a red state. Since 2005, Republicans have controlled the State Legislature as well as the governor’s office. Now most of the congressional districts are Republican. So are nearly 64 percent of the state representatives and 66 percent of the state senators.
That political power, however, bears no relation to the state’s demographics. Whites make up less than 60 percent of the state’s population but more than 90 percent of people who voted Republican in the primary. The state’s gerrymandered districts, drawn and redrawn by the Republican-dominated Legislature, mirror the inordinate and disproportionate power of this constituency.
But a change is coming. Black voter turnout, despite the barriers, is increasing — energized by a growing antipathy toward President Trump and his vision for and of African-Americans. Moreover, as the Pew Hispanic Trust reported, the ranks of the Republican Party are declining. In 2016, whites made up 57 percent of all registered voters in Georgia, down from 68 percent in 2004.
That’s why Mr. Kemp has worked diligently to fortify the Republicans’ crumbling bulwark since he became secretary of state in 2010. He has begun investigations into organizations that registered nearly 200,000 new Asian-American and African-American voters — efforts that resulted in the first majority-black school board in a small town.
His investigations yielded no charges, no indictments, no convictions, despite years of probing, suspects’ losing their jobs and Georgia Bureau of Investigation agents knocking on doors. Yet the intimidation had an impact. An attorney from a targeted organization told a reporter: “I’m not going to lie; I was shocked. I was scared.”
While Mr. Kemp insisted that these investigations were about preventing in-person voter fraud (which basically doesn’t exist), he was more candid when talking with fellow Republicans: “Democrats are working hard,” he warned in a recording released by a progressive group “registering all these minority voters that are out there and others that are sitting on the sidelines.”
“If they can do that, they can win these elections in November,” Mr. Kemp said. Therefore, even after the multiple investigations yielded no indication of fraud, thousands of people registered during these drives were not on the voter registration rolls, and a court ruling kept it that way.
Mr. Kemp also used Exact Match, a version of the infamous Crosscheck database, to put tens of thousands of citizens in electoral limbo, refusing to place them on the rolls if an errant hyphen, a stray letter or a typographical error on someone’s voter registration card didn’t match the records of the state’s driver’s license bureau or the Social Security office.
Using this method, Mr. Kemp blocked nearly 35,000 people from the voter rolls. Equally important, African-Americans, who made up a third of the registrants, accounted for almost 66 percent of the rejected applicants. And Asian-Americans and Latino voters were more than six times as likely as whites to have been stymied from registering.
But as diligent as he has been about purging eligible citizens from the voter rolls, Mr. Kemp has been just as lax about the cybersecurity of the state’s 27,000 electronic voting machines. Although there were a series of warnings about the ease with which they could be hacked, Mr. Kemp did not respond. Georgia’s electronic voting machines, which run on Windows 2000, leave no paper trail; as a result, there is no way to verify whether the counts are accurate or whether the vote has been hacked.
But the Department of Homeland Security warned him that hacking was a possibility. He ignored that until 2016, when, at a DefCon hacker convention in Las Vegas, an organization took control over the way Georgia’s voting machines register and store votes, although it had little expertise in voting matters. Mr. Kemp finally accepted federal dollars, which he had refused for years, to update some of the machines. But his efforts were too little, too late.
That complacency was evident when groups sued the state, alleging that the 2016 presidential election and a 2017 special election had been hacked. Rather than being on high alert to get to the bottom of it, after Mr. Kemp received notification of the lawsuit, officials at Kennesaw State University, which provides logistical support for the state’s election machinery, “destroyed the server that housed statewide election data.” That series of events, including an April visit to the small campus by Ambassador Sergey Kislyak of Russia, raised warning flags to many observers. But not to Mr. Kemp, who said that there was nothing untoward in any of it; the erasure was “in accordance with standard IT procedures.”
Mr. Trump’s endorsement, therefore, was no surprise. Mr. Kemp had pulled off an incredible feat: Georgia’s population increased, but since 2012, the number of registered voters has decreased. He, like Mr. Trump, has been steadfast in riding the voter-fraud train, regardless of how often and thoroughly the claim has been debunked. His work has winnowed out minorities who overwhelmingly vote Democratic and so threaten the Republican stranglehold on Georgia.
A Kemp victory in November is, therefore, transactional but essential for Mr. Trump. It means that there will be a governor, in a state that demographically should be blue, who is practiced and steeped in the nuances of disfranchisement. Mr. Kemp can rubber-stamp the Legislature’s voter-suppression bills that privilege the Republican Party, artificially increase the Republican representation in Congress and in the end protect a president facing mounting evidence of graft, corruption, conspiracy and the threat of impeachment.
Carol Anderson is a professor of African-American studies at Emory University. She is the author of “White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide” and the forthcoming “One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy.”
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 13, 2020 9:12:50 GMT
Activists ‘Leverage’ Their Voices To Block Georgia Voter Suppression EffortElection officials wanted to close seven of nine voting locations in a majority-Black county. Nigel Roberts Written By Nigel Roberts Posted August 26, 2018
11618 A chorus of voting rights activists blended their voices to shut down a voter suppression attempt against African Americans in rural Randolph County, Georgia.
SEE ALSO: Georgia’s Excuse For Closing Polling Stations In A Predominantly Black County Begins To Unravel newsone.com/3823238/voter-suppression-georgia-randolph-county/
“We were at the meeting with court papers in hand and we were prepared to file suit on behalf of People’s Agenda, Georgia NAACP and New Georgia Project and African American voters in the county if the proposal went forward,” Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, told NewsOne.
Election officials voted at a public hearing on Friday not to close seven of the nine voting location in the predominantly African-American county.
Kristen Clarke ✔ @kristenclarkejd BREAKING: We won! Voter suppression proposal in Randolph County abandoned. All 9 polling sites across the county will stand.
This is a victory for African American voters who, too often, are subject to voting discrimination and racial animus. @lawyerscomm
5:36 AM - Aug 24, 2018 114K 26.7K people are talking about this Twitter Ads info and privacy The officials came under fire from civil rights organizations and residents for considering the proposal, claiming that the seven sites were not wheelchair accessible. Closing the sites would have forced scores of residents to use alternative polling places, miles away, for the November general election.
Opponents believed the claim about handicap accessibility was a pretext to veil underlying racism and to keep the governor’s office under Republican control. Georgia’s Black voters have the opportunity to elect Stacey Abrams, who could become the nation’s first female African-American governor.
“This is a victory for African-American voters across Georgia who are too often subject to a relentless campaign of voter suppression,” Clarke said. “The defeat of this proposal also shows the power of resistance and the impact that we can have by leveraging our voices against injustice.”
In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court rolled back a portion of the Voting Rights Act that required several jurisdictions, mainly in the Deep South, to obtain federal permission before changing how residents are allowed to vote. Since then, civil rights groups have been fighting to stem the steady erosion of voting rights.
To that end, Lawyers’ Committee submitted a pre-suit demand letter on Aug. 20 to the Randolph County Board of Elections, objecting to the proposed closures.
“The right to vote is the most sacred civil right in our democracy, and we stand fully prepared to defend that right throughout the midterm election cycle,” Clarke stated.
newsone.com/3823545/voter-suppression-georgia-randolph-county-close-poll-sites/
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 13, 2020 9:13:24 GMT
Turning a BLUE WAVE into a RED WAVE with the flip of a switch.Election fraud is Real! Jonathan Simon author of CODE RED: Memory Cards are easily rigged.
Published on Jul 12, 2015 Election fraud is Real! Author of CODE RED: Jonathan Simon simply explains in this short video clip how voting machine’s memory cards can be programmed to switch votes. Video excerpt from a Panel Discussion on Computerized Vote Theft and the Subversion of Democracy. May 31, 2015 at John Jay College, New York, New York:
It’s now been 13 years since “HAVA” Help America Vote Act gave states $3.9 billion in subsidies to modernize their voting rolls and election equipment, which resulting in installing Hackable electronic voting machines. As of 2012, 95 percent of the country’s voters were voting on electronic touch-screen machines, or on optical scanners. Computer programming is the province of small elite private programmers and/or corporations who work in the shadows beyond the reach of public records request: fatallyflawedelections.blogspot.com/2015/03/william-e-doyle-hidden-de-facto.html
All theses electronic voting machines use programs that enjoy copyright protection from public scrutiny, not secure from hacking and there is ample evidence that voting machines can be hacked and here is ours in Arizona! Attorney Bill Risner disclosure statement filed with court Jan 12, 2012, which is a mind blowing, comprehensive statement of facts collected over many years of investigating and litigation of Pima County: drive.google.com/file/d/0B6Fh3F6hufhDNWVmYzBiMWMtMTc3Zi00NDk3LTkxYzEtOTQzNGIzNzk0NDZm/view
In Tucson, AZ we won 3 court cases to collect the evidence; nevertheless at the end, after 8 years, they would not allow us to present the evidence in court. Pima County Elections programmed the memory cards to rig the outcome of a $2 billion bond election in May 2006. I refer you to this summary article after the Maricopa Appellate Court denied our appeal: fatallyflawedelections.blogspot.com/2014/07/elections-remain-compromised.html
Also please watch this short video that shows how the precincts’ memory cards can be pre-stuffed with votes and still produce a zero tape before the 1st ballot is ever counted:
The Diebold, GEMS/AccuVote machine that in 2012 was in use in 20 states by more than 26 million voters was hacked into by a team at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, which concluded that anyone with $26 in parts and an eighth-grade science education could manipulate the outcome of an election, according to Collier. Team leader Roger Johnson called it a “national security issue.” Want proof? Watch this: From the May 31, 2015 forum in New York you can get a great overview from these outstanding panelists: Bob Fitrakis (Ohio shenanigans in the presidential elections and how they were thwarted in 2012). Jonathan Simon (voting machines, and, YES, they’re used to steal elections). Mark Crispin Miller (the media’s role in this). Allegra Dengler (NYS’s voting machines). Victoria Collier (40 years of electoral shenanigans documented by her father and uncle, and how to engage young people). Complete video:
Our current investigation is on The 'Doyle Anomaly in Arizona!' One guy, “William E. Doyle”, looks to be the Hidden De Facto Statewide Election Director for the last 25 years: fatallyflawedelections.blogspot.com/2015/03/william-e-doyle-hidden-de-facto.html
History teaches us that elections without public accountability are nothing more than vote-counting in the dark, controlled by a government in the act of choosing itself and its cronies, while picking our pockets. Our message is simple: “We the People”, must have elections that are 100% transparent, with documented ‘checks and balances’ and ‘chain-of-custody’, followed by mandatory election verification! Nothing less! Government can never be the sole verifier of its own secret elections.
I bought 20 copies of CODE RED last September and gave them to my co plaintiffs and others in the San Cruz County Public Records case that we won: Link to CODE RED: codered2014.com/
John Roberts Brakey of Americans United for Democracy, Integrity, and Transparency, Arizona AUDITAZ@cox.net
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