OK, then — in One Party America … with no one to blame for the steaming pile of corruption and decline we’ve become but their own hubris and arrogance and greed and ineptitude … who can the Pub’s go after in the Blame Game?? Why, the LAST guy in office, of course.
This is almost funny, big picture — because as mild-mannered as Bill Clinton is, the one thing that makes him spit coffee, scowl and raise his [considerable] voice is the Republican Hit Squad, the one that ran his own presidency and wobbly marriage into the ground in those last unhappy days at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
The Path to 9/11 gave us the Rovian playbook — and Bill’s decision to enter Red Territory on FOX [Faux] News is about as good a throw down as I can think of. In the transcript [and video snip] below, which has not yet aired [and much of it probably won't, I'd guess] he takes on Wallace the Younger with some of that anger that never found resolve in his last term.
I’d expect that in Bill’s mind, anybody who takes him on, at this point [looks like ... feels like ... Ken Starr and the 'vast right-wing conspiracy,' appropriately named by Hil, and ...] deserves an ass whoopin’ … at minimum.
This will make you smile. From framed* to reframer … below.
Jude
* Oh, I know he did it … we all know he did it … but the amount of political oxygen that accompanied that fateful blow [pun, no pun] was yet another of those inappropriate uses of power we’ve learned to swallow [pun, no pun] from the Red’s. What might Clinton have accomplished without the hysteria of the Republican “ethical concerns” pogrom? And look where those ethics have taken us, today. I’ll bet Bill Clinton is clear enough on what ‘constitutes’ torture! Pfffffft!
Clinton Takes On Fox News
http://thinkprogress.org/2006/09/22/clinton-fox/
Today, President Bill Clinton taped an interview with Fox News’ Chris Wallace, which is scheduled to be aired Sunday. He was told the interview would focus on his nonpartisan efforts to raise over $7 billion to combat the world’s biggest problems.
Early in the interview, Wallace attempted to smear Clinton with the same kind of misinformation contained in ABC’s Path to 9/11. Clinton was having none of it.
ThinkProgress has obtained a transcript of the interview. Here are some highlights –
Wallace repeats Path to 9/11 misinformation, Clinton fights back:
WALLACE: When we announced that you were going to be on Fox News Sunday, I got a lot of email from viewers, and I got to say I was surprised most of them wanted me to ask you this question. Why didn’t you do more to put Bin Laden and al Qaeda out of business when you were President? There’s a new book out which I suspect you’ve read called the Looming Tower. And it talks about how the fact that when you pulled troops out of Somalia in 1993, Bin Laden said “I have seen the frailty and the weakness and the cowardice of US troops.” Then there was the bombing of the embassies in Africa and the attack on the USS Cole.
CLINTON: OK..
WALLACE: …may I just finish the question sir. And after the attack, the book says, Bin Laden separated his leaders because he expected an attack and there was no response. I understand that hindsight is 20/20.
CLINTON: No let’s talk about…
WALLACE: …but the question is why didn’t you do more, connect the dots and put them out of business?
CLINTON: OK, let’s talk about it. I will answer all of those things on the merits but I want to talk about the context of which this arises. I’m being asked this on the FOX network…ABC just had a right wing conservative on the Path to 9/11 falsely claim that it was based on the 9/11 Commission report with three things asserted against me that are directly contradicted by the 9/11 Commission report. I think it’s very interesting that all the conservative Republicans who now say that I didn’t do enough, claimed that I was obsessed with Bin Laden. All of President Bush’s neocons claimed that I was too obsessed with finding Bin Laden when they didn’t have a single meeting about Bin Laden for the nine months after I left office. All the right wingers who now say that I didn’t do enough said that I did too much. Same people.
WALLACE: Do you think you did enough sir?
CLINTON: No, because I didn’t get him.
WALLACE: Right…
CLINTON: But at least I tried. That’s the difference in me and some, including all the right wingers who are attacking me now. They ridiculed me for trying. They had eight months to try and they didn’t…I tried. So I tried and failed. When I failed I left a comprehensive anti-terror strategy and the best guy in the country, Dick Clarke… So you did FOX’s bidding on this show. You did you nice little conservative hit job on me. But what I want to know..
WALLACE: Now wait a minute sir…
CLINTON:…
WALLACE: I asked a question. You don’t think that’s a legitimate question?
CLINTON: It was a perfectly legitimate question but I want to know how many people in the Bush administration you asked this question of. I want to know how many people in the Bush administration you asked: Why didn’t you do anything about the Cole? I want to know how many you asked: Why did you fire Dick Clarke? I want to know…
WALLACE: We asked…
CLINTON:…
WALLACE: Do you ever watch Fox News Sunday sir?
CLINTON: I don’t believe you ask them that.
WALLACE: We ask plenty of questions of…
CLINTON: You didn’t ask that did you? Tell the truth.
WALLACE: About the USS Cole?
CLINTON: Tell the truth.
WALLACE: I…with Iraq and Afghanistan there’s plenty of stuff to ask.
CLINTON: Did you ever ask that? You set this meeting up because you were going to get a lot of criticism from your viewers because Rupert Murdoch is going to get a lot of criticism from your viewers for supporting my work on climate change. And you came here under false pretenses and said that you’d spend half the time talking about…
WALLACE: [laughs]
CLINTON: You said you’d spend half the time talking about what we did out there to raise $7 billion dollars plus over three days from 215 different commitments. And you don’t care.
Clinton on his priorities and the Bush administration priorities:
CLINTON: What did I do? I worked hard to try and kill him. I authorized a finding for the CIA to kill him. We contracted with people to kill him. I got closer to killing him than anybody has gotten since. And if I were still president we’d have more than 20,000 troops there trying to kill him. Now I never criticized President Bush and I don’t think this is useful. But you know we do have a government that thinks Afghanistan is 1/7 as important as Iraq. And you ask me about terror and Al Qaeda with that sort of dismissive theme when all you have to do is read Richard Clarke’s book to look at what we did in a comprehensive systematic way to try to protect the country against terror. And you’ve got that little smirk on your face. It looks like you’re so clever…
WALLACE: [Laughs]
CLINTON: I had responsibility for trying to protect this country. I tried and I failed to get Bin Laden. I regret it but I did try. And I did everything I thought I responsibly could. The entire military was against sending special forces into Afghanistan and refueling by helicopter and no one thought we could do it otherwise…We could not get the CIA and the FBI to certify that Al Qaeda was responsible while I was President. Until I left office. And yet I get asked about this all the time and they had three times as much time to get him as I did and no one ever asks them about this. I think that’s strange.
Read the full transcript (rough) HERE:
http://thinkprogress.org/clinton-interview
++
Go Big Dog
Jane Hamsher
http://www.firedoglake.com/2006/09/22/go-big-dog/
[open link for YouTube snip]
I actually think this could be quite an important moment for Democrats to re-frame the national security debate. Wallace pushed Clinton into saying what Democrats should be saying — Bush was asleep on the job, did not take Osama Bin Laden seriously and his actions have not made us safer.
[...]
No prisoners, Bubba. No prisoners. ++
What’s right and good doesn’t come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it - as if the cause depends on you, because it does. Allow yourself that conceit - to believe that the flame of Democracy will never go out as long as there’s one candle in your hand.
~ Bill Moyers
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
September 23rd, 2006
We all know … have known … that the Diebold problem is Square Zero in our political future and fortune, as it has been for the last several years. With no question at all, Kerry won Ohio — thus the US Presidency. That he didn’t raise Holy Hell at that point is good enough reason for me to consider him null and void for a future run … if he can’t fight for what’s his, what makes him think he can fight for what’s ours?
RFK Jr. is our Hero of the Day … Bobby would be busting his buttons.
Jude
Will the Next Election Be Hacked?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Rolling Stone
Thursday 05 October 2006 Issue
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/11717105/robert_f_kennedy_jr__wil
Fresh disasters at the polls - and new evidence from an industry insider - prove that electronic voting machines can’t be trusted.
The debacle of the 2000 presidential election made it all too apparent to most Americans that our electoral system is broken. And private-sector entrepreneurs were quick to offer a fix: Touch-screen voting machines, promised the industry and its lobbyists, would make voting as easy and reliable as withdrawing cash from an ATM. Congress, always ready with funds for needy industries, swiftly authorized $3.9 billion to upgrade the nation’s election systems - with much of the money devoted to installing electronic voting machines in each of America’s 180,000 precincts. But as midterm elections approach this November, electronic voting machines are making things worse instead of better. Studies have demonstrated that hackers can easily rig the technology to fix an election - and across the country this year, faulty equipment and lax security have repeatedly undermined election primaries. In Tarrant County, Texas, electronic machines counted some ballots as many as six times, recording 100,000 more votes than were actually cast. In San Diego, poll workers took machines home for unsupervised “sleepovers” before the vote, leaving the equipment vulnerable to tampering. And in Ohio - where, as I recently reported in “Was the 2004 Election Stolen?” [RS 1002], dirty tricks may have cost John Kerry the presidency - a government report uncovered large and unexplained discrepancies in vote totals recorded by machines in Cuyahoga County.
Even worse, many electronic machines don’t produce a paper record that can be recounted when equipment malfunctions - an omission that practically invites malicious tampering. “Every board of election has staff members with the technological ability to fix an election,” Ion Sancho, an election supervisor in Leon County, Florida, told me. “Even one corrupt staffer can throw an election. Without paper records, it could happen under my nose and there is no way I’d ever find out about it. With a few key people in the right places, it would be possible to throw a presidential election.”
Chris Hood remembers the day in August 2002 that he began to question what was really going on in Georgia. An African-American whose parents fought for voting rights in the South during the 1960s, Hood was proud to be working as a consultant for Diebold Election Systems, helping the company promote its new electronic voting machines. During the presidential election two years earlier, more than 94,000 paper ballots had gone uncounted in Georgia - almost double the national average - and Secretary of State Cathy Cox was under pressure to make sure every vote was recorded properly.
Hood had been present in May 2002, when officials with Cox’s office signed a contract with Diebold - paying the company a record $54 million to install 19,000 electronic voting machines across the state. At a restaurant inside Atlanta’s Marriott Hotel, he noticed the firm’s CEO, Walden O’Dell, checking Diebold’s stock price on a laptop computer every five minutes, waiting for a bounce from the announcement.
Hood wondered why Diebold, the world’s third-largest seller of ATMs, had been awarded the contract. The company had barely completed its acquisition of Global Election Systems, a voting-machine firm that owned the technology Diebold was promising to sell Georgia. And its bid was the highest among nine competing vendors. Whispers within the company hinted that a fix was in.
“The Diebold executives had a news conference planned on the day of the award,” Hood recalls, “and we were instructed to stay in our hotel rooms until just hours before the announcement. They didn’t want the competitors to know and possibly file a protest” about the lack of a fair bidding process. It certainly didn’t hurt that Diebold had political clout: Cox’s predecessor as secretary of state, Lewis Massey, was now a lobbyist for the company.
The problem was, Diebold had only five months to install the new machines - a “very narrow window of time to do such a big deployment,” Hood notes. The old systems stored in warehouses had to be replaced with new equipment; dozens of state officials and poll workers had to be trained in how to use the touch-screen machines. “It was pretty much an impossible task,” Hood recalls. There was only one way, he adds, that the job could be done in time - if “the vendor had control over the entire environment.” That is precisely what happened. In late July, to speed deployment of the new machines, Cox quietly signed an agreement with Diebold that effectively privatized Georgia’s entire electoral system. The company was authorized to put together ballots, program machines and train poll workers across the state - all without any official supervision. “We ran the election,” says Hood. “We had 356 people that Diebold brought into the state. Diebold opened and closed the polls and tabulated the votes. Diebold convinced Cox that it would be best if the company ran everything due to the time constraints, and in the interest of a trouble-free election, she let us do it.”
Then, one muggy day in mid-August, Hood was surprised to see the president of Diebold’s election unit, Bob Urosevich, arrive in Georgia from his headquarters in Texas. With the primaries looming, Urosevich was personally distributing a “patch,” a little piece of software designed to correct glitches in the computer program. “We were told that it was intended to fix the clock in the system, which it didn’t do,” Hood says. “The curious thing is the very swift, covert way this was done.”
Georgia law mandates that any change made in voting machines be certified by the state. But thanks to Cox’s agreement with Diebold, the company was essentially allowed to certify itself. “It was an unauthorized patch, and they were trying to keep it secret from the state,” Hood told me. “We were told not to talk to county personnel about it. I received instructions directly from Urosevich. It was very unusual that a president of the company would give an order like that and be involved at that level.”
According to Hood, Diebold employees altered software in some 5,000 machines in DeKalb and Fulton counties - the state’s largest Democratic strongholds. To avoid detection, Hood and others on his team entered warehouses early in the morning. “We went in at 7:30 a.m. and were out by 11,” Hood says. “There was a universal key to unlock the machines, and it’s easy to get access. The machines in the warehouses were unlocked. We had control of everything. The state gave us the keys to the castle, so to speak, and they stayed out of our way.” Hood personally patched fifty-six machines and witnessed the patch being applied to more than 1,200 others.
The patch comes on a memory card that is inserted into a machine. Eventually, all the memory cards end up on a server that tabulates the votes - where the patch can be programmed to alter the outcome of an election. “There could be a hidden program on a memory card that adjusts everything to the preferred election results,” Hood says. “Your program says, ‘I want my candidate to stay ahead by three or four percent or whatever.’ Those programs can include a built-in delete that erases itself after it’s done.”
It is impossible to know whether the machines were rigged to alter the election in Georgia: Diebold’s machines provided no paper trail, making a recount impossible. But the tally in Georgia that November surprised even the most seasoned political observers. Six days before the vote, polls showed Sen. Max Cleland, a decorated war veteran and Democratic incumbent, leading his Republican opponent Saxby Chambliss - darling of the Christian Coalition - by five percentage points. In the governor’s race, Democrat Roy Barnes was running a decisive eleven points ahead of Republican Sonny Perdue. But on Election Day, Chambliss won with fifty-three percent of the vote, and Perdue won with fifty-one percent.
Diebold insists that the patch was installed “with the approval and oversight of the state.” But after the election, the Georgia secretary of state’s office submitted a “punch list” to Bob Urosevich of “issues and concerns related to the statewide voting system that we would like Diebold to address.” One of the items referenced was” Application/Implication of ‘0808′ Patch.” The state was seeking confirmation that the patch did not require that the system “be recertified at national and state level” as well as “verifiable analysis of overall impact of patch to the voting system.” In a separate letter, Secretary Cox asked Urosevich about Diebold’s use of substitute memory cards and defective equipment as well as widespread problems that caused machines to freeze up and improperly record votes. The state threatened to delay further payments to Diebold until “these punch list items will be corrected and completed.”
Diebold’s response has not been made public - but its machines remain in place for Georgia’s election this fall. Hood says it was “common knowledge” within the company that Diebold also illegally installed uncertified software in machines used in the 2004 presidential primaries - a charge the company denies. Disturbed to see the promise of electronic machines subverted by private companies, Hood left the election consulting business and became a whistle-blower. “What I saw,” he says, “was basically a corporate takeover of our voting system.”
The United States is one of only a handful of major democracies that allow private, partisan companies to secretly count and tabulate votes using their own proprietary software. Today, eighty percent of all the ballots in America are tallied by four companies - Diebold, Election Systems & Software (ES&S), Sequoia Voting Systems and Hart InterCivic. In 2004, 36 million votes were cast on their touch-screen systems, and millions more were recorded by optical-scan machines owned by the same companies that use electronic technology to tabulate paper ballots. The simple fact is, these machines not only break down with regularity, they are easily compromised - by people inside, and outside, the companies.
Three of the four companies have close ties to the Republican Party. ES&S, in an earlier corporate incarnation, was chaired by Chuck Hagel, who in 1996 became the first Republican elected to the U.S. Senate from Nebraska in twenty-four years - winning a close race in which eighty-five percent of the votes were tallied by his former company. Hart InterCivic ranks among its investors GOP loyalist Tom Hicks, who bought the Texas Rangers from George W. Bush in 1998, making Bush a millionaire fifteen times over. And according to campaign-finance records, Diebold, along with its employees and their families, has contributed at least $300,000 to GOP candidates and party funds since 1998 - including more than $200,000 to the Republican National Committee. In a 2003 fund-raising e-mail, the company’s then-CEO Walden O’Dell promised to deliver Ohio’s electoral votes to Bush in 2004. That year, Diebold would count the votes in half of Ohio’s counties.
The voting-machine companies bear heavy blame for the 2000 presidential-election disaster. Fox News’ fateful decision to call Florida for Bush - followed minutes later by CBS and NBC - came after electronic machines in Volusia County erroneously subtracted more than 16,000 votes from Al Gore’s total. Later, after an internal investigation, CBS described the mistake as “critical” in the network’s decision. Seeing what was an apparent spike for Bush, Gore conceded the election - then reversed his decision after a campaign staffer investigated and discovered that Gore was actually ahead in Volusia by 13,000 votes.
Investigators traced the mistake to Global Election Systems, the firm later acquired by Diebold. Two months after the election, an internal memo from Talbot Iredale, the company’s master programmer, blamed the problem on a memory card that had been improperly - and unnecessarily - uploaded. “There is always the possibility,” Iredale conceded, “that the ’second memory card’ or ’second upload’ came from an unauthorized source.”
Amid the furor over hanging chads and butterfly ballots in Florida, however, the “faulty memory card” was all but forgotten. Instead of sharing culpability for the Florida catastrophe, voting-machine companies used their political clout to present their product as the solution. In October 2002, President Bush signed the Help America Vote Act, requiring states and counties to upgrade their voting systems with electronic machines and giving vast sums of money to state officials to distribute to the tightknit cabal of largely Republican vendors.
But according to recent e-mails obtained by Rolling Stone, Diebold not only failed to follow up on most of the recommendations, it worked to cover them up. Michael Wertheimer, who led the RABA study, now serves as an assistant deputy director in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. “We made numerous recommendations that would have required Diebold to fix these issues,” he writes in one e-mail, “but were rebuffed by the argument that the machines were physically protected and could not be altered by someone outside the established chain of custody.”
In another e-mail, Wertheimer says that Diebold and state officials worked to downplay his team’s dim assessment. “We spent hours dealing with Diebold lobbyists and election officials who sought to minimize our impact,” he recalls. “The results were risk-managed in favor of expediency and potential catastrophe.”
During the 2004 presidential election, with Diebold machines in place across the state, things began to go wrong from the very start. A month before the vote, an abandoned Diebold machine was discovered in a bar in Baltimore. “What’s really worrisome,” says Hood, “is that someone could get hold of all the technology - for manipulation - if they knew the inner workings of just one machine.”
Election Day was a complete disaster. “Countless numbers of machines were down because of what appeared to be flaws in Diebold’s system,” says Hood, who was part of a crew of roving technicians charged with making sure that the polls were up and running. “Memory cards overloading, machines freezing up, poll workers afraid to turn them on or off for fear of losing votes.”
Then, after the polls closed, Diebold technicians who showed up to collect the memory cards containing the votes found that many were missing. “The machines are gone,” one janitor told Hood - picked up, apparently, by the vendor who had delivered them in the first place. “There was major chaos because there were so many cards missing,” Hood says. Even before the 2004 election, experts warned that electronic voting machines would undermine the integrity of the vote. “The system we have for testing and certifying voting equipment in this country is not only broken but is virtually nonexistent,” Michael Shamos, a distinguished professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, testified before Congress that June. “It must be re-created from scratch.”
Two months later, the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team - a division of the Department of Homeland Security - issued a little-noticed “cyber-security bulletin.” The alert dealt specifically with a database that Diebold uses in tabulating votes. “A vulnerability exists due to an undocumented backdoor account,” the alert warned, citing the same kind of weakness identified by the RABA scientists. The security flaw, it added, could allow “a malicious user [to] modify votes.”
Such warnings, however, didn’t stop states across the country from installing electronic voting machines for the 2004 election. In Ohio, jammed and inoperable machines were reported throughout Toledo. In heavily Democratic areas of Youngstown, nearly 100 voters pushed “Kerry” and watched “Bush” light up. At least twenty machines had to be recalibrated in the middle of the voting process for flipping Kerry votes to Bush. Similar “vote hopping” was reported by voters in other states.
The widespread glitches didn’t deter Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell - who also chaired Bush’s re-election campaign in Ohio - from cutting a deal in 2005 that would have guaranteed Diebold a virtual monopoly on vote counting in the state. Local election officials alleged that the deal, which came only a few months after Blackwell bought nearly $10,000 in Diebold stock, was a violation of state rules requiring a fair and competitive bidding process. Facing a lawsuit, Blackwell agreed to allow other companies to provide machines as well. This November, voters in forty-seven counties will cast their ballots on Diebold machines - in a pivotal election in which Blackwell is running as the Republican candidate for governor.
Electronic voting machines also caused widespread problems in Florida, where Bush bested Kerry by 381,000 votes. When statistical experts from the University of California examined the state’s official tally, they discovered a disturbing pattern: “The data show with 99.0 percent certainty that a county’s use of electronic voting is associated with a disproportionate increase in votes for President Bush. Compared to counties with paper ballots, counties with electronic voting machines were significantly more likely to show increases in support for President Bush between 2000 and 2004.” The three counties with the most discrepancies - Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade - were also the most heavily Democratic.
Electronic voting machines, the report concluded, may have improperly awarded as many as 260,000 votes to Bush. “No matter how many factors and variables we took into consideration, the significant correlation in the votes for President Bush and electronic voting cannot be explained,” said Michael Hout, a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Charles Stewart III, an MIT professor who specializes in voter behavior and methodology, was initially skeptical of the study - but was unable to find any flaw in the results. “You can’t break it - I’ve tried,” he told The Washington Post. “There’s something funky in the results from the electronic-machine Democratic counties.”
Questions also arose in Texas in 2004. William Singer, an election programmer in Tarrant County, wrote the secretary of state’s office after the vote to report that ES&S pressured officials to install unapproved software during the presidential primaries. “What I was expected to do in order to ‘pull off’ an election,” Singer wrote, “was far beyond the kind of practices that I believe should be standard and accepted in the election industry.” The company denies the charge, but in an e-mail this month, Singer elaborated that ES&S employees had pushed local election officials to pressure the secretary of state to accept “a software change at such a last minute there would be no choice, and effectively avoid certification.”
Despite such reports, Texas continues to rely on ES&S. In primaries held in Jefferson County earlier this year, electronic votes had to be recounted after error messages prevented workers from completing their tabulations. In April, with early voting in local elections only a week away, officials across the state were still waiting to receive the programming from ES&S needed to test the machines for accuracy. Calling the situation “completely unacceptable and disturbing,” Texas director of elections Ann McGeehan authorized local officials to create “emergency paper ballots” as a backup. “We regret the unacceptable position that many political subdivisions are in due to poor performance by their contracted vendor,” McGeehan added.
In October 2005, the government Accountability Office issued a damning report on electronic voting machines. Citing widespread irregularities and malfunctions, the government’s top watchdog agency concluded that a host of weaknesses with touch-screen and optical-scan technology “could damage the integrity of ballots, votes and voting-system software by allowing unauthorized modifications.” Some electronic systems used passwords that were “easily guessed” or employed identical passwords for numerous systems. Software could be handled and transported with no clear chain of custody, and locks protecting computer hardware were easy to pick. Unsecured memory cards could enable individuals to “vote multiple times, change vote totals and produce false election reports.”
An even more comprehensive report released in June by the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan think tank at the New York University School of Law, echoed the GAO’s findings. The report - conducted by a task force of computer scientists and security experts from the government, universities and the private sector - was peer-reviewed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Electronic voting machines widely adopted since 2000, the report concluded, “pose a real danger to the integrity of national, state and local elections.” While no instances of hacking have yet been documented, the report identified 120 security threats to three widely used machines - the easiest method of attack being to utilize corrupt software that shifts votes from one candidate to another. Computer experts have demonstrated that a successful attack would be relatively simple. In a study released on September 13th, computer scientists at Princeton University created vote-stealing software that can be injected into a Diebold machine in as little as a minute, obscuring all evidence of its presence. They also created a virus that can “infect” other units in a voting system, committing “widespread fraud” from a single machine. Within sixty seconds, a lone hacker can own an election.
And touch-screen technology continues to create chaos at the polls. On September 12th, in Maryland’s first all-electronic election, voters were turned away from the polls because election officials had failed to distribute the electronic access cards needed to operate Diebold machines. By the time the cards were found on a warehouse shelf and delivered to every precinct, untold numbers of voters had lost the chance to cast ballots. It seems insane that such clear threats to our election system have not stopped the proliferation of touch-screen technology. In 2004, twenty-three percent of Americans cast their votes on electronic ballots - an increase of twelve percent over 2000. This year, more than one-third of the nation’s 8,000 voting jurisdictions are expected to use electronic voting technology for the first time.
The heartening news is, citizens are starting to fight back. Voting-rights activists with the Brad Blog and Black Box Voting are getting the word out. Voter Action, a nonprofit group, has helped file lawsuits in Arizona, New York, Pennsylvania, Colorado and New Mexico to stop the proliferation of touch-screen systems. In California, voters filed suit last March to challenge the use of a Diebold touch-screen system - a move that has already prompted eight counties to sign affidavits saying they won’t use the machines in November.
It’s not surprising that the widespread problems with electronic voting machines have sparked such outrage and mistrust among voters. Last November, comedian Bill Maher stood in a Las Vegas casino and looked out over thousands of slot machines. “They never make a mistake,” he remarked to me. “Can’t we get a voting machine that can’t be fixed?” Indeed, there is a remarkably simple solution: equip every touch-screen machine to provide paper receipts that can be verified by voters and recounted in the event of malfunction or tampering. “The paper is the insurance against the cheating machine,” says Rubin, the computer expert.
In Florida, an astonishing new law actually makes it illegal to count paper ballots by hand after they’ve already been tallied by machine. But twenty-seven states now require a paper trail, and others are considering similar requirements. In New Mexico, Gov. Bill Richardson has instituted what many consider an even better solution: Voters use paper ballots, which are then scanned and counted electronically. “We became one of the laughingstock states in 2004 because the machines were defective, slow and unreliable,” says Richardson. “I said to myself, ‘I’m not going to go through this again.’ The paper-ballot system, as untechnical as it seems, is the most verifiable way we can assure Americans that their vote is counting.”
Paper ballots will not completely eliminate the threat of tampering, of course - after all, election fraud and miscounts have occurred throughout our history. As long as there has been a paper trail, however, our elections have been conducted with some measure of public scrutiny. But electronic voting machines are a hacker’s dream. And today, for-profit companies are being given unprecedented and frightening power not only to provide these machines but to store and count our votes in secret, without any real oversight.
You do not have to believe in conspiracy theories to fear for the integrity of our electoral system: The right to vote is simply too important - and too hard won - to be surrendered without a fight. It is time for Americans to reclaim our democracy from private interests.
Read Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Was the 2004 Election Stolen?” in the June 15th, 2006, issue of “Rolling Stone,” his investigation into how Republicans prevented more than 350,000 voters in Ohio from casting ballots or having their votes counted - enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/060106R.shtml
Election Dysfunction
John Nichols
Tuesday, September 19, 2006 by The Nation
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0919-25.htm
The Sunday Washington Post headline said it all. Echoing a theme that is finally being picked up by print and broadcast media that for too long has neglected the dramatic problems with this country’s systems for casting and counting votes, the newspaper’s front page announced: “Major Problems At Polls Feared: Some Officials Say Voting Law Changes And New Technology Will Cause Trouble.”
Following a disastrous election day in Maryland that was defined by human blunders, technical glitches, long lines and long delays in vote counting so severe that some contests remain unresolved almost a week after the balloting, the Post declared that, “An overhaul in how states and localities record votes and administer elections since the Florida recount battle six years ago has created conditions that could trigger a repeat — this time on a national scale — of last week’s Election Day debacle in the Maryland suburbs, election experts said.”
No fooling!
Some of us have been writing and talking about this country’s almost fully dysfunctional electoral systems for the better part of a decade. And the one thing that every serious observer of the electoral meltdown recognizes is that the people who have managed the mess ought not to be trusted to clean it up.
That’s the message that underpins the candidacy of John Bonifaz for the Democratic nomination for Massachusetts Secretary of State.
Bonifaz, the founder of the National Voting Rights Institute, is one of a number of activists and advocates who are running in races for secretary of state positions around the country this year. They have recognized that these posts, which in most states are responsible for conducting elections, can no longer be trusted to Republican partisans — such as Florida’s Katherine Harris and Ohio’s Ken Blackwell — or Democratic hacks. They have to be occupied by champions of democracy who believe that protecting and the promoting the right to vote must be the central function of local and state election officials.
Some of these champions have already secured secretary of state nominations, including Minnesota Democrat Mark Ritchie and California Democrat Debra Bowen. But in Massachusetts, where the primary is Tuesday, Bonifaz faces a tough challenge. He must overcome an entrenched incumbent, William Galvin, who at one point was considered a serious contender for governor but dropped back to seek reelection as secretary of state.
That decision by Galvin made Bonifaz’s job much harder. But he has persevered with a primary campaign that has spoken well and wisely of the need to fix our broken election systems. His small “d” democratic commitment has earned Bonifaz enthusiastic endorsements from newspapers such as the Boston Phoenix, one of the nation’s premier alternative weeklies, and the New Bedford Standard-Times, which declared last week that, “Mr. Galvin has not used his office enough to push through voting reforms that make Massachusetts a shining example and a leader in reviving democracy at the local level. Mr. Bonifaz will be that champion for the voter.”
Bonifaz has also won the backing of national figures who have been active on behalf of voting rights, including U.S. Representatives John Conyers, D-Michigan, and Jesse Jackson Jr., D-Illinois., along with the support of the state’s many Progressive Democrats of America chapters.
What appeals about Bonifaz is the seriousness of his uphill campaign, a seriousness that is highlighted by the candidate’s commitment to a Voters’ Bill of Rights that ought to be the platform on which progressives stand as they address this country’s democracy shortfall.
Bonifaz’s Voters Bill of Rights promises to:
1. Count every vote
The right to vote includes the right to have our votes properly counted.
We must ensure that every citizen’s vote will be counted. This includes a guarantee of open and transparent elections with verified voting, paper trails, hand-recorded paper ballots, and access to the source codes for, and random audits of, electronic voting machines. It also includes a guarantee that we the people, through our government, will control our voting machines — not private companies.
2. Make voting easier
We should enact election day registration here in Massachusetts, removing the barrier of registration prior to Election Day. Seven states have election day registration. They have a higher voter turnout in their elections and have no evidence of voter fraud. We should be encouraging greater participation in the political process, starting with election day registration.
We should also ensure absentee voting for all, allow for early voting, and remove other barriers that make it difficult for people to vote.
3. End the big money dominance of our electoral process
In a democracy, public elections should be publicly financed. In Maine and Arizona, publicly financed elections have enabled people to run for office who would never have dreamed of running under a system dominated by big money interests. We, as voters, need to own our elections, rather than allow the process to be controlled by the wealthy few.
We also need to enact mandatory limits on campaign spending. In 1976, the Supreme Court wrongly struck down mandatory campaign spending limits for congressional elections. Massachusetts should help lead the way with campaign spending limits for our elections.
4. Expand voter choice
Instant run-off voting: Voters should be able to rank their choices of candidates, ensuring majority support for those elected and allowing greater voter choice and wider voter participation.
Cross Endorsement Voting (Fusion voting): Voters should be able to cast their ballots for major party candidates on a minor party’s ballot line, placing power in the hands of the people and broadening public debate on the issues of the day.
Proportional Representation: Voters should be allowed their fair share of representation, ensuring that majority rule does not prevent minority voices from being heard.
5. Ensure access for new citizens and language minorities
The right to vote does not speak one specific language. It is universal. No one should be denied the right to vote because of a language barrier.
6. Level the playing field for challengers
Redistricting reform — Incumbent legislators should not have the power to draw their own district lines. We must transfer this power to independent non-partisan commissions and create fair standards for redistricting, thereby promoting competition in our electoral process and improving representation for the people.
7. Ensure non-partisan election administration
The Secretary of the Commonwealth must be a Secretary for all of us, regardless of party affiliation. The Secretary should not be allowed to serve as a co-chair of campaigns of candidates. To ensure the people’s trust in the integrity of our elections, the Secretary must conduct the administration of elections in a non-partisan manner.
8. Make government more accessible to all of us
Democracy is not just about our participation on Election Day. We need to participate every day and our government needs to be accessible to us every day. This means a government that is open and transparent, that encourages people to make their voices heard, and that enlists citizen participation in addressing the major issues of our time.
9. Amend the US Constitution to ensure an affirmative right to vote
One hundred and eight democratic nations in the world have explicit language guaranteeing the right to vote in their constitutions, and the United States — along with only ten other such nations — does not. As a result, the way we administer elections in this country changes from state to state, from county to county, from locality to locality. The Secretary of the Commonwealth must fight for a constitutional amendment that affirmatively guarantees the right to vote in the US Constitution.
What’s right and good doesn’t come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it - as if the cause depends on you, because it does. Allow yourself that conceit - to believe that the flame of Democracy will never go out as long as there’s one candle in your hand.
~ Bill Moyers
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.) rocky mp3 19811492 vangelis mp3mi bitti mp3 110 grup11th hour mp3fruit 1910 mp3 company1983 mp3 keep smilingmcs mp3 1501108 thugz mp3 Map
September 23rd, 2006