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OpEdNews

4/12/2015

CODE RED: Jonathan Simon's Hail-Mary for Democracy

By Joan Brunwasser

Join CODE RED Kickstarter Campaign before April 20th deadline!

My guest today is Jonathan Simon, co-founder and currently Executive Director of Election Defense Alliance.

JB: Welcome back to OpEdNews, Jonathan. You wrote Code Red: Computerized Election Theft and the new American Century, and more recently the post 2014 edition. Why did you write this book?

JS: Why did Doug Flutie throw his "Hail-Mary" pass? Because the clock was running out and the end zone was a mile away.

I have been witness to and participant in more than a decade of strenuous but essentially fruitless efforts to challenge the passivity with which America has collectively accepted an "upgrade" that gave us a concealed, computerized, privatized vote counting process--a Trojan Horse which the forensic evidence we have painstakingly gathered links inextricably to a bewildering political sea change tantamount to a rolling coup. It became clear to me that a massive boost of public awareness would be essential as a foundation for the kind of determined and dramatic action needed to restore observable vote counting to our wounded democracy. CODE RED is my hail-mary pass to bring about that awareness.

I also state my purpose explicitly in CODE RED, if I may quote myself:

"My goal in writing this book has been to bring the issue of vote counting, and the perils it presents in the New American Century, into the public discourse. I hope also that reading CODE RED will help those who have been keeping to themselves their suspicions, concerns, or outrage about our faith-based, man-behind-the-curtain electoral system to recognize that they are neither crazy nor alone."

Some may view CODE RED as primarily a fact-laden reference book, but to me it is rather a kind of suspense or even horror story with factual backup--a Blair Witch Project of contemporary American politics. I hope no one finishes it unshaken or finds it possible to remain passive and quiet.

JB: Anyone who is still unaware of the dire situation need only consult the recent Harvard study that places the U.S. 46th in the world for election integrity. Can you explain briefly what's happened with exit polls, traditionally a good indication when something is amiss electorally?

JS: If the United States were pretty much any other country on Earth, the chronic disparities between exit polls and vote counts--which we have come to call the "Red Shift" because they are virtually always in the same direction, favoring Republican candidates--would have resulted in charges of wholesale fraud, serious investigations, and probably even electoral re-dos. In America, however--in no small part because we just take it as an article of faith that we must be first in the world when it comes to election integrity--the Red Shift is simply taken in stride: the pundits conclude that the pollsters must have, yet again, "oversampled Democrats," or that Republican (but not Democratic) voters must just be lying to the exit pollsters. Although unsupported by evidence, these conclusions are comforting to a nation that, collectively, would rather not ask serious questions about how its votes are being counted.

In E2014 the Red Shift was especially egregious: 19 out of 21 exit-polled US Senate elections were red-shifted; 20 out of 21 gubernatorial elections were red-shifted; and in the US House, which is exit-polled with an aggregate national sample, the Red Shift was 3.7%, the equivalent of nearly 3 million votes, more than enough to determine control of the House. This caps a pattern in which six out of seven biennial elections since the computers took over in 2002 have exhibited the Red Shift--in other words, a whole era of suspect elections with cumulative political effect.

To which we may add that none of the thousands of contests for state legislative office is ever exit polled, and capture of those legislatures has enabled Republicans (who now hold 68 out of the 100 state legislative chambers, more than at any time since the Hoover presidency) to lock in their gains indefinitely via such tactics as gerrymandering, voter suppression laws, gutting of campaign finance regulations, and control of other aspects of election administration. Those critical infrastructural elections can be electronically rigged with essentially zero risk--not even a Red Shift to be explained away.

But it has become clear enough that, in America at least, exit polls and the chronic Red Shift disparities are simply written off. The burden of proof for election theft appears to be set higher than any statistics, no matter how telling, will ever be able to meet. Since we are strictly denied access to all such "smoking gun" materials as memory cards, computer code, and actual voter-marked ballots, "proving" fraud has become a terminally frustrating effort. But is that what we have to do before America decides to take a serious look at its vote counting process?

I think not. If you took all of the analyses in CODE RED--every calculation of the Red Shift, every flipped vote, every suspect result, all evidence of fraud, and the whole big picture of resulting political incongruity--and tossed it all in the trashcan, if you said it was all a conspiracy theorist's mirage, what we'd still have sitting on the table in front of us is an unobservable vote counting process. A process in which votes become 1s and 0s in the pitch dark of cyberspace--literally trillions of 1s and 0s, a tiny portion of which can be moved around in that darkness to alter outcomes and change what will one day be our history and world history. Without an observable count of the votes, elections are fatally compromised as the legitimate foundation of democracy, and this basic truth requires no exit polls, no Red Shift, no forensics, direct or indirect, to establish.

JB: If there is no way to measure, now that the once tried and true exit polls have been discarded, how do we know what the electorate actually looks like, locally and nationally? Could it be that our nation really is as red as the elections appear to indicate and complaints and concerns are not justified?

JS: That's just it. We, following the media, naturally assume that elections are the gold standard when it comes to deducing the political leanings of a state, a region, or the nation. So right now America is "red," more Republican than at any time since Herbert Hoover was president, and not just more Republican but far more radically reactionary (Hoover and Nixon would both be far too "liberal" to be nominated). Unlikely states like Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio have become right-wing bastions where it would seem, judging by election results, that the people hate unions, love corporations, don't give a hoot about exploding income inequality, and believe climate change is a liberal hoax. Well, at least their representatives do. But if our manifestly corruptible elections have been corrupted, and if we mock the exit polls, what is left to go on? How can we gauge where America is really at?

This is not exactly a mystery without any clues. Congressional approval rating, for example, plummeted once the new Congress installed by the E2010 Tea Party rout took office and began to show its colors. It has been hovering in single digits (e.g., 8% approve, 89% disapprove of the job Congress is doing) for several years now, and is very obviously a function of voter disapproval of the Republican-controlled House, which has succeeded in gridlocking Washington by doing everything possible to ensure that the Obama presidency fails (Obama's approval rating, by contrast, has remained roughly 40 points higher than that of Congress).

Apart from a seething discontent with a Republican Congress consistently expressed in polls, we have a direct electoral gauge of where the voters are at: in E2014 voters across a wide swath of states overwhelmingly approved a parade of ballot propositions that Republican candidates made it a core theme of their campaigns to oppose. From minimum wage increases to environmental protection and weapons control, these "liberal" measures passed by margins far too large to reverse with a rig that could pass the smell test, while the Republican candidates that inveighed against them somehow won reelection (often narrowly) in the same states and by the same voters. So in E2014 we saw a pervasive red shift from the exit polls, which we are agreeing to discard, but also a glaring red-flag mismatch between "candidate" and "issue" elections, and another glaring red flag: with a Congressional Approval of 8% (and, for the first time ever, a plurality of voters indicating that they did not believe their own representative deserved re-election), a grand total of TWO out of 222 GOP US House incumbents were voted out of office!

Where are the people of America? Why do they seem to now be voting consistently against their own interests? The answer from the punditry is that Democratic voters are not voting. But who then approved by overwhelming margins all those ballot propositions, even in "red" states? There is a great deal of corroboratory evidence that America goes into the voting booth blue-purple and comes out of the pitch dark of cyberspace "red."


CODE RED book cover
(image by courtesy of Jonathan Simon) DMCA

JB: What would you say to someone on the Right who's convinced it's the Left that's cheating?

JS: That was just about the last Q&A I added to CODE RED--in response to several right-wingers who said that CODE RED was just a partisan cherry-pick! Well what I'm interested in, trying with everything I have to bring about, is an observable vote counting process--that's it! Not Democratic victories, except as a byproduct of that legitimate process. I'm not interested in looking backwards, overturning even the smelliest computerized elections or unseating any office-holders. I am after an election system and an observable vote counting process that all Americans can trust, and if it elects Scott Walkers and Mitch McConnells and right-wing majorities in the US House and 68 out of 100 state legislatures, so be it!

As for the evidence, however, any objective analyst of whatever partisanship will encounter the same data that my colleagues and I have encountered for the past dozen years, and it will still point in one direction. The red shift is a numerical fact, not a figment of our biases. The same goes for the glaring red-flag pattern found in Cumulative Voteshare Analysis (CVA), where Republican (and, in primaries, Establishment Republican) voteshare increases with increasing precinct size--demographically inexplicable but fitting perfectly a rigging algorithm that targets larger precincts for vote theft because taking X votes from a 20X vote precinct can pass the smell test but taking those same X votes from a 2X vote precinct cannot. Nor are we making up the political pedigree of the voting equipment corporations--it's sometimes a bit obscure but it's in the record. There's a boatload of evidence and a strong prevailing wind in its sails.

To my readers on the Right who believe the Left has been doing the rigging or would be if given the opportunity, I say simply this: with computerized counting neither of us has any reason to trust the other side--particularly in the current political environment, so rich in anger and poor in trust. Under these conditions especially, aren't we both entitled to an observable counting of the votes? Please, let's count the votes in public and let the chips fall where they may.

JB: I agree, the system looks pretty rotten from here. But getting from here to observable vote counting: well, it's daunting, hard to know where to begin. What's the take-away of your book? And what would you like us concerned citizens to do?

JS: Let's begin with this: in a vacuum, designing any serious electoral system from scratch, observable vote counting would be a no-brainer. You wouldn't trust a system where you handed your ballots to a man, dressed in a magician's costume, who took them behind a curtain, claimed he'd counted them and shredded them, and then came out and told you who won. So I assume you also wouldn't trust, or build, a system where the votes were counted in a place just as dark and hidden as the magic room behind the curtain. You wouldn't, that is, entrust your democracy--independent of any concrete evidence of actual fraud--to computers programmed and maintained by private (and partisan) corporations and insulated against virtually all scrutiny by proprietary protections. Add to that vacuum our growing recognition that cyber-security is an oxymoron; add to that all the evidence we have gathered and analyzed pointing squarely and insistently in the direction of actual computerized manipulation of votecounts; and add to that the enormous political and historical consequence of all these suspect elections: well, it should be Case Closed.

But we are not in a vacuum and powerful real-world inertias are at play. The computers took over vote counting in a flash when the Help America Vote Act was passed in 2002, at a time before computers had begun to show their dark side, before folks were getting their money and identities stolen and receiving those urgent CHANGE YOUR PASSWORD! notices. They were billed as quicker and more convenient and cheaper, and collectively America was content with getting its democracy on the cheap. So now computers are the duh! no brainer! when it comes to counting votes and, as you say, changing that and restoring observable vote counting is a daunting challenge and it is hard to know where to begin.

We have found out the hard way that we can't begin with the political or journalistic establishments seeing the light and making this change of their own accord. By definition any officeholder voting on such reform has been elected--the electoral system has worked for him or her so, from their standpoint, if it ain't broke, why fix it? And this certainly holds for the Democrats, as it has not yet occurred to the latter-day minority that the political pendulum may be in the grip of an invisible hand such that they are almost certainly destined to be a permanent minority. For a variety of practical and psychological reasons hardly anyone with a seat at or near the power table, including the media itself, has shown any willingness to make an issue over the way votes are counted, and that is unlikely to change absent a change in the public itself.

CODE RED is all about bringing that change to be. There are specific ways of pressuring legislators and election administrators which I present in the book. But the overarching call to action is simply that we all start communicating--writing, texting, emailing, or just talking to others about this issue, about CODE RED, about what we are facing and about what we can do.

Because I hold the conviction that CODE RED itself can be a difference-maker--perhaps the difference-maker--in our quest, I am doing all I can to bring it to a broad readership, starting with a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for advertising and promotion. The link to this campaign is https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/18 ... dy-lets-st. Meeting our funding goal, the deadline for which is April 20th, would be a big step along the communication path I've been talking about. A viral CODE RED would be a very powerful tool.

CODE RED supplies the facts and analyses needed to become informed, to have something constructive and persuasive to say--it is then up to all of us to go to work building the foundation of public awareness and determination that will be needed to force a chronically uninterested political system to respond. We need to show that we take our democracy seriously, that we are available to count votes, observe the counting of votes, audit the counting of votes--even more, that we demand to be so deputized, to fulfill this duty to our democracy. And ultimately, if the political system remains unresponsive, we must back that demand with civil action, exercise our freedom of assembly, and take a stand to reclaim our right to fair, open, and honest elections.

JB: Anything you'd like to add before we wrap this up?

JS: Just this: the situation we're in is grave; the evidence shows that we are in the midst of a rolling coup and that, for all the illusion of business as usual, our democracy itself is in the ICU on life support. Yet, as I conclude in CODE RED, "the basic counting of votes, in an observable way that ensures the legitimacy of our elections, . . . is an easy assignment. We need only to break a spell that has been cast on us--a spell of convenience, passivity, helplessness. We need only remember that democracy is not something that we watch, it is something that we do."

JB: Good luck on your kickstarter campaign, Jonathan. CODE RED is an important, if not a fun, read. And it sure beats sticking our heads in the sand. Thanks so much for talking with me.

***

CODE RED Kickstarter Campaign link which ends April 20, 2015.

arstechnica

Meet the e-voting machine so easy to hack, it will take your breath away

Virginia decertifies device that used weak passwords and wasn't updated in 10 years.

by Dan Goodin - Apr 15, 2015


VerifiedVoting.org

Virginia election officials have decertified an electronic voting system after determining that it was possible for even unskilled people to surreptitiously hack into it and tamper with vote counts.

The AVS WINVote, made by Advanced Voting Solutions, passed necessary voting systems standards and has been used in Virginia and, until recently, in Pennsylvania and Mississippi. It used the easy-to-crack passwords of "admin," "abcde," and "shoup" to lock down its Windows administrator account, Wi-Fi network, and voting results database respectively, according to a scathing security review published Tuesday by the Virginia Information Technologies Agency. The agency conducted the audit after one Virginia precinct reported that some of the devices displayed errors that interfered with vote counting during last November's elections.

The weak passwords—which are hard-coded and can't be changed—were only one item on a long list of critical defects uncovered by the review. The Wi-Fi network the machines use is encrypted with wired equivalent privacy, an algorithm so weak that it takes as little as 10 minutes for attackers to break a network's encryption key. The shortcomings of WEP have been so well-known that it was banished in 2004 by the IEEE, the world's largest association of technical professionals. What's more, the WINVote runs a version of Windows XP Embedded that hasn't received a security patch since 2004, making it vulnerable to scores of known exploits that completely hijack the underlying machine. Making matters worse, the machine uses no firewall and exposes several important Internet ports.

"Because the WINVote devices use insecure security protocols, weak passwords, and unpatched software, the WINVote devices operate with a high level of risk," researchers with the Virginia Information Technologies Agency wrote in Tuesday's report. "The security testing by VITA proved that the vulnerabilities on the WINVote devices can allow a malicious party to compromise the confidentiality and integrity of Voting data."

Putting it to the test

To prove their claim the machine was vulnerable to real-world hacks, the auditors were able to use the remote desktop protocol to gain remote access to the voting machines. They also used readily available hacking and diagnostic software to map, access, and transfer data from default shared network locations including C$, D$, ADMIN$, and IPC$. After downloading the database that stores the results of each vote, the auditors required just 10 seconds to figure out its password was "shoup" (named after the company name that preceded Advanced Voting Solutions). The auditors were then able to copy the database, modify its contents to tamper with recorded votes, and copy it back to the voting machine.

It's hard to find plain words that convey just how bad the security of this machine is. It's even harder to fathom so many critical defects resided in a line of machines that has played a crucial role in the US' democratic system for so many years. Jeremy Epstein, a security expert specializing in e-voting, summarized the threat brilliantly in a post published Wednesday morning to the Freedom to Tinker blog. He wrote:

As one of my colleagues taught me, BLUF—Bottom Line Up Front. If an election was held using the AVS WinVote, and it wasn’t hacked, it was only because no one tried. The vulnerabilities were so severe, and so trivial to exploit, that anyone with even a modicum of training could have succeeded. They didn’t need to be in the polling place—within a few hundred feet (e.g., in the parking lot) is easy, and within a half mile with a rudimentary antenna built using a Pringles can. Further, there are no logs or other records that would indicate if such a thing ever happened, so if an election was hacked any time in the past, we will never know.

He went on to write:

I’ve been in the security field for 30 years, and it takes a lot to surprise me. But the VITA report really shocked me—as bad as I thought the problems were likely to be, VITA’s five-page report showed that they were far worse. And the WinVote system was so fragile that it hardly took any effort. While the report does not state how much effort went into the investigation, my estimation based on the description is that it was less than a person week.

And finally, he wrote:

So how would someone use these vulnerabilities to change an election?

1. Take your laptop to a polling place, and sit outside in the parking lot.
2. Use a free sniffer to capture the traffic, and use that to figure out the WEP password (which VITA did for us).
3. Connect to the voting machine over WiFi.
4. If asked for a password, the administrator password is “admin” (VITA provided that).
5. Download the Microsoft Access database using Windows Explorer.
6. Use a free tool to extract the hardwired key (“shoup”), which VITA also did for us.
7. Use Microsoft Access to add, delete, or change any of the votes in the database.
8. Upload the modified copy of the Microsoft Access database back to the voting machine.
9. Wait for the election results to be published.

It's good that Virginia will no longer use this machine. Still, given how long it took for the vulnerabilities to be identified, the report raises serious questions about the security of electronic voting and the certification process election officials use to determine if a given machine can be trusted.

phibetaiota

OPEN POWER Electoral Reform Home Page

Want an Honest Government Of, By, and For We the 99%?

Here’s How.

I cannot stress this enough: whatever your issue, however righteous and important it might be, it will never get a fair hearing as things now stand.

The ONLY way any issue might receive a fair hearing is if we FIRST achieve Electoral Reform and restore integrity to our government.

continued...

RT

Welcome to McFascism: Over 300 million disenfranchised US voters since 1988

Robert Bridge
Published time: May 30, 2015


U.S. Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama (L) (D-IL) and Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain (R) (R-AZ) talk during their presidential debate at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York, October 15, 2008. (Reuters/Gary Hershorn)


How does one describe a political system where just two parties control the game, preventing any third ‘factions’ from participation in the elite franchise? There’s just one ugly word for it, and it’s not democracy.

Part1

Most Americans have never heard about the dirtiest secret on Capitol Hill: The Democrat and Republican parties have achieved an iron grip on the reins of power, obstructing any third-party contenders from challenging their authority. This is more of a literal statement than many realize. Third-party ‘factions’ are being denied participation in the presidential debates in order to protect the Establishment's cozy and very lucrative relationship with corporate power.

How this state of affairs came about is nothing short of astonishing - and not a little treacherous.

America’s bloodless coup d’état of 1987

A funny thing happened on the road to the 1988 presidential campaign between Republican George H.W. Bush and his Democrat challenger Michael Dukakis. Representatives from both campaign camps secretly hatched a "memorandum of understanding" - which was more of a ransom letter - designed to overhaul the rules of the political road.

The new changes put forward by the establishment would determine which candidates could participate in the presidential debates (namely the Democrats and Republicans), which media organizations could attend (only those that could be trusted) and who would serve as debate panelists (thereby controlling the questions).

There was just one problem with this rare display of bipartisan camaraderie on the part of the Democrats and Republicans: the function of setting down the rules and regulations of the presidential debates (surprise!) was not and never meant to be the job of the political contenders. Since 1976, the sole responsibility of organizing the debates had been relegated to the League of Women Voters. And until 1987, they were doing a great job – probably too well.

So imagine the wrath, the very feminine fury, the ladies felt as they were duly delivered a list of demands by the Democrats and Republicans as to how the debates would be organized in the future. Although it would have been one hell of a spectacle had the League put their heels down and declared the elections suspended until the Asses and Elephants backed off, sadly that did not happen. Instead, the ladies politely spewed some harmless venom at the ponderous predators before excusing themselves altogether from the sanitized, dumbed down political reality show.

LWV of the USVerified account
‏@LWV

8 Throwback Pictures of Empowering Voters – Then & Now! http://bit.ly/1Iw4m8N #LWVat95 #vote #elections #TBT

League President Nancy M. Neuman issued a powerful farewell statement that should have rattled the US electorate to the very bone: "The League of Women Voters is withdrawing its sponsorship of the presidential debate scheduled for mid-October because the demands of the two campaign organizations would perpetrate a fraud on the American voter."

Neuman continued with a degree of candor not commonly found in the halls of power these days. She urged Bush and Dukakis to "rise above your handlers and agree to join us in presenting the fair and full discussion the American public expects of a League of Women Voters debate.

"The League has no intention of becoming an accessory to the hoodwinking of the American public."

Connie Rice, a civil rights lawyer and commentator on National Public Radio, said the Democrats and Republicans “hijacked” the debates.

American consumers responded with a collective shrug and a yawn as it switched to the shopping channel with its remote - the last shred of control it seems to enjoy these days.

Since any silence from the electorate is immediately interpreted by politicians as consent, what followed was the hideous transformation of the US political system, now plagued by a disturbing level of nepotism and elitism. Suffice it to say that US babbling heads are still breathlessly wondering whether yet another Bush or Clinton will inherit the throne on Pennsylvania Avenue.

So after the League of Women Voters politely excused themselves from participating in the game of thrones, a brand new organization rose up from the cigarette butts, deflated balloons and empty beer cups. Today, US presidential debates are owned lock, stock and barrel by an officious, priggish gang of Beltway thugs that unabashedly calls itself the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD), a nonprofit corporation that funds the debates through private contributions from foundations and corporations.

Global Trade Watch @PCGTW

Storm with us tonight! #NoFastTrack for the secret, job-killing #TPP. Tweets are here: http://tiny.cc/TPPMediaMarch #p2 #1u
12:15 PM - 26 May 2015

George Farah, author of the book, “No Debate: How the Republican and Democratic Parties Secretly Control the Presidential Debates,” explained the obvious rationale behind Washington’s desire to seize control of the debate process.

“It seized control of the presidential debates precisely because the League was independent, precisely because this women’s organization had the guts to stand up to the candidates that the major-party candidates had nominated,” Farah said.

On February 19, 1987, the New York Times ran an obituary of sorts regarding the bloodless coup d’état, touting the new organization that would waltz over the corpse of the League. In that article, Paul G. Kirk Jr., the Democratic national chairman, and Frank J. Fahrenkopf Jr., the Republican national chairman, happily agreed that the new arrangement would ''institutionalize'' the debates and strengthen the role of the political parties in the electoral process.

That’s right folks, strengthening the role of the two political parties in the electoral process is exactly what America’s Founders would have wanted since limiting the playing field to exactly two power-snorting junkies has everything to do with the spirit of Democracy.

Kirk Jr. underscored the situation regarding America’s newly-razed political landscape, saying he personally believed the CPD “should exclude third-party candidates from the debates.”

Ralph Nader, politician and social activist, argued that the CPD had created a virtual two-party dictatorship in the ‘land of the free.’

“The two parties created the debate commission. It’s a private company. And they have set the rules,” Nader told the Center for Public Integrity. “So if they shut you out of the national presidential debates, there is no way…of reaching people — just no way. So it’s a two-party elected dictatorship.”

Nader has certainly not been the only victim of the CPD death grip on the US political system. In the 1996 elections, Republican Bob Dole and President Bill Clinton, with the connivance of the CPD, had managed to keep billionaire Ross Perot out of the debates, even though a huge number of voters (18 percent) said they wanted the self-made billionaire’s opinions heard.

Corporate McFascists destroying the America Dream

The US Capitol is presently under siege by an army of corporate lobbyists, armed to the teeth with unlimited funds to lure legislators away from their primary obligation, which is representing American citizens, not corporate interests.

Jesse Ventura, the former governor of Minnesota, once offered his recommendations for fixing the US political system when he advised – only half-jokingly - that any politician running for office should be required to wear a NASCAR racing suit – complete with the decals of their corporate sponsors - so the American people will know “who’s bought them.”

Ventura’s joke contained more truth than anybody on Capitol Hill is willing to admit.

Never before in American history (or any history, for that matter) has money spoken louder among the so-called representatives of the people. And since the mega-corporations have most of the money, it is the corporations that are getting the lion’s share of political representation. This is not the way things were supposed to work.

The US Supreme Court deserves a healthy part of the blame for America’s political meltdown. In 2010, the Supreme Court opened the floodgates on corporate campaign spending in Citizens United vs. FEC (2010). This devastating ruling allows corporations to spend unlimited amounts of cash - much of it courtesy of consumer spending, incidentally – in Democratic and Republican campaign coffers without the benefit of public transparency.

Susan Maylone
‏@SusanMaylone

Common Cause
Fix Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United with a constitutional amendment: http://act.commoncause.org/site/Advocac ... _subsrc=fb …

The New York Times decried the Citizens ruling in an editorial: "The Supreme Court has handed lobbyists a new weapon. A lobbyist can now tell any elected official: if you vote wrong, my company, labor union or interest group will spend unlimited sums explicitly advertising against your re-election."

Citizen United led to the rise of so-called Super PACS, independent action committees that are empowered to raise unlimited sums of money from corporations, unions and individuals (some readers may be tempted to argue that the inclusion of labor unions among Super PACS would work to balance the political scales; this is patently false because unions now represent less than eight percent of the US workforce – down from about 36 percent in the 1970s).

The PACS then spend their vast sums of money secretly advocating for or against political candidates. This is what the brave new world of American politics refers to as the ‘freedom of speech.’

As of January 19, 2015, 1,291 Super PACs reported total receipts of $688,826,115 and total independent expenditures of $344,172,141 in the 2014 campaign cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Most disturbing, Super PACS receive their vast funding from just a handful of insanely wealthy donors, which points to the dangerous narrowing of the American political franchise. Yet what government commission could/would smash this monopoly?

Trevor Potter, a former FEC chairman, summed up the situation when he said that corporations have just one reason for throwing their support behind a particular party or candidate, and that is to “maximize their profits,” he told the Atlantic.

It remains highly doubtful that America’s experiment in democracy can succeed much longer based on such mercantile considerations.

The problem is that what America is coming close to inheriting is nothing short of fascism, albeit a fuzzy form of fascism unique in world history.

Is America approaching Fascism?

Of course, what we now have in the United States is not (yet) comparable to a Mussolini-style of fascism, complete with a megalomaniac inciting the masses from a bully pulpit and jackboot black shirts throttling dissenters on the street. Or have we become so saturated and dumbed-down by the sugar-coated reality of American life, the “air-conditioned nightmare” of unlimited consumer choice and hardcore commercialism, that we are no longer able to perceive the death of democracy in our midst?

For a country that offers its hapless consumers 1,000 brands of everything from automobiles to breakfast cereals to fast food franchises, isn’t it odd that the choice that really matters – political choice – has gone missing from America’s shelves?

Patrick M
‏@andendall

When fascism comes to USA it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross" Sinclair Lewis
http://buff.ly/1GAt87C

This ridiculous paucity of choice, where the last two political parties are showing remarkable similarities (not least of all as to their corporate paymasters), threatens to open the door to the worst possible scenarios in the world of politics: The dirty ‘F’ word.

The historian Alan Ryan once set forth the standard features of fascism, which included “mass mobilization through a political party that held a monopoly of power, the cult of leadership, the destruction of all intermediate and nonstate organizations, such as trade unions, and their replacement by politicized parodies, the abolition of privacy so that the family provided no safe haven against the state, and the replacement of the rule of law by arbitrary violence and a regime based on terror.”

Nothing remotely in common with America, circa 2015, you say? Well, it’s only necessary to consider the two-party political charade in Washington, the death of nonstate players such as the trade unions, the privacy-destroying PATRIOT ACT, and the militarization of our local and state police forces, that comes not only with the equipment but the military tactics and mindset to boot.

Meanwhile...at the same time that Corporate America is stuffing the campaign war chests of US politicians, guaranteeing their servile complaisance down the road, American CEOs are awarding themselves outrageous salaries at the expense of everybody else. Where is all of this extra cash coming from that allows corporations to flood the political system and their own pockets?

Thomas Piketty, author of the best-selling book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, gave some clue when he revealed that around two-thirds of the increase in US income inequality over the last four decades can be attributed to a massive rise in “super salaries” among America’s top executives.

Lori Wallach
‏@WallachLori

Prosperity Undermined: http://citizen.org/documents/prosperity-undermined.pdf …. 20 years of trade deficits, lost jobs & suppressed wages. #NoFastTrack

In 1960, the top 10 percent of wage earners in the US accounted for 33.5 percent of all income, according to data in Piketty’s book. By 2010, however, that share had exploded to 47.9 percent. Meanwhile, Congress has shown no willingness to increase the tax rate on the super-wealthy anytime soon, not help labor unions get back on their feet.

Separately, the above phenomenon might be cause for alarm. Taken together, however, and they could herald in a very dark period for the American empire.

Noam Chomsky, the social critic and intellectual, suggested as much in 2010 with some rather shocking comments.

“I’m just old enough to have heard a number of Hitler’s speeches on the radio,” he was quoted by the Progressive as saying. “I have a memory of the texture and the tone of the cheering mobs, and I have the dread sense of the dark clouds of fascism gathering” here at home.

“The level of anger and fear is like nothing I can compare in my lifetime,” he said.

Before the American experiment in democracy turns into a bad laboratory accident, it would be wise to consider such dire warnings and move to bring average Americans - and third party contenders - back into the American political franchise.
_____

Robert Bridge is the author of the book, Midnight in the American Empire, which discusses the dangerous consequences of extreme corporate power in a democratic state.

@Robert_Bridge

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

RT

Scourge of US elections: Electoral College, hackable voting machines & obscure rules

Cynthia McKinney
After serving in the Georgia Legislature, in 1992, Cynthia McKinney won a seat in the US House of Representatives. She was the first African-American woman from Georgia in the US Congress. In 2005, McKinney was a vocal critic of the government’s response to Hurricane Katrina and was the first member of Congress to file articles of impeachment against George W. Bush. In 2008, Cynthia McKinney won the Green Party nomination for the US presidency.

Published time: 15 Feb, 2016


Republican U.S. presidential candidates Senator Ted Cruz (L) and Senator Marco Rubio (R) both gesture at businessman Donald Trump (C) during the Republican U.S. presidential candidates debate in Greenville, South Carolina February 13, 2016 © Jonathan Ernst / Reuters


Jesus once remarked to a wealthy man that “it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to go to heaven.”

Today, we could amend the words of that Biblical reference with the US presidential race underway:
“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a voter in the US to know and understand the rules regulating the administration of all elections, including elections for President of the United States.”

Let’s start with the phenomenon of what is called a “minority president.” No, that is not a president who identifies as an ethnic or racial minority in the US. A minority president is one who has failed to win a plurality of the votes cast in the race for president, and yet is still able to become President of the United States. This is the exact opposite of what a true democracy would require; perhaps not even a pure democracy would entertain such a position such as the 'Office of the Presidency'. But that is an entirely different matter.

The United States has actually had several minority presidents in its history, while the 21st century began ominously enough with yet another minority President: George W. Bush, the Republican who failed to secure the most votes cast by the people [in the 2000 election, the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 ruling, decided the victor of the race after moving to halt the recount process in the state of Florida].

Both the US House and the US Senate are charged with counting the Electoral College votes, and this is a process in which I have participated. The constitutionally mandated process was circumvented by the precedent-setting Bush v. Gore Supreme Court ruling that instructed future Courts not to use the decision as a precedent!

As this case aptly proved, it’s not the people who have the last word in US elections. It’s a non-democratic construct called the Electoral College that does, except in those rare instances when it doesn’t.

The Electoral College was created by the framers of the US Constitution to ensure that the votes of the plebes did not supersede the interests of the landed gentry. That’s not just my opinion. For example, according to FairVote, an organization with which I have worked in the 2000 Presidential election, a whopping 78 percent of the votes cast were rendered unimportant due to the arcane rules of the Electoral College. They estimate that in 2008, the figure still topped 70 percent.

In order to be declared the winner of the presidency, 270 Electoral College votes are required. But the process is not what could be called transparent. For example, veteran Pro Se litigator Asa Gordon has demonstrated how the Black vote in the US is rendered less relevant by the arcane apportionment rules of the Electoral College. And when the Electoral College is deadlocked, which has happened before, then the matter falls to the United States House of Representatives to decide who will be allowed to serve in the White House.

Hacking Democracy

Add to the above debacles, the US Congress and the election authorities in the 50 states have authorized and encouraged the use of hackable electronic voting machines that are used for vote casting and vote tabulation. Bev Harris and her company, Black Box Voting, has accumulated horror stories surrounding the non-transparency of US elections. I have worked closely with Harris because the danger of these machines is self-evident to everyone except the officials who continue to purchase them for millions of dollars, putting millions of voters’ most precious political asset at risk.

Such a scenario is what led former President Jimmy Carter to comment he “absolutely” could not be elected today under such conditions, going so far as to characterize the United States as an oligarchy, not a democracy.

‘Hacking Democracy’ is only one of the many documentaries to expose the fallibility of the actual voting process in the US. Other documentaries focus on how private money has corrupted its election process.

In addition to the insecure hardware, I am sorry to write that the voter list is kept on an electronic device and if the voter’s name fails to appear on the list, the voter has little recourse.

In the US, votes and vote tabulation processes are done without any traceable back-up procedures. In other words, there is no paper trail - no receipt of a vote, as it were - whatsoever. In one of my Congressional elections in which the electronic voting machines “failed,” not only was I unable to obtain the election data despite a lawsuit having been filed, an expert witness for the state of Georgia testified that voters have to simply “trust” that the announced winner is the actual winner. Meanwhile, candidates have no access to the raw election data because that information is “owned” by Diebold—the company that produced the electronic voting machines and the software used by them (The documentary ‘American Blackout’ tells my own personal story with US elections). It is difficult to place trust in the US election system when we learn about the number of votes cast that go uncounted. In the 2000 Presidential election between Bush and Gore, between two million and five million Americans went to the polls and voted, yet their votes were thrown out, disqualified for any number of reasons. Half of those uncounted votes were cast by Black Americans.

Money, money, money

Add to these procedural vagaries, the influence of private money in US elections and even the pretense of holding transparent, free, and fair elections is stood completely on its head. As I wrote in a previous post, the rules have given rise to super-wealthy individuals who lurk in the shadows while becoming the power behind the public faces of candidates: Marco Rubio has Norman Braman as his closest and most important backer. Hillary Clinton has Haim Saban as one of her top donors; Sheldon Adelson is a “player” at the Presidential level in US politics. Billionaire Donald Trump self-finances his Presidential bid and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is rumored to be willing to spend one billion dollars in his still-to-be-announced independent presidential run.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yd693C-O0Dg

The situation is so dire that one wealthy individual could legally bankroll an entire Congressional campaign and a roundtable of them could do the same with the US Presidency. So-called campaign finance reform blew the existing loopholes wide open instead of closing them. The Citizens United Supreme Court ruling stood the revered Freedom of Speech First Amendment to the US Constitution on its head by allowing a few wealthy donors to have more 'free speech' than 300 million other Americans.

The sad truth is that much of what takes place resembles a horse race, or some kind of political theater designed specifically for public consumption. Each step of the process, whether it’s the hunt for delegates in the political party primary or the hunt for Electoral College votes after nominations have taken place, the real action takes place in the darkest recesses of the system, out of view. One could go so far as to say that the real action of US “democracy” takes place in the shadows.

So, what we are witnessing for public consumption is the hunt for delegates among the presidential contenders in the Republican Party and between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders in the Democratic Party. Until February 1, everything was basically kabuki theatre, advertising in order to lure an ample audience to enhance the profits of the major television, radio broadcasters and newspaper publishers. Donald Trump made this point repeatedly just before he decided to not participate any longer in the pre-February Republican Party Primary debates. He challenged CNN to donate some of its profits from debate ad sales to veterans’ charities—which, of course, CNN refused to do.

On February 1, the first popular voting actually took place. The Iowa Caucuses kicked off the delegate hunt. The Democratic candidates are trying to garner 2,382 delegates to win the nomination; Republican candidates need 1,144. Across the state of Iowa, registered voters gathered to cast their vote for their preferred party primary candidate. Yet the rules for the caucuses are far from straightforward, as are the rules for counting of votes and assignment of delegates.

Thus, several results in the Iowa Democratic caucuses were actually decided by a coin toss; one Clinton precinct captain didn’t even live in the precinct to whose caucus he had been assigned to manage. As a result of the massive confusion as to who actually won the Iowa Caucuses, the Sanders campaign has launched a quest to get the raw vote totals—as yet unavailable from the Iowa or national Democratic Party that declared Clinton the winner.

The next vote took place in the New Hampshire primary, which is different than a caucus. And there, too, the rules change by state for which primary voters are eligible to vote.

The next round of voting will take place on what is called ‘Super Tuesday’ when a number of states allow their voters to express their presidential preferences in primaries. But, that’s only if your preferred presidential candidate has been able to secure ballot access. Not all of the candidates are able to run in all states because each state has its own requirements for gaining ballot access. This is not a problem for either the Democratic or Republican parties, but is a huge issue for other parties. Therefore, most American voters don’t even get to see the full range of candidates and political parties on their ballots!

All of this popular voting is to assign delegates to each candidate. Those delegates will represent their candidate at the political party’s nominating convention. Or at least that’s the way it’s supposed to work. And so, the candidate with the most delegates will win the party’s nomination, right? Well, not necessarily, due to something called “super delegates” who are not bound by the popular vote. So, theoretically, unless Bernie Sanders wins the popular vote by a commanding margin in the Democratic Party primary, Hillary Clinton could actually walk away with the party’s nomination, due to the power of superdelegates whose role is similar to that of the Electoral College—to make sure that the plebes don’t ever really think they are in control. However, if something like that were to occur, the credibility of the Party might take a beating.

So, there you have it. When there is no challenge to the shadow players, everything rolls just fine and the flaws in the system are not clearly evident. But, for candidates who do not have shadow blessing, the election process can become a nightmare. Imagine then, America's increasingly alienated voters trying to overcome all of the information and process hurdles.

And, by the way, not all adult citizens in the US are eligible to vote. In some states, people in the criminal justice system with felonies may forfeit their right to vote altogether. At the same time, some states require state-issued identification cards in order to vote. Even voting machines are positioned by precinct history, not by need. Thus, Blacks voting in Ohio and other places around the country waited for hours to vote while White majority precincts had no wait at all to vote.

It is little wonder, then, that so few citizens of voting age actually participate in the process. According to one study, only approximately 55 percent of the voting age population actually voted in 2012. For citizens tying to unravel all of the rules and regulations, how a candidate moves through the process to become a nominee and then incumbent is “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”

So the next time the victor of a US presidential race system says that he or she will destabilize a foreign government or wage a war against a foreign country in order to 'fight for democracy', the entire world, led most of all by the voters of the United States, should greet the news with a hearty laugh.
_____

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

1 of 4 comments
Norman Allen 6 hours ago

There are many problems with the US election process that gives the 1% disproportional power to bar the 99% from having equal opportunity in the election process. They are: gerrymandering (every 10 years congressional districts are redrawn by the ruling party to carve voting blocks supporting their future candidates), organized gangs of the wealthy buying elections through vast expenditures of money for their lapdogs, the two party system dominated by the servants of the wealthy controlling the selection of issues, forums, and the process; the delegates voting for candidates instead of direct each person one vote in the state primaries; the electoral collage doing the same at the national elections. The bullhorn of the 1%, the media is heavily engaged in spreading information/disinformation about their masters favorite/unfavorite candidates; and the latest: hacking of the voting machines by the 1% without anyone knowing.

That is why the use masses want something usually the opposite of the political bosses: peace, economic development, fair trade, better health system, education system, less expenditure on guns, more on butter. The divergence keep increasing with each election cycle. Sometimes, it feels we live in a third world dictatorship: the media/ruling party emphasis on things people hate: politics of race, gender, geography, ignoring the will of the people.

If the system is not corrected, the consequence will be massive violence. Sanders offer the last rational, peaceful solution to make the political process, the wishes of the masses and the action of the government congruent.

RT

“Beyond upset” Voting irregularities reported across the nation on Super Tuesday
Published time: 2 Mar, 2016

Voters in Alabama, Colorado, Georgia and Texas flooded voter hotlines with complaints about dysfunctional polling booths and ballots in Republican primaries. Callers to an Austin radio station complained of machines switching their vote for Trump to Rubio...

richard charnin

Five Democratic Primaries: Exit Poll Discrepancies and Win Probabilities

Richard Charnin
March 16, 2016

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-voting-technology/


The Computer Voting Revolution Is Already Crappy, Buggy, and Obsolete
Remember when everyone hated hanging chads and wanted computerized voting? Seemed like a good idea at the time.

By Michael Riley, Jordan Robertson, and David Kocieniewski | September 29, 2016
Photographs by Julian Berman
From Bloomberg Businessweek


Six days after Memphis voters went to the polls last October to elect a mayor and other city officials, a local computer programmer named Bennie Smith sat on his couch after work to catch up on e-mail.

The vote had gone off about as well as elections usually do in Memphis, which means not well at all. The proceedings were full of the technical mishaps that have plagued Shelby County, where Memphis is the seat, since officials switched to electronic voting machines in 2006. Servers froze, and the results were hours late. But experts at the county election commission assured both candidates and voters that the problems were minor and the final tabulation wasn’t affected.

That story might have held up if Smith, a financial software developer and church organist, hadn’t been conducting an election night experiment. In his free time, Smith crunches voter-turnout data with programs he’s written to help local politicians target their direct-mail campaigns. Like Smith, most of his clients are black, and he had bet a friend 10 candy bars that the polling place at Unity Christian Church, a black congregation a mile from Graceland, would have a big turnout. The precinct, No. 77-01, is a Democratic stronghold and has one of the largest concentrations of African American voters in a city known for racially fractured politics. Smith’s guess: 600 votes. When the polls closed at 7 p.m., he was at Unity Christian and snapped some photos with his BlackBerry of the precinct’s poll tape—literally a tally of the votes printed on white paper tape and posted on a church window. Since the printouts come directly from the voting machines at each location, election officials consider it the most trustworthy count. According to the tape, Smith’s guess was close: 546 people had cast ballots.

When he got an e-mail a week later with Shelby County’s first breakdown of each precinct’s voting, he ran down the list to the one precinct where he knew the tally for sure. The count for Unity Christian showed only 330 votes. Forty percent of the votes had disappeared.

If you’re an election official, losing votes is a very big deal, but it presents a special problem in Tennessee. Most counties in the state don’t keep paper records of ballots, so there are no physical votes locked in a room somewhere, ready to be recounted.

When underperforming voting equipment in Florida nearly created a constitutional crisis in the 2000 presidential race, officials at least knew what went wrong. The aging Votomatic machines were supposed to be cleaned regularly, which election officials in several counties failed to do. So when voters choosing between Al Gore and George W. Bush inserted their readable punch-card ballots into the devices, they often created a half-punched piece of chaff rather than a clean cut, and entered the term “hanging chad” into the American political lexicon.

Shelby County uses a GEMS tabulator—for Global Election Management System—which is a personal computer installed with Diebold software that sits in a windowless room in the county’s election headquarters. The tabulator is the brains of the system. It monitors the voting machines, sorts out which machines have delivered data and which haven’t, and tallies the results. As voting machines check in and their votes are included in the official count, each machine’s status turns green on the GEMS master panel. A red light means the upload has failed.

At the end of Memphis’s election night in October 2015, there was no indication from the technician running Shelby County’s GEMS tabulator that any voting machine hadn’t checked in or that any votes had gone missing, according to election commission e-mails obtained by Bloomberg Businessweek. Yet as county technicians followed up on the evidence from Smith’s poll-tape photo, they discovered more votes that never made it into the election night count, all from precincts with large concentrations of black voters.

For the members of Congress, who in 2002 provided almost $4 billion to modernize voting technology through the Help America Vote Act, or HAVA—Congress’s response to Bush v. Gore—this probably wasn’t the result they had in mind. But voting by computer has been a technological answer in search of a problem. Those World War II-era pull-lever voting machines may not have been the most elegant of contraptions, but they were easy to use and didn’t crash. Georgia, which in 2002 set out to be an early national model for the transition to computerized voting, shows the unintended consequences. It spent $54 million in HAVA funding to buy 20,000 touchscreen voting machines from Diebold, standardizing its technology across the state. Today, the machines are past their expected life span of 10 years. (With no federal funding in sight, Georgia doesn’t expect to be able to replace those machines until 2020.) The vote tabulators are certified to run only on Windows 2000, which Microsoft stopped supporting six years ago. To support the older operating system, the state had to hire a contractor to custom-build 100 servers—which, of course, are more vulnerable to hacking because they can no longer get current security updates.


Smith


After California declared almost all of the electronic voting machines in the state unfit for use in 2007 for failing basic security tests, San Diego County put its decertified machines in storage. It has been paying the bill to warehouse them ever since: No one wants to buy them, and county rules prohibit throwing millions of dollars’ worth of machines in the trash bin.

This muddle is about to collide head-on with one of the most incendiary presidential campaigns in modern U.S. history, one in which the candidates have already questioned whether votes will be counted properly. Donald Trump warned supporters in Columbus, Ohio, on Aug. 1 that “we’d better be careful, because that election is going to be rigged.” Hillary Clinton and top Democrats have accused Russia of trying to manipulate the election by hacking. FBI Director James Comey, testifying before Congress on Sept. 28, said that states should be vigilant against online intrusions “because there’s no doubt that some bad actors have been poking around.”

The real threat isn’t a thrown election. Nationwide electoral fraud would be extremely difficult to pull off, mostly because votes in the U.S. are tallied by more than 7,000 counties and townships. Hacking enough of them to tip the balance would be a monumental undertaking—and one certain to be detected. (Tabulators are designed not to be connected to the internet at all.) Rather, the risk is a violation of trust: that Election Day mishaps borne of outdated, poorly engineered technology will confirm and amplify the fear pervading this campaign. In Shelby County, multiple lawsuits over the past 10 years have alleged that voting machines and computerized tabulators have been used to steal or suppress votes—deepening the distrust of a system some locals see as stacked against them.

Smith was never one of those. His energies went into building data analytics that candidates would need if they wanted to stop complaining and get elected. But after the votes disappeared from Unity Christian last October, something changed. “I kind of knew this would be a place where this could happen, but this morbid feeling came over me—are you serious?” he remembers thinking. “Is this how politics is supposed to work? Is anybody’s vote safe?”

The voting technology business, after a frenetic decade of mergers, acquisitions, and renamings, is dominated by just a few companies: Election Systems & Software, or ES&S, and Dominion Voting Systems are the largest. Neither has much in common with the giants of computing. Apple, Dell, IBM, and HP have all steered clear of the sector, which generates, according to an analysis by Harvard professor Stephen Ansolabehere, about $300 million in annual revenue. For context, Apple generates about $300 million in revenue every 12 hours.

During the dramatic Florida recount, Mark Earley was an election official in Leon County, which is mostly made up of the city of Tallahassee, the state capital. That put Earley at the center of a global spectacle, in charge of counting the 103,000 votes in the county, which were cast on optically scanned ballots, a novelty then. State troopers armed with machine guns stood outside the courthouse, protecting the proceedings from crowds of screaming protesters and international TV crews.


Earley


Earley knew the controversy would create a big opportunity for voting tech companies, and they began hiring local officials like him. Sandra Mortham, a former Florida secretary of state, was hired by ES&S, based in Omaha. (Mortham also represented the Florida Association of Counties, and before long ES&S was the only voting system endorsed by the association.) Earley took a job at Global Election Systems, a smaller Canadian company that he thought had better products.

Global Election Systems, with U.S. offices in McKinney, Texas, was sold to Diebold in 2002, as companies merged to chase the HAVA billions. Earley went to Diebold as well, where he liked the travel and the chance to share what he’d learned with officials in other states. But this was no Silicon Valley, with its stock options and office juice bars. Managers at Diebold’s election division in McKinney went to CiCis Pizza for the all-you-can-eat buffet. “You had to try and go when it was busy—that way they had to keep replacing the food,” Earley says. “Otherwise it got cold and stiff.”

By 2006 every state but New York had dumped their pull-lever and punch-card machines in favor of computerized voting. The voting tech vendors rushed systems to market, often without adequate testing, to meet procurement deadlines set by hundreds of counties and states. According to Earley, the systems often had software flaws or too little memory, problems the company’s executives figured could be fixed later.

Before Global was sold, Earley says, its executives were frantically trying to solve the problem of recurring revenue. Consumers were willing to replace mobile phones or computers every two or three years to get the latest features, creating big profits and fast innovation cycles. County buyers wanted electronic voting machines to last a decade or more. Earley believes Global ran into trouble because its products were too reliable, so there were too few returning customers.

He says the competition solved the revenue problem by focusing less on making equipment and more on long-term contracts. It was an enhancement of the old razors-and-blades strategy: Sell the razors cheap and make money on the blades, and make even more money by making the razors so hard to use that customers pay you to give them a shave. When Allen County, Ohio, replaced its old voting machines in 2005 with equipment from ES&S, officials didn’t realize they’d also be stuck with a service fee of $40,000 per year to help run an election system that handled about 70,000 votes. “When we found out the cost, our jaws just about hit the floor,” says Ken Terry, who was election director there until this year.

To top it off, Terry discovered that the county was paying top dollar for antiquated technology. It wasn’t until the machines were purchased, and in place, that county officials realized their new system ran on software written in 1996. After counting paper ballots with an optical scanner, the data had to be transferred to a server using Zip drives—a storage format developed when pagers and AOL dial-up were still in vogue. When Allen County tried to replace the disks in 2012, they were so hard to find that officials had to ask ES&S for a set. “They were in this shrink-wrapped package,” Terry says, “and when we opened it, there was a coupon that expired in 1999.”

ES&S declined to be interviewed for this story but provided written answers to questions. Kathy Rogers, senior vice president for government relations, wrote that many local election officials are satisfied customers who see digital voting as a big improvement over the old-fashioned kind. The company stands by the performance record of its equipment and services. “At ES&S we place as much emphasis on sustainability of currently fielded systems as we do on development and research of new systems,” she wrote.

Election officials now have more ways than ever to screw up a vote. South Carolina elections are run on ES&S machines that use cartridges—like the ones for old Nintendo game consoles—to transfer votes to a tabulator. Poll workers put the cartridge in a slot in the machine at the start of voting; after polls close, all cartridges must be delivered to the tabulator room, where they are plugged in and their data downloaded. In 2010 workers at two precincts in the state capital of Columbia mixed up cartridges and lost 1,127 votes, or almost two-thirds of the precincts’ total.

Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner sued Diebold following the 2008 primaries after 11 counties using the company’s AccuVote-TSX voting machines and GEMS tabulator dropped votes. The company claimed the problem was the result of the antivirus program the counties were using. After a 10-month fight, Diebold conceded the lost votes were the result of a software bug. The bug was fixed in later versions, and more than half of Ohio counties received free or discounted voting machines and software as part of the settlement.

“This is the strangest niche of IT that I’ve ever come across,” says Merle King, executive director for the Center for Election Systems at Georgia’s Kennesaw State University, which runs the state’s vote machine testing program. “Whatever you think you know about IT, you have to check it at the door. It’s legacy stuff, but it’s legacy in weird ways. This is legacy stuff that as you start to tease it apart goes back decades.”

With little chance of another infusion of federal funds from a constipated Congress, the industry consolidated some more. Diebold rebranded its elections division as Premier Elections Solutions in 2007, then sold the business two years later to ES&S. Antitrust action by the U.S. Department of Justice forced ES&S to sell some of those assets to Toronto-based Dominion.

What the industry hasn’t done is invest much in updating the hardware on which millions of Americans will cast their votes in November. In conversations with officials at statehouses and county offices, the device makers often point fingers at the same federal law that greatly expanded the market for digital voting in the first place. HAVA created the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, which sets federal standards for computerized voting equipment that most states use as a benchmark. Those standards haven’t changed much since 2005.

Whoever is to blame, the result is that many of the old systems were simply repackaged as they passed from one company to the next. Even a cosmetic upgrade was too much in some cases. On its website, ES&S displays a picture of its AccuVote-TSX touchscreen voting machine. Emblazoned on the front of the machine is the name Diebold, a company that stopped making voting equipment seven years ago. (ES&S’s Rogers says its agreement with the Justice Department allows the company to sell AccuVote only to customers who already use them.)

In 2014 a presidential commission that assessed the state of voting technology, interviewing hundreds of local election officials over two years, issued a devastating judgment in its final report: “Jurisdictions do not have the money to purchase new machines, and legal and market constraints prevent the development of machines they would want even if they had funds.”

The AccuVote-TSX touchscreen voting machines used in Shelby County are essentially folding easels with a computer screen. They stand about 5 feet tall, weigh about as much as a hibachi grill, and record votes on a removable data card about the size of a credit card. When the polls close, the votes from the five or six machines at a typical polling place are totaled and printed on a tally tape, which is posted somewhere visible. The cards are then sealed in a clear security bag and driven to one of six upload centers, where they are individually inserted into a transmitter and the data sent to GEMS over a closed network.

At 7 p.m. on Oct. 8, 2015, the polls for Memphis’s municipal elections closed, and tallies began rolling in to Shelby County’s election operations center, a wide building on the eastern outskirts of the city, across from a county penal farm ringed with concertina wire. The problems began almost immediately.

About 15 minutes into counting, votes stopped coming into the GEMS tabulator from the precincts. Shelby County was using two GEMS databases that night instead of one, a troublesome configuration because each memory card can upload only to the database it was programmed on for security reasons. Problems merging the two sets of data created at least a two-hour reporting delay that night, according to a postelection analysis by ES&S. But by 8:45 p.m. the system was up and running again.

The county also happened to be using new software to post results to the web, which is a different program than the one that calculates the official tally. A worker copying the wrong file in the race for city clerk of court published the wrong vote count, which stood uncorrected until around 9 p.m.

Watching from Fitzgerald’s Cigar Lounge, Wanda Halbert, a two-term city councilwoman, was munching on a deviled egg when officials corrected the numbers. Halbert had left her City Council seat to run for clerk, a job that oversees the collection of some $5 million in traffic fines handed out annually—real power in Memphis. She and her supporters were stunned as the top three candidates’ vote totals suddenly changed, dropping her into second place.


Halbert


Climbing into a friend’s car, Halbert sped to the county election commission’s offices, where she cursed out officials and demanded answers. The profane exchange was caught by a local TV news crew before Halbert calmed down. She stayed until the final results were tallied around 2 a.m. Halbert, who is black, lost to the top vote-getter, who is white, by a slim margin, 1,367 votes.

Herman Morris, then the Memphis city attorney, sent out an e-mail the following day congratulating election officials on quickly resolving the night’s various crises and noting that, “notwithstanding the intense media scrutiny, harassment, bias and spin, you all performed magnificently.”

That was before Smith’s smartphone image of the Unity Christian vote count surfaced. Smith grew up poor in the city’s College Park neighborhood, a high-crime stretch of single-family homes in north Memphis. As a kid, he managed to stay out of the violence that engulfed his family and friends, reading Malcolm X and tinkering with toy trains and other electronics. Smith eventually moved into a gated community, raising three girls, but he never lost the habit of questioning authority and “this knack for the rub—figuring out why things didn’t line up.”

He decided to show the poll tape to Norma Lester, a friend on the election commission. The photo, which Smith gave Lester on Oct. 17, the week before commissioners were scheduled to certify the election, was smoking-gun proof that the votes had disappeared somewhere between Unity Christian’s voting machines and the GEMS tabulator that spat out the official election night tally.

What the county’s election administrators did with that information isn’t entirely clear, mostly because the county has decided not to clarify it. Shortly after the election results were certified, Halbert filed a lawsuit over irregularities in the tally, and an attorney representing the election commission cited the legal action in explaining that officials wouldn’t comment about anything that happened that night.

Internal e-mails and other documents related to the Oct. 8 election were given to Bloomberg Businessweek by Carol Chumney, a local attorney, who got them through a series of open records requests. They show that Joe Young, Shelby County’s deputy administrator of elections, went hunting for answers shortly after Lester got Smith’s poll-tape photo. He looked at server logs and other data that gave a picture of how GEMS operated on election night, and he found the problem was much worse. At first it looked like votes were missing from not just one precinct but 20. After more investigation, he appeared to narrow that number to four. Not all of the precincts are named in the e-mail, but a master record for the voting machines shows missing uploads at four polling places on election night, all in areas with large concentrations of black voters. Three are located at black churches: Mt. Zion Missionary Baptist, Mississippi Boulevard Christian, and Unity Christian; the fourth is at Gaston Park, a community center in a mostly black neighborhood south of downtown. The weird thing is, the GEMS system recognized at least some of the missing votes—stored on the memory cards of seven voting machines—as already counted when officials tried to reload them on Oct. 19, according to an e-mail exchange between Young and operations manager Darral Brown. But it was clear from Smith’s poll tape and other data dug up by Young that they hadn’t been. In all, 1,001 votes had been dropped from the election night count, according to the master record, including almost 400 from an early voting center at Mt. Zion, the most from any single polling place.

Young wasn’t rewarded for his effort. In fact, on Oct. 19 he got a sharp rebuke from his boss, Shelby County Administrator of Elections Richard Holden, who had asked Young to investigate a separate issue. Holden refused repeated interview requests by phone, e-mail, and in person.

Discussion of the missing votes stops in the e-mails after that. There’s no indication the county looked further into how the votes got lost or why the GEMS system failed. One other thing Holden and Young didn’t do: They didn’t explain how widespread the problem was to the five county election commissioners, according to Commissioner Anthony Tate, one of two Democrats on the panel. As far as the five commissioners knew, the only precinct with missing votes was Unity Christian; not three other precincts, too. If they had been informed of the full scale of the fiasco, Tate says, he would not have voted to certify the election along with the other commissioners on Oct. 23.

Given that this is Memphis, where the political history is fraught with a legacy of election tampering and cronyism that favored wealthy, white elites, it would be easy to conclude that something nefarious was going on. That’s what Halbert’s lawsuit is seeking to prove. King, the Kennesaw professor and an expert in GEMS software, says the answer is probably much simpler: It’s what happens when hard-to-use technology is deployed sloppily.

Shelby election officials added the votes after the fact, using the data on the memory cards located the day of Young’s search. Around 300 votes were added on Oct. 19 and an additional 700 or so over the next two weeks, according to a master tabulation report which was also obtained by Chumney. In the court clerk’s race, the missing votes were divided among four African American candidates, including Halbert, who gained 225 votes on the winner, not enough to change the result.

It may never be possible to say exactly what went wrong on election night last October, since officials in Shelby County didn’t conduct a public investigation, but one possibility stands out. Among the documents released to Chumney is a user’s manual for the county’s version of GEMS. It shows they’re using a version of the software that contains the bug known to drop votes, the subject of that 10-month investigation in Ohio in 2008. The software flaw creates exactly the situation described in the e-mails by Young and other officials, one that has been well-known for eight years. Diebold didn’t replace the flawed versions outside of Ohio, and for counties to do so on their own was expensive. Some counties in Virginia and Georgia still use the problem software, as well. But they employ special protocols to make sure that votes aren’t dropped, officials in both states say. In Georgia, that includes comparing tabulated precinct results with each physical poll tape—essentially replicating Smith’s experiment, but for every precinct in every county.

Tennessee law requires counties there to do it as well, but Shelby County stopped the practice several years ago to save money, according to a deposition in an earlier election lawsuit. The process was replaced with an audit of 10 percent of polling places, which failed to catch any problem with the October vote. The county’s election commissioners were also not told that Shelby uses a version of GEMS known to lose votes, Tate says. “I’m shocked and baffled as to why that information was not disclosed to us,” he says.

For Smith, who prides himself on being sober and analytical, it’s tough to know what to think. It’s certainly odd that the missing votes were all in areas with high concentrations of black voters. What is clear, he says, is that local officials didn’t try to get to the bottom of the problem, or figure out whether it’s also occurred in past elections, or determine what elections over the past several years might also be compromised. If these problems were affecting white votes, Smith says, “there’d be some smoke in the city.”

Following every major election since introducing computerized voting 10 years ago, Shelby County has been sued, often with the plaintiffs alleging some version of election fraud through hacking or data manipulation. So far, none of those plaintiffs have been successful.

Before running for city clerk, Halbert spent 25 years as an administrative assistant at FedEx and eight years on the City Council. She is now cleaning houses, trying to earn enough on top of her savings to fund her lawsuit, which alleges that problems with Shelby County’s election systems “date back at least a decade and are pervasive, severe, chronic, and persistent.” The only attorney she could afford is a personal injury lawyer; Shelby County is represented by John Ryder, a local attorney who’s also general counsel for the Republican National Committee and one of the most high-powered election lawyers in the country.

“We just have to stop this happening in Shelby County,” says Halbert. “If I did lose, I want it to be fair and square. We really don’t know who the hell won” the election.

The case was going Halbert’s way, at first. In early filings, the county conceded some of the software it uses is so old or obscure it doesn’t even know who makes it. The suit stalled in May, when District Court Judge Jim Kyle abruptly recused himself, citing that his wife is running for office in November. A new judge was appointed in July, but Halbert says she’s running low on money.

Shelby County officials say they’re exploring whether to buy new voting machines, but replacing all of them would cost about $20 million. Linda Phillips, the county’s new administrator of elections (Holden, who oversaw the October election, retired at the end of last year), said in a local TV interview that the current system needs only small changes, mostly voter education about confusing ballots. “The basics are there,” Phillips said.

Reverend Eric Lowell Winston, pastor at Mt. Zion, the polling place where the most votes were lost in October, says election officials have already lost the trust of many black voters in Memphis. Not having a clear answer for what happened, or pretending the problem doesn’t exist, only feeds suspicion. “I think it insults the intelligence of our community,” he says. “As if we don’t see or understand. But we do understand, we understand perfectly well what’s going on.”

(Corrects the introduction of computerized voting and the initiator of the election fraud lawsuits in Shelby County in the 48th paragraph.)

Every week, we interview the journalists behind Bloomberg Businessweek's cover story. In this edition, we speak with Michael Riley, author of "The Computer Voting Revolution Is Already Crappy, Buggy, and Obsolete."

Fraction Magic Short Version
Bev Harris

Published on Oct 26, 2016

This devastating video contains a real-time demo of precise, scaleable, invisible election manipulation which can be performed in multiple counties and states at once. Contains very little explanation - see long version for full context and explanation: https://youtu.be/Fob-AGgZn44

http://blackboxvoting.org/stream-hackin ... zon-video/
Stream ‘Hacking Democracy’ – now on Amazon Video
By Bev Harris October 31, 2016



The Emmy-nominated HBO documentary, Hacking Democracy, has recently been made available for streaming on Amazon Video. Most people don’t realize that the producers of this film are independent filmmakers from Great Britain — they dug deep into their own pockets, and credit cards, to produce a film that was so controversial it was not at all certain whether it would ever see the light of day.

Russell Michaels and Simon Ardizzone followed us around for two years while documenting this film. I will always be honored and grateful that these two courageous filmmakers, along with producer Sarah Teale, had the courage to make this film happen.

No, it’s not a free download on Amazon. You can afford the small fee to rent or buy. Consider it a contribution to the gutsy commitment these folks made to make sure the truth is known. They took risks.

You can stream the film on your Kindle or TV through Amazon.com. You can find more about it at the Hacking Democracy Web site: http://www.hackingdemocracy.com

Russell Michaels continues to nose about and we speak semi-regularly to share what we know. I have a feeling you’ll hear more from him, as he continues to find very important information.

By the way, people often refer to it as “my” film. I didn’t do anything but my daily work. The film is theirs. I didn’t get paid and they burnt a hole in their own pockets to make the film. That happens to be the reality for many documentary film producers, especially those who are exposing the truth. It is interesting that it took people from England to tell America what’s really going on with its elections.

https://www.amazon.com/CODE-RED-Compute ... B00A0QDJP2

CODE RED: Computerized Election Theft and The New American Century




CODE RED is about what has happened to American elections, American politics, and America since computers took over the vote counting just a few short years ago. It identifies the red flags--including the glaring one now waving over our most recent election, E2014--and provides accessible examinations of why those flags are red. It is a disturbing and provocative call to action. It is about saving our democracy and our country. Now, before it's all gone.

Free and fair elections are the bedrock of a democracy. America, which considers itself the beacon of democracy, has turned to computerized counting for virtually all of its public elections. Several other advanced democracies—including Germany, The Netherlands, and Ireland—have moved away from the computerized tabulation they initially embraced, having recognized the manifest security risks it entails. But America has continued to entrust its elections to privatized and concealed vote counting despite mounting and voluminous evidence that the vulnerabilities to manipulation are not merely hypothetical but are actually being exploited, with profound political consequences.

CODE RED shows how America has come to adopt and embrace such a system and why America is so collectively resistant to any serious reconsideration of its safety and appropriateness. We examine the role of election administrators, politicians, and the media in stifling investigation of the validity of suspect American elections and, more generally, of the safety and rationality of a system proven by experts to be easily corrupted. We also examine the nexus between computerized elections and the veer of American politics over the past few years since the computers took over the counting.

Finally, CODE RED urges possible ways out of this mess, and evaluates the prospects for reform and resolution by various tactics. The conclusion is that time is running short for a political (i.e., non-revolutionary) resolution, and that restoration of electoral legitimacy and political balance will depend on an exercise of public will not witnessed in America within living memory.

CODE RED combines analysis and advocacy and concludes with a powerful call to action: "We need only to break a spell that has been cast on us--a spell of convenience, passivity, helplessness. We need only remember that democracy is not something that we watch, it is something that we do."

CODE RED author, Jonathan D. Simon, is a co-founder and the current Executive Director of Election Defense Alliance, a nonprofit organization founded in 2006 to restore observable vote counting and electoral integrity as the foundation of American democracy. His expertise in polling and statistical analysis derives from his former employment as a political survey research analyst in Washington, DC.

Dr. Simon has authored, both individually and in collaboration, numerous papers related to various aspects of election integrity. He has appeared in several election integrity-related films and as an interviewee on several dozen live programs. He has collaborated with a large number of election integrity colleagues and organizations and has been active in election integrity efforts since 2001. He invites those readers interested in exchanging views to contact him through LinkedIn or the CODE RED website, http://www.CODERED2014.com.