Politics

Worse Than 2000: Tuesday's Electoral Disaster

Stealing an election, live on CNBC:

Bev Harris, who has been working tirelessly since the passage of the Help America Vote Act to inform people of the dangers present in this new process, got a chance to demonstrate how easy it is to steal an election on that central tabulation computer while a guest on the CNBC program 'Topic A With Tina Brown.' Ms. Brown was off that night, and the guest host was none other than Governor Howard Dean. Thanks to Governor Dean and Ms. Harris, anyone watching CNBC that night got to see just how easy it is to steal an election because of these new machines and the flawed processes they use.

"In a voting system," Harris said on the show, "you have all the different voting machines at all the different polling places, sometimes, as in a county like mine, there's a thousand polling places in a single county. All those machines feed into the one machine so it can add up all the votes. So, of course, if you were going to do something you shouldn't to a voting machine, would it be more convenient to do it to each of the 4000 machines, or just come in here and deal with all of them at once? What surprises people is that the central tabulator is just a PC, like what you and I use. It's just a regular computer."

Harris then proceeded to open a laptop computer that had on it the software used to tabulate the votes by one of the aforementioned central processors. Journalist Thom Hartman describes what happened next: "So Harris had Dean close the Diebold GEMS tabulation software, go back to the normal Windows PC desktop, click on the 'My Computer' icon, choose 'Local Disk C:,' open the folder titled GEMS, and open the sub-folder 'LocalDB' which, Harris noted, 'stands for local database, that's where they keep the votes.' Harris then had Dean double-click on a file in that folder titled Central Tabulator Votes,' which caused the PC to open the vote count in a database program like Excel. 'Let's just flip those,' Harris said, as Dean cut and pasted the numbers from one cell into the other. Harris sat up a bit straighter, smiled, and said, 'We just edited an election, and it took us 90 seconds.'"

MassINC - Beyond Red and Blue

An interesting look at regional (cutting state lines) voting patterns.

Ishbadiddle: Ten Steps For Taking Back The Country

Moving forward after the heartbreak of 2004/11/02.

Jefferson on the "reign of witches"

Thomas Jefferson, from a letter he sent in 1798 after the passage of the Sedition Act:

A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt......If the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake.

The Electronic Voting Machine Project

A worldwide group of scientists, engineers, political scientists, legal scholars, and voting-rights activists are working on developing a PC based voting machines that will be easier to use, more secure, cheaper, and provide greater democratic transparency than commercially available voting machines. All EVM2003 voting stations produce a voter-verifiable paper ballot

Computerized voting offers many advantages over traditional systems, including,

• The ability to easily handle multiple languages

• Meeting the needs of voters with disabilities

• Eliminates problems such as over-voting and other voter intent issues.

High quality refurbished PC's that are only one generation old exist in great abundance and have more than enough power to make great voting machines.

The EVM2003 software development project includes participants from around the United States as well as from many other countries. Our EVM2003 reference software is Free Software, programmed in Python, and uses documented XML formats for data storage.

The New Yorker: The Choice

What a scathing, beautiful indictment of this administration. The New Yorker, hardly what anybody would pick as a liberal / progrressive mouthpiece, shreds Bush's presidency in no uncertain words, endorsing a presidential candidate for the first time in 80 years:

The Bush Administration has had success in carrying out its policies and implementing its intentions, aided by majorities—political and, apparently, ideological—in both Houses of Congress. Substantively, however, its record has been one of failure, arrogance, and — strikingly for a team that prided itself on crisp professionalism — incompetence.

And on Kerry:

But the challenger has more to offer than the fact that he is not George W. Bush. In every crucial area of concern to Americans (the economy, health care, the environment, Social Security, the judiciary, national security, foreign policy, the war in Iraq, the fight against terrorism), Kerry offers a clear, corrective alternative to Bush’s curious blend of smugness, radicalism, and demagoguery.

Top 35 Trends that say Kerry will Take the White House in November

An interesting and hopeful analysis.

Really Scary: Bush-as-Messiah

Ron Suskind's NYT analysis of the "certainty-at-any-cost" nature of the current presidential culture is chilling.

The Lone Star ICONOCLAST endorses Kerry

Bush's hometown paper, who endorsed him in 2000, is endorsing Kerry:

Four items trouble us the most about the Bush administration: his initiatives to disable the Social Security system, the deteriorating state of the American economy, a dangerous shift away from the basic freedoms established by our founding fathers, and his continuous mistakes regarding terrorism and Iraq.

LA Times: "Is He a Dope?" (via blog.johnkerry.com)

About whom does the op-ed writer ask these questions, do you think?

Does this man think through his beliefs before they harden into unwavering principles? Is he open to countervailing evidence? Does he test his beliefs against new evidence and outside argument? Does his understanding of a subject go any deeper than the minimum amount needed for public display? Is he intellectually curious? Does he try to reconcile his beliefs on one subject with his beliefs on another?

Here's what happened to the Republican Party

Garrison Keilor's scathing analysis of the decline of the "party of pragmatic Main Street businessmen" lays out, with considerable punch, what has puzzled me for years: what happened to the sensible Republicans? they lost their party, "purged by a legion of angry white men who rose to power on pure punk politics."

I, Cringely: Why We Send So Many Americans to Prison and Probably Shouldn't

Cringley reports a fasicnating (in a horrifying, sick-making way) on the decision of the Department of Justice to bury a study they commissioned back in 1982 on the new federal sentencing guidelines. That study accurately predicted;

• the explosion of both the prison population and the prison "industry"

• the decimation of the black and Latino communities

• the increase in violent crime

which we live with today.

Barack Obama's Speech (washingtonpost.com)

WOW! What an amazing tour-de-force, aimed squarely at the center of our values.

Thanks to Larry Lessig for the link.

Al Gore: Our Founders and the Unbalance of Power

In a speech to the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy, Vice President Gore skewers the unprecedented power grab being perpetrated by the current administration, framing it clearly in terms of the ideals our nation's founders wrote into our Constitution.

Coming from a man whose own, palpable adherence to the rule of law was amply demonstrated four years ago, the indictment is chilling.