[Novus]

So the Republicans are going to win after all. They don't need to defraud the whole counrty, just a few key districts is all they need to hang onto power.

By this time tomorrow we will know for sure.

[ChicknLittle]

Other videos to watch while waiting for election results... : )


http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid ... vote&hl=en
Discrepency between exit polls and the offician count in 2004

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid ... racy&hl=en
Testimony re: voting fraud (programmer)

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid ... bold&hl=en
Princeton University exposes voting machine vulnerability

[julianj]

This article was supposedly printed in the Guardian. (though I can't find it on the website)

It's by Greg Palast, who is normally an excellent investigative journalist - I know he doesn't believe in Peak Oil , but that doesn't make him a prat about other subjects.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'H')OW THEY STOLE THE MID-TERM ELECTION

by Greg Palast
for The Guardian (UK), Comment
Monday November 6, 2006

Here's how the 2006 mid-term election was stolen.

Note the past tense. And I'm not kidding.

And shoot me for saying this, but it won't be stolen by jerking with the touch-screen machines (though they'll do their nasty part). While progressives panic over the viral spread of suspect computer black boxes, the Karl Rove-bots have been tunneling into the vote vaults through entirely different means.

For six years now, our investigations team, at first on assignment for BBC TV and the Guardian, has been digging into the nitty-gritty of the gaming of US elections. We've found that November 7, 2006 is a day that will live in infamy. Four and a half million votes have been shoplifted. Here's how they'll do it, in three easy steps:

Theft No 1: Registrations gone with the wind.

On January 1, 2006, while America slept off New Year's Eve hangovers, a new federal law crept out of the swamps that has devoured 1.9 million votes, overwhelmingly those of African-Americans and Hispanics. The vote-snatching statute is a cankerous codicil slipped into the 2002 Help America Vote Act -- strategically timed to go into effect in this mid-term year. It requires every state to reject new would-be voters whose identity can't be verified against a state verification database.

Sounds arcane and not too threatening. But look at the numbers and you won't feel so fine. About 24.3 million Americans attempt to register or re-register each year. The New York University Law School's Brennan Center told me that, under the new law, Republican Secretaries of State began the year by blocking about one in three new voters.

How? To begin with, Mr. Bush's Social Security Administration has failed to verify 47% of registrants. After appeals and new attempts to register, US Elections Assistance Agency statistics indicate 1.9 million would-be voters will still find themselves barred from the ballot on Tuesday.

But don't worry: those holding passports from their ski vacations to Switzerland are doing just fine. And that's the point. It's not the number of voters rejected, it’s their color. For example, California's Republican Secretary of State Bruce McPherson figured out how to block 40% of registrants, mostly Hispanics. In a rare counter-move, Los Angeles, with a Hispanic mayor, contacted these citizens, "verified" them and got almost every single one back on the rolls. But throughout the rest of the West, new Hispanics remain victims of the "Jose Crow" treatment.

In hotly contested Ohio, Kenneth Blackwell, Secretary of State and the Republican's candidate for Governor, remains voter-rejection champ -- partly by keeping the rejection criteria a complete secret.

Theft No 2: Turned Away - the ID game

[edit - insults Republican vote challengers]

Sounds benign, but it's not. The federal HAVA law and complex new ID requirements in states like New Mexico will easily allow the GOP squads to triple the number of voters turned away. Rather than deny using these voter suppression tactics, Republican spokesmen are claiming they are "protecting the integrity of the vote."

I've heard that before. In 2004, we got our hands on fifty confidential internal memos from the files of the Republican National Committee. Attached to these were some pretty strange spreadsheets. They called them "caging lists" -- and it wasn't about zoo feeding times. They were lists (70,000 for Florida alone) of new Black and Jewish voters -- a very Democratic demographic -- to challenge on Election Day. The GOP did so with a vengeance: In 2004, for the first time in half a century, more than 3.5 million voters were challenged on Election Day. Worse, nearly half lost their vote: 300,000 were turned away for wrong ID; 1.1 million were allowed a "provisional" ballot -- which was then simply tossed out.

Tomorrow, new federal ID requirements and a dozen new state show-me-your-ID laws will permit the GOP challenge campaign to triple their 300,000 record to nearly one million voters blocked.

Theft No 3: Votes Spoiled Rotten

The nasty little secret of US elections is that three million ballots are cast in national elections but not counted -- 3,600,380 not counted in 2004 according to US Election Commission stats. These are votes lost because a punch card didn't punch (its chad got "hung"), a stray mark voided a paper ballot and other machinery glitches.

Officials call it "spoilage." I call it, "inaugurating Republicans." Why? According to statisticians working with the US Civil Rights Commission, the chance your vote will "spoil" this way is 900% higher for Black folk and 500% higher for Hispanics than for white voters. When we do the arithmetic, we find that well over half of all votes spoiled or "blank" are cast by voters of color. On balance, this spoilage game produces a million-vote edge for the GOP.

That's where the Black Boxes come into play. Forget about Karl Rove messing with the software to change your vote. Rather, the big losses occur when computers crash, fail to start or simply don't respond to your touch. They are the new spoilage machines of choice with, statistically, the same racial bias as the old vote-snatching lever machines. (Funny, but paper ballots with in-precinct scanners don't go rotten on Black voters. Maybe that's why Republican Secretaries of State have installed so few of them.)

So Let's Add it Up

Two million legitimate voters will be turned away because of wrongly rejected or purged registrations.

Add another one million voters challenged and turned away for "improper ID."

Then add yet another million for Democratic votes "spoiled" by busted black boxes and by bad ballots.

And let's not forget to include the one million "provisional" ballots which will never get counted. Based on the experience of 2004, we know that, overwhelmingly, minority voters are the ones shunted to these baloney ballots.

And there's one more group of votes that won't be counted: absentee ballots challenged and discarded. Elections Assistance Agency data tell us a half million of these absentee votes will go down the drain.

Driving this massive suppression of the vote are sophisticated challenge operations. And here I must note that the Democrats have no national challenge campaign. That's morally laudable; electorally suicidal.

Add it all up -- all those Democratic-leaning votes rejected, barred and spoiled -- and the Republican Party begins Election Day with a 4.5 million-vote thumb on the vote-tally scale.

So, what are you going to do about it? May I suggest you … steal back your vote.

It's true you can't win with 51% of the vote anymore. So just get over it. The regime's sneak attack via vote suppression will only net them 4.5 million votes, about 5% of the total. You should be able to beat that blindfolded. If you can't get 55%, then you're just a bunch of crybaby pussycats who don't deserve to win back America.

.................
Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller, "ARMED MADHOUSE."

[Ludi]

The Dems need to win by a margin greater than the "margin of cheating," so, over 10% I think.

[ChicknLittle]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('julianj', '
')
Theft No 2: Turned Away - the ID game

[edit - insults Republican vote challengers]

Sounds benign, but it's not. The federal HAVA law and complex new ID requirements in states like New Mexico will easily allow the GOP squads to triple the number of voters turned away. Rather than deny using these voter suppression tactics, Republican spokesmen are claiming they are "protecting the integrity of the vote."

I've heard that before. In 2004, we got our hands on fifty confidential internal memos from the files of the Republican National Committee. Attached to these were some pretty strange spreadsheets. They called them "caging lists" -- and it wasn't about zoo feeding times. They were lists (70,000 for Florida alone) of new Black and Jewish voters -- a very Democratic demographic -- to challenge on Election Day. The GOP did so with a vengeance: In 2004, for the first time in half a century, more than 3.5 million voters were challenged on Election Day. Worse, nearly half lost their vote: 300,000 were turned away for wrong ID; 1.1 million were allowed a "provisional" ballot -- which was then simply tossed out.

Tomorrow, new federal ID requirements and a dozen new state show-me-your-ID laws will permit the GOP challenge campaign to triple their 300,000 record to nearly one million voters blocked.

[erl]

So, did the Democrats win by cheating?

[evilgenius]

The Republicans lost by cheating. Nobody is looking for this. They won't. Why should they?

They will need someone to blame for the chaos that Iraq will become. They couldn't risk being the ones to pull out. They need the Democrats for that. This way when Bush's get tough and stay the course rhetoric magically comes true the American sheeple will follow him into the new Iraqi conflict, the one which will turn the oil resources over to the Saudis. Mastery over the decline of oil solved. The Russian threat to the control of oil prices solved. Petro-dollar crisis solved. Solved unless they go back and lose.

[erl]

The Republicans lost by cheating?

Wow!

The conspiracy theories are getting deep and convoluted now.

[Denny]

I see the NY Times has an article today about the various problems that have prevailed with electronic voting.

I saw a good application this past week here in our city, with a hybrid paper ballot-machine type idea. Each person was handed a ballot in a folder. Yoiu went to a private booth and marked your choice by a horizontal line beside the candidate, replacing the ballot in the folder. Then one clerk for the polling place ran the ballot through a scantron type machine, which removed the ballot from the folder so the clerk did not see the strokes.

I see this as an excellent compromise. Each ballot is retained in the event of foul-ups, and clearly marked beside the candidate name. The poll summaries were available almost instantly when the polls closed and we knew the city wide results in 20 minutes from closing. I think it was very economical too as just one machine was needed to serve eight polling booths.

We all know that foul ups are not uncommon, how many have not found, now and again, that the cash register does not know the proper price for something at the store as a wrong entry was made for the UPC code it scans? And, as elections are mostly "one off" situations, the frequency of configuration error is even worse than a store, I am sure, as you are delaing with inexperienced people.

[Cobra_Strike]

I happen to like the scantron style, though they still have the risk of tampering....it is less likely to be messed with by the 'average joe hacker' and a thumb drive

[AlexdeLarge]

The FEC’s primary job is to protect the integrity of our federal election process. With this many red flags flying and barely three week left before election day, there’s no time to lose if voters are to have all the information at hand before casting their ballots.

FEC Probe ?

[obixman]

Voter fraud has always existed in this country - ranging from the semi-mob who elected Jackson, up through the Republicans and poll-tax regimes who controled the South after the civil war - to the masssive machine politics of the late 19th and early 20th century machine politices.

They have seldom actually resulted in federal election changes ( with the notable exception of Kennedy's election due to the Chicago machine politics.... For REAL corruption you need to be more local - see "Landslide Lyndon's" first election in Texas - or any Lousianna election.

So I'm not worried about federal elections - I suspect Acorn was trying more to influence local elections than federal.


We won't even get into the more pervasive and influential rumor machines of late.. ( anyone for the John McCain black baby rumor of 2000).

So my take is - yes it does exist, but it's a minor effect compared to other chinanagans that take place.

(odd story from the 70's when I was in Lousianna and active as a election comissioner..

Two guys are in the cemetary taking down names to register the dead, one guy wants to break off and the other resists, when the first guy asks why the second says: " Hey - this guy has just as much right to vote as anyone else here in the cemetary.")

THis things could and would all be taken care of if the motivation was there - since neither party cares to deal with it outside of right around election time - neither do I.

[Ludi]

Sure! Why not?

[Ludi]

http://mudflats.wordpress.com/2008/09/1 ... ppression/

"seeks declaratory and injunctive relief to challenge the “lose your home, lose your vote” vote-suppression program adopted by the Macomb County Republican Party, in concert with the Michigan Republican Party and the Republican National Committee, as well as unnamed Defendants who will implement the scheme at polling places in Macomb County and throughout the state. This “lose your home, lose your vote” program is part of a broader scheme - misnamed an “election integrity” program - to harass voters and suppress the vote throughout the State of Michigan in the upcoming election on November 4."


http://www.klas-tv.com/global/story.asp?s=2421595
"(Oct. 13) -- Federal, state, and local officials are gathering information about allegations of voter registration fraud that were first raised Channel 8 Eyewitness News.

An employee of a private voter registration firm alleges that his bosses trashed registration forms filled out by Democratic voters because they only wanted to sign up Republican voters.

The allegations have set off a political firestorm stretching from Las Vegas to Washington D.C., and beyond.

As with everything else in this election year, it's now become a political football being tossed between the two parties, with charges and countercharges, but at its core, there still remains the matter of registration forms that were ripped up and tossed in the trash."

[Dreamtwister]

Deputy Fox! Quickly! There's been a murder at the hen house! Go investigate!

[katkinkate]

You guys reeeally need an politically independent electoral commission to run your elections.

[obixman]

I agree - unfortunately in most states the office that runs elections is part of an elected offcie - either local or state.

No one wants to spend a fair amount of money on an event that happems so rarely - and - to tell the truth - in general, electorial races are not as close as they have been lately.

The net result however, is that we mange to srew up most of the time, and when we try to do something correctly (i.e. improved voting machines) we manage to screw it up even more (how do you do a recount with no paper trail? - or for that matter prevent election rigging via the equipment?)

Until we start using biometrics to identify people (why Oh why do I carry 10 credit cards when I have fingerprints and irises?) it's all acedemic anyway. I am continually amazed that we do not correlate births, deaths, immigration, and voting rolls......

but we don't. A fair number of people prize personal freedom, but then have major issues with election fraud.

you can have one or the other - but having both seems .. a bit impossible.

[AlexdeLarge]

Agree. Voter I.D. using biometrics or some other form of identification is a must. You must prove you are a citizen, of voting age and not a felon. Voter fraud by any individual or group should be prosecuted and have mandatory jail time. No exceptions!!!!

Plus, Election day should be made a national holiday so everyone who "works" can vote. Just drop some other holiday to pay for it.

All early voting should be abolished. Absentee ballots should go through extreme scrutinty.

[lawnchair]

Sure. Naturally. That's what they do every day and why we have such a commission.

You are aware that organizations holding registration drives (including many conservative churches, btw) are not allowed to throw away any voter registrations that get handed to them, even if they say "Mickey Mouse, Doha, Qatar", right? They, by law, have to turn them in, and in some states aren't even supposed to look at them before turning them in.

I agree that it's well past time for a free national ID. I'm rather surprised to find you on the side of it.

I don't see any problem with early voting, though. Can you explain your opposition? I voted yesterday. My last grandmother is in hospice right now. 1 in 3 chance says I'll be out of state on November 4th. But, I don't know. Really, really glad to be able to vote early.

[AlexdeLarge]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('lawnchair', 'S')ure. Naturally. That's what they do every day and why we have such a commission.

You are aware that organizations holding registration drives (including many conservative churches, btw) are not allowed to throw away any voter registrations that get handed to them, even if they say "Mickey Mouse, Doha, Qatar", right? They, by law, have to turn them in, and in some states aren't even supposed to look at them before turning them in.

I agree that it's well past time for a free national ID. I'm rather surprised to find you on the side of it.

I don't see any problem with early voting, though. Can you explain your opposition? I voted yesterday. My last grandmother is in hospice right now. 1 in 3 chance says I'll be out of state on November 4th. But, I don't know. Really, really glad to be able to vote early.