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Election Voter Education for Americans

We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office. ~ Aesop

FIND OUT WERE TO VOTE

8/22/19 Court rules Electoral College members aren't bound by popular vote
A U.S. appeals court in Denver said Electoral College members can vote for the presidential candidate of their choice and aren't bound by the popular vote in their states.
The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday that the Colorado secretary of state violated the Constitution in 2016 when he removed an elector and nullified his vote when the elector refused to cast his ballot for Democrat Hillary Clinton, who won the popular vote. It was not immediately clear what effect the ruling might have on the Electoral College system, which is established in the Constitution. Voters in each state choose members of the Electoral College, called electors, who are pledged to a presidential candidate. The electors then choose the president. Most states require electors to vote for the candidate who won the popular vote in that state, but the Denver appeals court said the states do not have that authority. The Constitution allows electors to cast their votes at their own discretion, the ruling said, “and the state does not possess countervailing authority to remove an elector and to cancel his vote in response to the exercise of that Constitutional right.”... [...]
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/aug/21/electoral-college-members-not-bound-popular-vote-c/

@mattblaze and @joncallas disassembling the DoJ over demands for encryption backdoors.

Security firm Carbon Black reported that 81 million voter records from 20 states are available in online forums. This data, obtained by hacking various official and corporate databases, could be used to facilitate voter fraud or sow confusion at polling places on Election Day: How would you feel if you were told that someone using your name and address had already voted?

2018 The Crisis of Election Security more than 80 percent of the machines in use today are under the purview of three companies — Dominion, ES&S and Hart InterCivic.

Top Voting Machine Vendor Admits It Installed Remote-Access Software on Systems Sold to States July 17, 2018
Remote-access software and modems on election equipment 'is the worst decision for security short of leaving ballot boxes on a Moscow street corner.'

Voting Device Manufacturer Encourages Users To Use (And Re-Use) Easily-Guessed Passwords Kim Zetter, writing for Motherboard, has obtained a manual for devices made by Unisyn Voting Solutions, which provides horrendous security advice for users of its products. There are federal guidelines for voting systems. The Elections Assistance Committee makes the following recommendations for passwords: [E]lection officials are encouraged to change passwords after every election. Passwords should also have the following characteristics: they should be at least six characters, preferably eight, and include at least one uppercase letter, a lowercase letter, at least one number and a symbol. It also says, though, that passwords should be easy to remember so that employees won't need to write them down, "yet sufficiently vague that they cannot be easily guessed."

Passwords SysremID: IamInfected
Password: H1N1tobereplacedGesundheit

The Crisis of Election Security As the midterms approach, America's electronic voting systems are more vulnerable than ever. Why isn't anyone trying to fix them?

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/26/magazine/election-security-crisis-midterms.html

The nation's top voting machine maker has admitted in a letter to a federal lawmaker that the company installed remote-access software on election-management systems it sold over a period of six years, raising questions about the security of those systems and the integrity of elections that were conducted with them. In a letter sent to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) in April and obtained recently by Motherboard, Election Systems and Software acknowledged that it had "provided pcAnywhere remote connection software … to a small number of customers between 2000 and 2006," which was installed on the election-management system ES&S sold them.
ES&S is the top voting machine maker in the country, a position it held in the years 2000-2006 when it was installing pcAnywhere on its systems. The company's machines were used statewide in a number of states, and at least 60 percent of ballots cast in the US in 2006 were tabulated on ES&S election-management systems. It's not clear why ES&S would have only installed the software on the systems of “a small number of customers” and not all customers, unless other customers objected or had state laws preventing this. The company told Wyden it stopped installing pcAnywhere on systems in December 2007, after the Election Assistance Commission, which oversees the federal testing and certification of election systems used in the US, released new voting system standards. Those standards required that any election system submitted for federal testing and certification thereafter could contain only software essential for voting and tabulation. Although the standards only went into effect in 2007, they were created in 2005 in a very public process during which the security of voting machines was being discussed frequently in newspapers and on Capitol Hill. Election-management systems are not the voting terminals that voters use to cast their ballots, but are just as critical: they sit in county election offices and contain software that in some counties is used to program all the voting machines used in the county; the systems also tabulate final results aggregated from voting machines.

BOOM! More than 250 Trump Organization Subdomains are in Communication with Computers in Russia!!
https://www.unhackthevote.com/our-research/trumps-connections-to-russia-they-are-just-a-ping-away/

IF YOUR VOTE ACTUALLY MATTERED
THEY WOULD MAKE IT ILLEGAL!

PAGE 2 Video shows Fraudsters explain in Court

The Myth of the Hacker-Proof Voting Machine 2018

In 2011, the election board in Pennsylvania's Venango County — a largely rural county in the northwest part of the state — asked David A. Eckhardt, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, to examine its voting systems. In municipal and state primaries that year, a few voters had reported problems with machines ''flipping'' votes; that is, when these voters touched the screen to choose a candidate, the screen showed a different candidate selected. Errors like this are especially troubling in counties like Venango, which uses touch-screen voting machines that have no backup paper trail; once a voter casts a digital ballot, if the machine misrecords the vote because of error or maliciousness, there's little chance the mistake will be detected.
Eckhardt and his colleagues concluded that the problem with the machines, made by Election Systems & Software (ES&S), was likely a simple calibration error. But the experts were alarmed by something else they discovered. Examining the election-management computer at the county's office — the machine used to tally official election results and, in many counties, to program voting machines — they found that remote-access software had been installed on it. Remote-access software is a type of program that system administrators use to access and control computers remotely over the internet or over an organization's internal network.

MERCER

2016 Paul Ryan's PAC raised more than $10.5 million in Q2. His top donors: Robert and Diana Mercer archive https://archive.is/gRD8P

Robert Mercer: the big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media With links to Donald Trump, Steve Bannon and Nigel Farage, the rightwing US computer scientist is at the heart of a multimillion-dollar propaganda network. This is a billionaire who is, as billionaires are wont, trying to reshape the world according to his personal beliefs. He funds a climate change denial thinktank, the Heartland Institute); and what is maybe the ultimate rich man's plaything - the disruption of the mainstream media. In this he is helped by his close associate Steve Bannon, Trump's campaign manager and now chief strategist.
Robert Mercer and his middle daughter, Rebekah, can be seen all over the new Trump staffing appointments and other decisions being made by the GOP presidential nominee. The Mercers, who previously put $13.5 million into a super-PAC supporting Texas Sen. Ted Cruz's presidential bid, have recently converted the group into the Defeat Crooked Hillary PAC, targeting Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. A Heritage Foundation trustee and director of the Mercer Family Foundation, Rebekah takes the lead on the details of the Mercers' political operation, while her father provides the funds. Stephen Bannon, the Trump campaign's newly appointed CEO, is “tied at the hip” with Rebekah Mercer, said a source who has worked with the Mercers in their political activities.

THE RECLUSIVE HEDGE-FUND TYCOON BEHIND THE TRUMP PRESIDENCY
How Robert Mercer exploited America's populist insurgency. archive https://archive.is/QYpEa

2017 FEC Dem eyes widening Russia probe to Facebook, Drudge, foreign companies

Peter W. Smith, GOP operative who sought Clinton's emails from Russian hackers, committed suicide, records show

No one has proved that Russia's attack influenced the vote count in the Nov. 8 general election but it wouldn't have taken much to tip the results and change the course of history. . "Russians targeted women, African Americans in 2 out of the 3 decisive states, Wisconsin and Michigan"-Senator Warner / see here and here

\@mjbeckel : We had "a ton" of data breaches of voter files, which could lead to ID theft, physical threats.

Feds are now looking into Trump's data op, which Kushner oversaw. Significant cooperation between Russia's online propaganda operation and individuals in the US who knew where to target disinformation.

Steve Bannon misreports $2 million debt in financial disclosure Top Trump adviser to amend filing after Center for Public Integrity questions

Bannon famously remarked that he wanted Breitbart to be “the platform for the alt-right.” Breitbart does more than tolerate the most hate-filled, racist voices of the alt-right. It thrives on them, fueling and being fueled by some of the most toxic beliefs on the political spectrum — and clearing the way for them to enter the American mainstream. It's a relationship illustrated most starkly by a previously unreleased April 2016 video in which Yiannopoulos sings “America the Beautiful” in a Dallas karaoke bar as admirers, including the white nationalist Richard Spencer, raise their arms in Nazi salutes. These documents chart the Breitbart alt-right universe. They reveal how the website — and, in particular, Yiannopoulos — links the Mercer family, the billionaires who fund Breitbart, to underpaid trolls who fill it with provocative content, and to extremists striving to create a white ethnostate. They capture what Bannon calls his “killing machine” in action, as it dredges up the resentments of people around the world, sifts through these grievances for ideas and content, and propels them from the unsavory parts of the internet up to TrumpWorld, collecting advertisers' checks all along the way. The emails tell the story of Steve Bannon's grand plan for Yiannopoulos, whom the Breitbart executive chairman transformed from a charismatic young editor into a conservative media star capable of magnetizing a new generation of reactionary anger. Often, the documents reveal, this anger came from a legion of secret sympathizers in Silicon Valley, Hollywood, academia, suburbia, and everywhere in between. Now Bannon is back at the controls of the machine, which he has said he is “revving up.” The Mercers have funded Yiannopoulos's post-Breitbart venture. And these documents present the clearest look at what these people may have in store for America. On July 22, 2016, Rebekah Mercer — Robert's powerful daughter — emailed Steve Bannon from her Stanford alumni account. She wanted the Breitbart executive chairman, whom she introduced as “one of the greatest living defenders of Liberty,” to meet an app developer she knew. Apple had rejected the man's game (Capitol HillAwry, in which players delete emails à la Hillary Clinton) from the App Store, and the younger Mercer wondered “if we could put an article up detailing his 1st amendment political persecution.”

How Russian money powered Trump's financial comeback, helped him win the White House

Trump's Russian Laundromat How to use Trump Tower and other luxury high-rises to clean dirty money, run an international crime syndicate, and propel a failed real estate developer into the White House. Head of the Russian Jewish mafia, Vyacheslav Ivankov, called Trump Tower home in the 90s-until he was deported He was assassinated in 2009.

Violation Tracker Tracking Subsidies, Promoting Accountability in Economic Development

National Association of State Election Directors
VOTING SYSTEMS THAT ARE NASED QUALIFIED
Voting Systems Secretariat: The Election Center,
12543 Westella, Suite 100, Houston, TX 77077-3929
Phone:281-293-0101 Fax: 281-293-0453
E-Mail: electioncent@pdq.net
Contact: R. Doug Lewis, Director

  1. SEQUOIA Corporation [FORMERLY BUSINESS RECORDS CORP]
  2. DIEBOLD (FORMERLY GLOB AL ELECTION SYSTEM)
  3. ES&S
  4. DANAHER CONTROLS
  5. COMPUTING DEVICES
  6. AVANT
  7. FIDLAR & CHAMBERS
  8. Hart Intercivic

 

7/31/17 DEF CON attendees make short work of electronic voting machines Security processes have never been more important… https://archive.is/db3vR

6/17 Voting systems really do have exploitable vulnerabilities.
Election Hackers Altered Voter Rolls, Stole Private Data. Russian Hackers Hit 39 States' Election Systems: Report
The U.S. intelligence community concluded in January that Russian hackers interfered in the election by compromising the internet accounts of people affiliated with Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and then publishing their personal correspondence prior to Election Day amid the course of conducting a broader Kremlin-ordered influence campaign. https://archive.is/iZOAX

The fact that private data was stolen from states is separately providing investigators a previously unreported line of inquiry in the probes into Russian attempts to influence the election. In Illinois, more than 90% of the nearly 90,000 records stolen by Russian state actors contained drivers license numbers, and a quarter contained the last four digits of voters' Social Security numbers, according to Ken Menzel, the General Counsel of the State Board of Elections. TIME magazine https://archive.is/qFe07
http://time.com/4828306/russian-hacking-election-widespread-private-data/

“It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.”- Joseph Stalin...

Professor Alex Halderman, says they've discovered evidence that votes were hacked or manipulated in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Revel

 

2002's “Help America Vote Act” provided federal funding for new voting tech. But that was a one time deal. In most states, voting systems are paid for and run by counties. Budget comes out of same pot that funds, e.g., the fire dept, roads, etc. Every four years: Experts warn for years about insecure black box voting machines. Brief post-election attention. No change. Rinse, repeat. We will all be having exactly the same conversation in 4 years.

Donald Trump LOST the popular vote in the 2016 presidential election by a greater margin than any other president in 140 years. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote. Wisconsin agrees to statewide recount in presidential race. Jill Stein raised at least $5 million from donors since launching her drive on Wednesday for recounts in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania - three battleground states where Republican Trump edged out Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton by relatively thin margins.

Hey Jurnos, if I say 'Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail'
that's what I mean. Not the same as 'paper printer'. ~ spacerog


The election hacking threat was significant enough that 46+ states asked DHS for help. Yet no state intends to audit their ballots. The crucial sentence of @jhalderm's piece on the elections is "no state is planning to actually check the paper". There is one absolutely essential security safeguard that protects most Americans' votes: paper. The paper creates a record of the vote that can't be later modified by any bugs, misconfiguration, or malicious software that might have infected the machines.

HUMANITIES
civics education

The BUSINESS CARTEL of media, political consultants, producers, politicians and propagandists are rigged against The People.

 

REPUBLICAN AND DEMOCRATE BOTH essentially exist to ensure that The People get sold on change, hope, fear, whatever they are selling — and they sell resentment, fear and anger and conflict best produced by a the propaganda industry that profits most when people are worked up. AND THIS HAPPENS EVERY FOUR YEARS.
Actually our vote only gives the electoral collage people power to cast their votes to pick the president.

SEE? THAT'S AN INSIDE JOB! DONE BY THE ELITE - NOT US.

The illusion that is given to us -- is that we picking the president.

11/9/16 TRUMP WINS
For 2nd time in the last 5 presidential elections, the person with the most popular votes was not elected president.

In the US election 200m people can vote. But just 538 people - called the Electoral College - choose the President

IS TRUMP MENTALLY ILL? 3 Professors Of Psychiatry Ask President Obama To Conduct 'A Full Medical And Neuropsychiatric Evaluation' https://archive.is/zkjE3

Why the Electoral College Ruins Democracy

The U.S. Electoral College and Spatial Biases in Voter Power:
The United States does not provide for direct election of its chief executive but utilizes the Electoral College to represent voter choices. Central to this institution is the “winner-take-all” model by which electoral votes in all states but two are awarded to the candidate who garners a plurality of that state's popular vote. As game theorists have long pointed out, this system introduces several biases in voter power that differentially reward or punish voters based on each state's population or electorate. This article offers a historical overview of the Electoral College and the geographic biases in voter power it introduces.
- All men and women are created equal, but their votes sure aren't. Members of the political establishment, called super delegates, are going against the will of the voters in their own states to support Clinton over Sanders. Will of the people be damned, the super delegates in Washington all said they are voting for Clinton. Clinton supporters are quick to say, “these are the rules the candidates agreed upon,” and maybe that's true, but voters are being ripped off. We didn't't decide on these rules and these officials are clearly going against the will of the people in their own states to support the establishment candidate who arranged for their support long before this election began. Don't say super delegates aren't determining this race. They are, and the practice should be abolished — immediately.

The system really is rigged: Why “winner-take-all” voting is killing our democracy
The Electoral College makes it virtually impossible for a third party to challenge the system. In almost every state, the candidate with the majority of votes wins all of the Electoral College votes. So voting for a third party can really skew the outcome. Even worse, it usually skews it away from your likely second-choice candidate toward the person you fear winning the most. How Does The Electoral College Work And Is It Fair?

WHO ARE THESE DRUNKEN CORRUPT PAY TO PLAY SUPER DELGATES ANYWAY?

Democrat Super delegate PAC Insiders
They were created in the 70's BY THE ELITE INSIDERS to get rid of grass roots candidates a corrupt process designed to let insiders and lobbyists overturn the will of voters. No one elected these bums, drunkards, losers - they can be anybody they are the insiders willing to protect the party of money.

At least 67 lobbyists who will attend the convention as super delegates. 21 governors, 40 senators and 193 representatives, which only makes up about a third of the super delegates. The remaining 463 convention delegates are establishment insiders that will cast votes at the Democratic National Convention for whomever they want, regardless of primary and caucus outcomes. In fact, there are 437 delegates in the DNC member category and when you remove elected officials from the super delegate pool, at least one in seven of the rest are former or current lobbyists registered on the federal and state level, according to lobbing disclosure records.

Democratic VOTERS BE DAMNED
Unelected, Clinton-supporting super delegates that simultaneously work in the lobbying industry to steal your votes away!

Super delegates ripping off Sanders supporters.

OVERCOME DELEGATES WITH VOTE SWAPPING

 

VOTE SWAPPING IS LEGAL
 In 2007, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled that swapping votes is a protected form of free speech, even if some disagreed with the tactic. Vote trading first gained attention in 2000, when some voters sought to ensure Ralph Nader, the Green Party candidate, did not siphon off enough support from Democrat Al Gore to hand the election to Republican George W. Bush.
The swaps take advantage of a unique feature of U.S. presidential elections. The winner is decided not by the national popular vote. Rather, the outcome depends on what are known as electoral votes, which are awarded to the victor of each state's presidential election, with rare exception.

WHERE THE NEWS
GETS THE NEWS

(Some) of the best political journalism of 2016

Detecting a shift in political culture away from journalism's grasp.
On the eve of an election filled with danger I take up my pen to describe one more time what I think political journalists missed about the candidacy of Donald Trump. We lack any common language for talking about press performance at the level where Trump eluded it. So this essay will have to roam a bit. If it doesn't cohere in the end— well, neither do we. We who care about news, truth, factuality, and democracy. We don't know where we are with Trump and the depiction of reality in an election contested this way. We have lost the plot.

The Political Industrial Complex: Government of, by and for… Consultants! Politics is a battlefield for a new breed of war profiteer.

Did the Press take down Bernie Sanders?
In his essential book, Out of Order — still, 23 years after publication, the best analysis of election coverage — Harvard political scientist Thomas Patterson said there are only four press narratives in an election campaign: “a candidate is leading, or trailing, or gaining ground or losing ground.” And: “The press dumps on losers and those who are losing support, criticizes front-runners and praises those who catch fire — at least as long as the bandwagon lasts.”
This may be the first time that social media compelled the MSM to change its narrative — from losing candidate to gaining candidate, or what Patterson calls the “bandwagon effect.” In turn, Sanders' crowds were huge. His fundraising was large and notable for the number of small donations. And most of all, his poll numbers began rising.

Where the #news gets the news of #Hillary #Clinton #Falling down in #NY #Video #9/11

SCREW THE TV NEWS

 

Blame the rise of Trump on the failure of tv newsThe news business must measure itself by factors other than ratings and revenues because of its responsibility to the public. THEY focus on the horse race a proven ratings magnet that draw attention and entertainment that sells advertising. As ratings soared, CBS CEO Les Moonves said of Trump's dominance in the election coverage, “It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS.… The money's rolling in and this is fun.” Indeed, the Trump ratings boost has been manna for an industry that had been under assault from the internet, suffering years of shrinking audience, a rapid aging of viewer demographics and declines in profitability.

The mainstream press thought people were listening to it.
To these holier-than-thou talking heads who are paid millions to bloviate in a world where we get our news from the internet, not television... If you're still watching TV for the answers, you ain't got a clue. . If you watched the "Times" odds for the last six months the Donald had no chance, Hillary had it locked up.
So the underclass decided to give the fortunate the middle finger. First they came for your union, then they came for your welfare, are you really gonna believe in the spineless Democrats who refused to stand up for you? I don't think so. Data is bogus. We thought everything could be mechanized, that 0's and 1's would save the world, when the truth is it comes down to people, and emotions, and no machine can compete.

ProPublica created Election Databot that makes it easier for journalists, researchers and citizens to quickly find newsworthy information about the presidential race and congressional campaigns in their states. It collects huge amounts of data and reports the most interesting details, in real time — details about campaign finance filings, congressional votes, polls and Google Trends data, among other things. How to use the Election DataBot

Campaign Finance Violations
Leaked documents reveal secretive influence of corporate cash on politics published in their entirety. The cache consists of a stack of evidence gathered by official prosecutors in Wisconsin who were conducting what was called a “John Doe investigation” into suspected campaign finance violations by Walker's campaign and its network.
The Guardian's documents - consisting of email exchanges between Walker, his advisers, Republican leaders and major donors who included none other than Trump himself, together with court filings held under seal - amount to a rich chronicle of the electoral health of the United States in the wake of Citizens United.
For more than 60 years, it was an explicit federal rule that profit-making corporations were not allowed to intervene directly in elections. Then along came Citizens United v FEC, the US supreme court's highly contentious 2010 decision. The ruling gave corporations - and by extension labor unions - the same first amendment rights to free political speech as any human being. It opened the floodgates for corporate cash to pour into elections.
Scott Walker Put Wisconsin Up for Sale And,now we know who bought it.
We pause here for a brief public service announcement from Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy: "Independent expenditures do not lead to, or create the appearance of, quid pro quo corruption." This has been a public-service announcement on behalf of Americans Abroad In La-La Land. We now continue with our regularly scheduled programming.

THE PROMISE OF THE INTERNET FULFILLED

The Promise of the Internet Fulfilled: The most Transparent Election in the History of the US Reading WikiLeaks We Learn all about the American status hierarchy in all its righteousness and majesty from reading internal DNC email.

GOVERNMENT GETS WHAT IT DESERVED

 

Can the 2016 Election Be Hacked or Disrupted? Congress Never Listened to the Tech Experts

The massive hacking of the confidential biometric files of voters stored in the Commission on Elections (Comelec) databank.
In a Facebook post before midnight Monday, March 28, 2016 a group calling itself LulzSec Pilipinas wrote, “A great lol to Commission on Elections, here's your whoooooole database.” This appears to be the first major open leak of elections-related data by a hacker group in the Philippines.

Keep voting systems disconnected

Despite what your local election officials may tell you, you can't trust the Internet with your vote. MIT Tech Review Keep voting systems disconnected.
This election year we've seen foreign hackers infiltrate the Democratic National Committee's e-mail system as well as voter databases in Arizona and Illinois. These attacks have reinforced what political scientists and technical experts alike have been saying for more than a decade: public elections should stay offline. It's not yet feasible to build a secure and truly democratic Internet-connected voting system.
Vendors like the Spanish company Scytl, which supplied Alaska's system, and Southern California-based Everyone Counts keep marketing these systems to election boards against the advice of security experts. And they haven't opened their systems to public security testing. A very good outline of the digital voting problem in its entirety was given by Bill Arbaugh in a brief but important piece in IEEE Computer: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1038098

WHAT HAS EITHER PARTY OF ELITES
REPUBLICANS OR DEMOCRATES
DONE ABOUT THIS?

3 TVs and No Food: Growing Up Poor in America

The United States has one of the highest rates of child poverty in the industrialized world.
One-fifth of our children live in poverty.
The public and media should demand the presidential candidates talk about poverty.
Here's why.

Clinton's pledge to forgive student debt of entrepreneurs, NOT the workers, will only benefit elite
Hillary's "Initiative on Technology & Innovation" reflects her Reaganite, neoliberal world view. One student loan debtor recently got a sense of how the gov't views students who come from low-income backgrounds - Student Debtors need to be bailed out. The DNC PAC committee of super delegates drafted the TTP Pacific Rim trade pact that Clinton endorsed but because of Bernie now rejects shows that the DNC wants TPP no matter what. Democrats on Friday voted down an amendment to the party's platform that would have opposed the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal.

IMPEACHMENT

The Founding Fathers designed impeachment for someone exactly like Donald Trump Impeachment is as much for people who shatter our norms as those who break our laws. Their writings and debates surrounding the creation of the Constitution make clear that the framers feared a certain kind of character coming to power and usurping the republican ideal of their new nation. Having just defeated a tyrant — “Mad” King George III of England — they carefully crafted rules to remove such a character: impeachment. In the process, they revealed precisely the kind of corrupt, venal, inattentive and impulsive character they were worried about. The very embodiment of what the Founding Fathers feared is now residing at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

In 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment was passed, seventy-two years after Elizabeth Cady Stanton first demanded women's suffrage - the right that would, in Stanton's words, "secure all others." By the 1960s, Northern Democrats abandoned their Southern allies and pushed to end the mass suppression of black votes below the Mason-Dixon line. With the Voting Rights Act of 1965, many Americans began to believe that the bad old days of stolen elections might soon be behind us.
But as the twentieth century came to a close, a brave new world of election rigging emerged, on a scale that might have prompted Huey Long's stunned admiration. Tracing the sea changes in our electoral process, we see that two major events have paved the way for this lethal form of election manipulation: the mass adoption of computerized voting technology, and the outsourcing of our elections to a handful of corporations that operate in the shadows, with little oversight or accountability.

Election Education and Fraud VOTE RIGGING SOFTWARE

Why the Democratic establishment fears Bernie Sanders
Money = Power! Clinton is doing more to boost the party's 2016 prospects than Sanders by a proportion of 26,000 to one. A fear that having Sanders as a nominee will decimate progressive candidates down the ballot — and leave Republicans in control of the House, and state capitals, for another decade or two. Clinton has raised more than $26 million for the Democratic National Committee and state Democratic parties so far this campaign. And Sanders? $1,000.
Obama was a disaster. Democrats are at their weakest position in state capitols in nearly a century; they have unified control of only 11 legislatures, while Republicans control 30 (31 if you include nominally nonpartisan Nebraska). Obama's decision to bypass the Democratic Party apparatus in favor of his own, parallel network, now known as Organizing for Action. Under the theory that Obama could directly rally supporters (and therefore didn't need to rely as much on party operatives or on congressional Democrats), this outgrowth of Obama's 2008 campaign apparatus competed with the party and wound up starving the party for funds.

Obama endorsed entrenched incumbent DWS 5 months before the primary because she is the pro-corporate Democratic Party establishment.

 

What's the difference between ignorance and apathy?
Who knows?
Who cares?

Why Rigging Elections Is Completely Legal - how political parties are able to predetermine election winners through a process called gerrymandering.

The true purpose of #VoterID
Voter ID law will help defeat Democrats in November. Rep. Glenn Grothman made the comment to the local NBC affiliate, in an interview at Ted Cruz's primary victory party in Milwaukee. Grothman said, “And now we have photo ID — and I think photo ID is gonna make a little bit of a difference, as well.” (ISSUE THE LINE TO GET A STUDENT ID IS LONGER THAN THE LINE TO VOTE)


2016 In 15 states, new voting laws will be in place for the first time in the 2016 election. Meet the 94-Year-Old Civil-Rights Activist Rosanell Eaton Who Is Now Challenging North Carolina's Voter-ID Law

Un-Democratic Party: DNC chair says superdelegates [are party insiders] ensure elites don't have to run “against grassroots activists” Critics say the unelected superdelegate system is rigged. Debbie Wasserman Schultz basically admitted this is true. “Unpledged delegates exist really to make sure that party leaders and elected officials don't have to be in a position where they are running against grassroots activists,” Wasserman Schultz calmly explained. Sanders could technically win the primary election, earning a majority of the 1,670 delegates determined by actual voting, but still lose the Democratic Party's nomination, if Clinton gets most of the party's 712 unelected unpledged delegates. Clinton's campaign boasted that it had secured the endorsements of well over 500 superdelegates. Superdelegates are Democratic Party officials and elected officeholders have direct votes in the presidential nomination process. They're automatic delegates to the national convention, which will take place in Philadelphia in the summer of 2016. They can change their commitments at any time.

Ready PAC, formerly Ready for Hillary PAC, earned $202,892 by selling or renting supporters' personal info.

#RULE 28 COIN TOSS @HillaryClinton steals the delegates

ISEA CAUCUS KIT

CAUCUS IS AN ALGONQUIN WORD THAT MEANS MEETING OF THE CHIEFS

This caucus process is not meant to ELECT anyone but to give contestants an opportunity to display their leadership skills by showing people who can lead.

#Rule28, no one realizes the rule and the 6 coin-tosses means #BernieWon.

The Independent (UK): "The Sanders campaign challenged the results" in Ames 2-4, meaning they were going to "lose" a delegate. So: #Rule28.

Apply #Rule28 #BernieWon 701.49 to 693.57

Per CNN, Iowa Dem Chair says Bernie is behind by 4 delegates. If he applies #Rule28--as he is obligated to do--#BernieWon, 701.49 to 693.57.

#Rule28 is an Iowa Democratic Party rule designed to protect _voters_. The parties cannot agree to ignore it just because they feel like it.

"Imagine #Rule28 had been worded 'a coin shall be tossed to determine who WINS the delegate'--it'd be clear. So is this." Party rules call for a coin flip when support for candidates is even but a precinct has an odd number of delegates to award.

If this is correct, Bernie won Iowa 701-694. If what Clinton won was 6 county delegates (not at all likely) Bernie may _still_ have won.

  1. #*Rule28* reveals each "win" actually cost her a delegate
  2. IA VOTER GUIDE CONSISTENTLY ATTACHES NEGATIVE RESULT TO WINNING COIN FLIPS (ITEM #21, PAGE 8)
  3. ITEM #24 (PAGE 9) ESTABLISHES THAT WHEN IOWA DEMS WANT COIN CALL TO EQUAL "WIN" THEY SAY SO EXPLICITLY
    - 6 Clinton coin-toss "wins" actually meant 6 more delegates for BERNIE.

Here is Iowa Dem #*RULE28* , proving #*BernieWon* . 6 Clinton coin-toss "wins" actually meant 6 more delegates for BERNIE. The rules read: 'Note: In a case where two or more preference groups are tied for the loss of a delegate, a coin shall be tossed to determine who loses the delegate.'

*The Des Moines Register reports that Clinton won coin tosses in at least six precincts.* The newspaper says party officials ordered coin flips in Ames, Newton, West Branch, Davenport and two in Des Moines. Iowa Democratic Party spokesman Sam Lau noted that the flips were to determine county convention delegates, which are only fractions of the state delegates awarded to candidates. Univision reporter Fernando Peinado, who was present at the precinct 70 caucus in Des Moines, tweeted a picture of what he said was a guide for Democratic precinct chairs showing rule 28, which contains the stipulation about tossing a coin to break ties.

USA Rigged Elections

 

America's Voting Fraud | Worst Machines
Hanging Chad Vote Fraud

HOW TO HACK AN ELECTION 2016 Andrés Sepúlveda RIGGED ELECTIONS throughout Latin America for almost a decade. He was dismantling what he says was a secret history of one of the dirtiest Latin American campaigns in recent memory. For decades, Latin American elections were rigged, not won, and the methods were pretty straightforward. For eight years, Sepúlveda, now 31, says he traveled the continent rigging major political campaigns. Usually, he says, he was on the payroll of Juan José Rendón, a Miami-based political consultant who's been called the Karl Rove of Latin America.

.@MatthewStoller urges @TheDemocrats to recall their historic roots of resisting concentrations of economic power.

 

How Democrats Killed Their Populist Soul In the 1970s, a new wave of post-Watergate liberals stopped fighting monopoly power. The result is an increasingly dangerous political system.

From the real, unfiltered, violence laden past of Spartanburg, South Carolina testimony of whippings and torture from freed slaves in the county in the 1860s and 1870s. Atrocities that happened to freed African Americans at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists during Reconstruction.

I ASK MYSELF: AND HOW DID WE GET HERE? 2016

IT started with this, a plank adopted by the Democratic national convention of 1948: "The Democratic party commits itself to continuing efforts to eradicate all racial, religious, and economic discrimination." That was enough to bring the devil howling out of his hole, that foot-on-the-neck-of-the-black-man devil of the Jim Crow, hookworm, lynch-prone south - “the solid south” that reliably delivered its votes to the Democratic party every four years. Trump's Scottish roots.

Scots were influential in founding the Ku Klux Klan, including the traditional Scottish symbol of the burning cross and the KKK's oath ceremony, which originated from a Highland custom.
Many of the "crackers" were Scots-Irish Protestants who had left Ireland in the 18th century.
The flash was the breakaway States' Rights Democratic party, aka the Dixiecrats (motto: “segregation forever”), who recoiled from the regular Democrats' spasm of conscience and put forward their own candidate for president, South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond. Thurmond campaigned on a platform that decried civil rights as “infamous and iniquitous”, “totalitarian” and an attempt by the federal government to impose “a police nation” on the land of the free. That fall, the Dixiecrats took four deep south states and 39 electoral votes from Harry Truman, a rippling of racist muscle that kept the Democratic party's egalitarian impulse in check throughout the 1950s. Two architects of modern conservative politics: a young Richard Nixon congratulates Strom Thurmond as he is sworn in as a senator in 1955.

How to make racism suitable for prime time.
"Dog-whistle politics, that coded language Lee Atwater was talking about." The Emerging Republican Majority by Nixon advisor Kevin Phillips, the Southern Strategy was a considered, premeditated, highly disciplined appeal to southern whites, and more generally to the deep-seated racism of America.
“Southern Strategy” Republican strategist Lee Atwater, by then an operative in the Reagan White House.
You start out in 1954 by saying, 'Nixxer, nixxger, nixxger'. By 1968 you can't say 'nixxer' - that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites.

An "open" primary means the rules allow independents and republicans to vote not just democrates. Which means registered independents can walk in and vote for [Bernie Sanders] without needing to register as democrats. It also means, to whatever extent this phenomenon is taking place, republicans who want to trip up Hillary can walk in and vote for Bernie just to drag out the democratic primary further. Open primaries could be this easily hijacked by outsiders.

Trump explains what a Dictator is to the American Voter.

HOW DONALD TRUMP GOT HIS START AND WAS FIRST ACCUSED OF BIAS

Donald's Father Fred Trump was arrested when anti-Catholic Ku Klux Klansmen attacked police in New York in 1927.

Stanley Leibowitz, the rental agent, talked to his boss, Fred C. Trump. “I asked him what to do and he says, 'Take the application and put it in a drawer and leave it there,'” Mr. Leibowitz, now 88, recalled in an interview. It was late 1963 — just months before President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the landmark Civil Rights Act — and the tall, mustachioed Fred Trump was approaching the apex of his building career. He was about to complete the jewel in the crown of his middle-class housing empire: seven 23-story towers, called Trump Village, spread across nearly 40 acres in Coney Island.
The complaints of discrimination were not limited to New York. Mr. Cash was repeatedly rejected by the Trumps' rental agent, according to court records and notes kept by Housing Opportunities Made Equal of Cincinnati, which sent in white testers posing as a young couple while he waited in the car. After the agent, Irving Wolper, offered the testers an apartment, they brought in Mr. Cash. Mr. Wolper grew furious, shoving them out of the office and calling the young female tester, Maggie Durham, a “nigger-lover,” according to court records. A former Trump superintendent named Thomas Miranda testified that multiple Trump Management employees had instructed him to attach a separate piece of paper with a big letter “C” on it — for “colored” — to any rental application filed by a black apartment-seeker.

2016 Woody Guthrie, 'Old Man Trump' song and a real estate empire's racist foundations.
Woody Guthrie lived in Fred Trump's Beach Haven apartment complex for two years. Guthrie's most bitter writings clearly pit America's national balladeer against the racist foundations of the Trump real estate empire.

#Facebook avoids Responsibility

Facebook cut out references to Russia in its report on the effort to undermine our election due to legal concerns. Facebook became aware of Russian manipulation of its platform during the election. In the blog post last month, Facebook disclosed that Russian entities spent $150,000 to run 5,200 potentially divisive ads on its platform, after declaring during the summer that it had found no such activity. The information on those advertisements was uncovered after the April report, a Facebook spokesman said.
On Monday, the company said an estimated 10 million people saw the Russian ads. But regular posts—not paid ads—from the accounts had a much wider reach because of shares, likes and comments, according to outside researchers. Six of the Russian pages discovered by Facebook generated approximately 20 million shares, likes and comments, according to data published Thursday by Jonathan Albright, a research director with Columbia University's Tow Center for Digital Journalism. Findings of alleged Russian interference in the U.S. democratic process, have also ensnared Twitter Inc. and Alphabet Inc.'s Google.

5/28/14 Hack the Vote: The Perils of the Online Ballot Box
Hackers could manipulate enough votes to change the results of local and national elections. And a skilled hacker can do so without leaving any evidence.
Over 30 states and territories allow some form of Internet voting (such as by email or through a direct portal) for some classes of voters, including members of the military or absentees. Utah just passed a law allowing disabled voters to vote online; and Alaska allows anyone to cast their ballots online. And there were recent news reports that Democratic and Republican national committees are contemplating holding primaries and caucuses online. We estimate that over three million voters now are eligible to vote online in the U.S.
Estonia is the world leader in using online voting for its national elections. Its government has done a great deal to improve the security of the system, which is now used by up to 25% of voters. The country's "I-voting system" is touted by proponents of online voting in the U.S. to claim that secure Internet voting is possible. It isn't. Early in May an international team of independent security experts accredited by the Estonian government reported severe security vulnerabilities in that country's "I-voting system." Elections, the researchers found, "could be stolen, disrupted, or cast into disrepute." The team recommended that Estonia's online voting system "be immediately discontinued." One researcher, J. Alex Halderman of the University of Michigan, has said that "Estonia's Internet voting system blindly trusts the election servers and the voters' computers. Either of these would be an attractive target for state-level attackers, such as Russia." Another researcher, Harri Hursti from Finland, concluded, "With today's security technology, no country in the world is able to provide a secure Internet voting system."
NIST's report noted, "it is extremely difficult to protect against software attacks" on personal computers outside the control of election officials "that could violate ballot secrecy or integrity or steal a voter's authentication credentials." Second, "remote electronic voter authentication is a difficult problem." Third is the problem of "ensuring remote electronic voting systems are auditable," with "no current or proposed technologies offering a viable solution." <source>

4/2012 E-voting system awards election to wrong candidates in Florida village. Analysts warn that same Dominion Sequoia machines are used in nearly 300 U.S. municipalities.
Dominion Voting Inc.'s Sequoia Voting Systems device mistakenly awarded two Wellington Village Council seats to candidates who were found in a post-election audit to have lost their races. The results were officially changed last weekend after a court-sanctioned public hand count of the votes.

2012 Internet voting systems are inherently insecure and should not be allowed in the upcoming general elections. { 1 }
The insecurity and the inability to audit such voting practices are unacceptable, says Jefferson.David Jefferson, a computer scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories and chairman of the election watchdog group Verified Voting, called on election officials around the country to drop plans to allow an estimated 3.5 million voters to cast their ballots over the Internet in this year's general elections. Jefferson warned that the systems that enable such voting are far too insecure to be trusted and should be jettisoned altogether. Cryptographer and security guru Ron Rivest, who is the "R" in RSA, and Alex Halderman, an academic whose research on security vulnerabilities in e-voting systems prompted elections officials in Washington to drop plans to use an e-voting system in 2010. "There's a wave of interest across the country, mostly among election officials and one agency of the [Department of Defense], to offer Internet voting" to overseas citizens and members of the military, Jefferson said. "From a security point of view, it is an insane thing to do." A total of 33 states allow citizens to use the Internet to cast their ballots. In a majority of cases, those eligible to vote over the Internet receive their blank ballots over the Web, fill them in and submit their ballots via email as a PDF attachment. Some states, such as Arizona, have begun piloting projects that allow eligible voters to log in to a web portal, authenticate themselves and submit their ballots via the portal. Ballots sent via email, for instance, are transmitted in the clear without encryption. That means any entity, such as an ISP or a malicious hacker that sits between the voter and the county where the vote is being cast, can view, filter, substitute or modify the ballot, he said.

 

2011 - 20 million do not have a government issued photo ID.
Several states have passed a new law requiring individuals to show government-issued photo IDs to vote. The law's supporters say it will help deter voter fraud, while opponents argue it will make it difficult for minorities, students and the elderly to cast their ballots. Host Michel Martin discusses both arguments with long-time civil rights activist and former Presidential candidate Rev. Jesse Jackson, as well as Republican political strategist Ron Christie.
http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=137003621&m=137003616

PHOTO ID IS A RED HERRING: BECAUSE

One of the most frightening examples Johnston has turned up is in one of the nation's most treasured franchises: the right to vote. He said he's found that most voting machines have almost no security to reveal tampering. Thus, he said, it's a fairly simple matter to tinker with the electronics while machines are in storage or being transported by the truckload. He has even demonstrated how he can turn cheating mechanisms in voting machines on and off by remote control.

"It's much easier to steal the election, right at the electronic voting machine," said Johnston."In many cases, we see security devices or electronic voting machines where we really have to wonder, 'Did anybody spend 60 seconds figuring out the security issues?"

Johnston and his team said they have learned that all too often, the highest tech systems can be cracked by the lowest tech methods

 

2009

Sequoia Voting Systems has inadvertently released the SQL (Structured Query Language) code for its voting databases. The existence of such code appears to violate Federal voting law.

Sequoia is controlling the elections from within the database itself. Since they didn't strip this controlling SQL code out, we have the chance to study it, and since it came from a purely legal source, we can for the first time study a voting system from the inside out, in public.

Jim March to Open Voting Consortium - OVC-discuss] Something really big: Sequoia source code, free to download and study, no NDAs.

"Folks, you'll love this. Sequoia blew it on a public records response.  We (basically EDA) have election databases from Riverside County that Sequoia insisted on "redacting" first, for which we paid cold cash.  They appear instead to have just vandalized the data as valid databases by stripping the MS-SQL header data off, assuming that would stop us cold.
They were wrong.
The Linux "strings" command was able to peel it apart.  Nedit was able to digest 800meg text files.  What was revealed was thousands of lines of MS-SQL source code that appears to control or at least influence the logical flow of the election, in violation of a bunch of clauses in the FEC voting system rulebook banning interpreted code, machine modified code and mandating hash checks of voting system code.
I've got it all organized for commentary and download in wiki form.
This is the first time we can legally study a voting system's innards without NDAs or court-ordered secrecy. Join the fun :).  
First goal is to prove that Sequoia did in fact vandalize the data files by stripping the MS-SQL headers - if so that will affect other public records inquiries against Sequoia.
Second goal: what does the code do, what are the security implications, is it as big a violation of the FEC rulebook as it appears?

Thanks, Jim March "

Among other issues, this raises the possibility that Sequoia and Riverside county collectively violated the California Public Records Act. It is obviously legal to distribute MS-SQL data files that you create; Microsoft holds no "secrecy claim" to them. Sequoia claimed to be "removing their trade secrets but given the amount of source code found it's obvious that's not what happened.
Legally speaking, redaction of a data file is allowed. Vandalism isn't. Establishing which one happened is an important project goal, as it could allow us to go to court and get an unedited set of the files for further study.

 

9/09 Diebold sold its voting-machine business to Election Systems & Software of Omaha Diebold decided in 2006 to focus on key markets, including A.T.M.'s and security systems, said Mike Jacobsen, a Diebold spokesman. Election Systems & Software operates election services in 39 states and overseas. Now they are controlling all the votes in the U.S. S. Candice Hoke, an election law professor at Cleveland State University, said the sale raises questions about the consolidation of election services. “It's a massive consolidation of voting-system vendors,” she said. Premier has about 180 employees in the U.S. & Canada - operates in 33 states.

Google Sequoia AVC Advantage montgomery county pennsylvania election problems.


Voting Systems Used in Pennsylvania The Board of Elections in each of Pennsylvania's sixty-seven counties can choose which system voters in the county will use. There are currently ten different systems or combinations of systems in use throughout the Commonwealth:[30] Failures by State

2008

Premier (Diebold) admits to flaw that drops votes 8/21/08

2008 Election Timeline
Timeline and related material about presidential debates, primaries, and caucuses for the 2008 presidential election. Also includes news stories and a list of presidential candidates with links to websites.

2006

"Diebold says"glitch-free," just don't touch those touchscreens" Apparently Diebold has gotten the machines to work relatively well     together, but only when using a mouse. If the touchscreen is tapped,   the machine loses contact with its peers. Diebold is touting this mouse thing as a fix, and is offering to provide 5,500 mice for their e-poll books if state officials in Maryland give the go-ahead. Unfortunately, during a recent mock election, a poll-worker tapped the touchscreen despite repeated warnings to the contrary, and screwed up the system, requiring a reboot which took 30 seconds.

Happy Voting
http://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/felten/hotel-minibar-keys-open-diebold-voting-machines
"The access panel door on a Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machine — the door that protects the memory card that stores the votes, and is the main barrier to the injection of a virus — can be opened with a standard key that is widely available on the Internet. [snip]
"Chris's key was left over from a previous job, maybe fifteen years ago. He said the key had opened either a file cabinet or the access panel on an old VAX computer."

"How to steal an election by hacking the vote"

Diebold demands that HBO cancel documentary on voting machines. Film saying they can be manipulated 'inaccurate' 2006 Diebold Inc. insisted that cable network HBO cancel a documentary that questions the integrity of its voting machines, calling the program inaccurate and unfair.Diebold Election System President David Byrd said in a   letter to HBO President and Chief Executive Chris Albrecht posted on Diebold's Web site. Short of pulling the film, Monday's letter asks for disclaimers to be aired and for HBO to post Diebold's response on its Web site. "We stand by the film," said Jeff Cusson, a spokesman for HBO, which is a unit of Time Warner Inc. "We have no intention of withdrawing it from our schedule. It appears that the film Diebold is responding to is not the film HBO is airing." The HBO documentary is based on the work of Bev Harris, the Renton   woman who founded BlackBoxVoting.org, which monitors election accuracy. In 2004 the attorney general of California took up a whistle-blower claim filed by Harris against Diebold and settled with the company for $2.6 million in December.

2007

California voting systems code review now released 8/2007 - Matt Blaze

GAO Presentation that evote problems are very real. Randolph C. Hite at (202) 512-3439 or by e-mail at hiter@gao.gov.

Most vote machines lose test to hackers July 28, 2007
State-sanctioned teams of computer hackers were able to break through   the security of virtually every model of California's voting machines   and change results or take control of some of the systems' electronic   functions, according to a University of California study released   Friday. The researchers "were able to bypass physical and software security in   every machine they tested,'' said Secretary of State Debra Bowen, who   authorized the "top to bottom review" of every voting system certified   by the state.

 

"The cryptographer David Chaum, through discussion with top cryptographers such as Ron Rivest, has designed a secure and verifiable voting system. One of the goals of his design is that anyone can verify that votes were tabulated correctly. It's good to see real security/crypto people working on this problem. They also have a press release."

 

2004

Diebold knew of legal risks
http://www.oaklandtribune.com/cda/article/print/0,1674,82%257E1865%257E2095811,00.html
Oakland Tribune By Ian Hoffman 4/04 Diebold knew of legal risks Attorneys warned firm that use of uncertified vote-counting software violated state law.

2003 Voting Machine Fraud

Voting Machine Fiasco: SAIC, VoteHere and Diebold SAIC is a behemoth military defense contractor with a shadowy, if not tarnished, reputation, while former SAIC executives also have ties to VoteHere. Why is that important? Former President, Chief Operating Officer, and Vice Chairman of SAIC is Admiral Bill Owens, who is now Chairman of the Board for VoteHere. Owens also served as Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and was a senior military assistant to Secretaries of Defense Frank Carlucci and Dick Cheney. Carlucci's company is Carlyle Group, while Vice President Dick Cheney's former employer is Halliburton.

Computer Voting Is Open to Easy Fraud, Experts Say By John Schwartz http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/24/technology/24VOTE.html
The software that runs many high-tech voting machines contains serious flaws that would allow voters to cast extra votes and permit poll workers to alter ballots without being detected, computer security researchers said yesterday. "We found some stunning, stunning flaws," said Aviel D. Rubin, technical director of the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University, who led a team that examined the software from Diebold Election Systems, which has about 33,000 voting machines operating in the United States read the paper at http://avirubin.com/vote.pdf

Jennifer Granick, Hackers vs. Diebold Election Systems
Black Hat 2015 keynote speaker Jennifer Granick is director of civil liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. She previously held the same position at the Electronic Frontier Foundation -- and is known for defending some of the more notorious criminal hackers around, including Kevin Poulsen, Aaron Swartz, Jerome Heckenkamp and the hackers in the Diebold Election Systems case.

Hacking Democracy - HBO
This cautionary documentary exposes the vulnerability of computers - which count approximately 80% of America's votes in county, state and federal elections - suggesting that if our votes aren't safe, then our democracy isn't safe either. Don't allow vendors hack the vote. Don't allow states to privatize elections demand open software.

 

RECOMMENDATIONS:

Black Box Voting - Eliminate Secrecy Consumer Protection for Elections
Paper ballots are the 'Currency of Democracy'. They've been helping to curb election fraud since 139 BCE!

Factcheck.org In this election year let me recommend this site run by the Annenberg School at UPenn and Teach Your Children - use this one http://www.factcheckED.org/ for the kids.

Historians are great at telling linear stories and written narratives that have a specific point of view, and an agenda. Historians try to make define a moment in time with a certain set of facts while they leave out others. Now with the advent of web 2.0 pictures might prove to be history's next frontier. The Internet uses pictures to show off the natural social process that history actually is.

We are always concerned with "trusted" sources of information. We want to believe that journalism is honest and that we get honest reporting from print, television, and online sources. We need to understand these relationships.

History and Myth Making

What is the Difference Between Information and Propaganda when Trusted Media Sources are The Official Story Tellers?

The House Sneaker, Starring "Fats" Hastert, & his sidekick "Sneaks" Foley.

The Sneaky "Sneaks" from Sneaksville © Dan Cassidy
Starring: The House Sneaker, "Fats" Hastert, & his sidekick "Sneaks" Foley.
Sneak, v., to move or walk in a stealthy or slinking manner; to creep or crawl furtively; to slink, or skulk.
Sneak, n., a sneaking, shifty, underhanded person. One who steals in a sneaking manner; a sneaking, shifty, underhanded person.
Sneak: “Of doubtful origin...”   ( Oxford English Dictionary) Dictionary Dicks are the thought police.
Like the words "slang," "vagabond cant," and "thieves' jargon," “doubtful origin” is often a sneaky Anglo-Saxon code for the Irish language.

  • Snighe, (pron. shniγə), n., crawling (as a snail);
  • snigheach, (pron. shniγaÄ‹), adj., creeping, crawling;
  • snighim, (shniγəm), v., I creep, I crawl. Snag, n., a small creeping thing or person; a “crawler;” (ornithology), a tree-creeper.
  • Snagadh, (pron. snagah), vn., creeping.
  • Snagaim, v., I creep, crawl, or move slowly.
  • Snagach, adj., creeping, crawling, snail-like.
  • Snagaire, al. snagóir,n., a sneak, a creeper. (Dineen, 1071, 1078, í“ Dónaill, 1121, 1122)    

Although “sneak” sneaks into works by William Shakespeare in the 16 th century, it was still classified as “Cant” by slang dictionaries as late as the 19 th century. Interestingly, the Barnhart Dictionary of English Etymology traces the English “sneak” back to the Irish snighim, I creep or crawl.   . . .  

  • “A poore... Out~law, sneaking home. “(Shakespeare, Henry. IV, 1596)
  • “Sneak, a pilferer. Morning sneak; one who pilfers early in the morning...To go upon the sneak; to steal into houses whose doors are carelessly left open. Cant.” (Grose, Egan, Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, 1785, 1811)
  • Sneaker, n., someone who sneaks, creeps, crawls, acts surreptitiously; an athletic shoe.
  • Snagaire, n., a sneak, a creeper, a crawler. (Dineen, 1071)
  • Sneaky,adj., creeping, crawling, shifty, underhanded.
  • Snagach, adj., creeping, crawling. Snagaí­, n., creeper, crawler. (Dineen, 1071)
  • Snigheach, (pron. shniγaÄ‹), adj., creeping, crawling. (Dineen, 1078)
  • “Jesus at the Movies: Some prominent proselytizers hope to save America -- and the world -- by doing some 'sneaky preaching' through a new movie they're calling 'one of the greatest outreach tools of the church in this century.'" (Sarah Posner, Alternet, Oct. 12, 2006)

INFORMATION
VS
PROPAGANDA

 

 

BIRTH / ROOTS OF FOX NEWS PROPAGANDA - STALINIST SYSTEM

2004 Rupert Murdock controls the news WATCH - OUTFOXED
Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism
Bravenew Films 1 hr 17 min 41 sec Sep 14, 2004
Outfoxed examines how media empires, led by Rupert Murdoch's Fox News, have been running a "race to the bottom" in television news. This film provides an in-depth look at Fox News and the dangers of ever-enlarging corporations taking control of the public's right to know.  

Fox News has once again identified a Republican as a Democrat and vice-versa.
October 4th 2006 Fox News labeled disgraced Republican Mark Foley as a Democrat multiple times in one night and they've done it again today, reversing the party affiliation of Sheldon Whitehouse and Lincoln Chafee in the Rhode Island Senate race.

About News Sniffer
The News Sniffer project aims to monitor corporate news organisations to uncover bias. Latest articles, Latest revisions. Blog

Tampering with Wikipedia
Keith Olbermann's story on the interesting authorship of many Wikipedia edits - Fox News, NSA over 100 entries. Aug. 16 2007:   A young computer scientist has developed a program called Wikipedia Scanner that can show who makes changes to Wikipedia articles by tracing their computer address.   Kevin Poulsen, senior editor of Wired.com discusses.

PRWatch.org
Taking a cue from Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, the nonprofit Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) is interested in promoting media literacy and citizen journalism "of, by and for the people."  
To achieve this goal, they publish a quarterly investigative journal, their "Spin of the Day", and the very useful PR Watch website. On the site, they investigate and craft critical appraisals of various public relations media. Recently, they have looked at the "green" claims made by print advertisements for various automobiles and media claims about other products.Overall, the site is a good resource for journalists and for people who are just plaincurious about the world of journalism and investigative reporting.

 

Who Contributed to their Campaigns?

 

Did you send in some money to someone's presidential campaign? Did your neighbor? How much and to who? Type in your address and see who your neighbors have donated money to. Or type in someone's name to see who they contributed to.

Links to individual state campaign finance disclosure agencies

Open Secrets Federal Level Data

NewsMeat - tracks celebraties, ceo's everyone you want to know about.

FEC Filings From Prospective 2008 Presidential Campaigns
Official records of Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings for the 2008 presidential election, including Statement of Organization and Statement of Candidacy forms. "This list includes campaigns who have raised or spent $50,000 or more (the threshold for mandatory electronic filing) from sources or to payees other than the candidate him or herself." Additional forms filed are listed under the candidate's committee, including quarterly reports of receipts and disbursements.

Most States Now Offering Campaign Data Online

 

The US Public Policy Committee of the ACM has released a study on statewide voter registration databases.   We looked at accurancy, privacy, usability, security, and reliability issues of such databases.
The home page for the study is http://www.acm.org/usacm/VRD/ ; it contains the committee membership, executive study, and (of course) a link to the full study.

Center for Governmental Studies

Public Citizen founded by Ralph Nader

Douglas Jones University of Iowa associate professor
of computer science has become a leading expert on voting security in the United States and heads the Iowa State Board of Voting Machines and launched a National Science Foundation project called ACCURATE, or A Center for Correct, Usable, Reliable, Auditable and Transparent Elections. Jones said hand-marked paper ballots that can be counted by local machines are probably the best ballot choice.

Project Vote Smart http://votesmart.org/​
A national library of factual information on 40,000 candidates for public office including President of the United States to state legislature to local elected officials. We cover them in five basic areas: backgrounds, issue positions, voting records, campaign finances and performance evaluations made by over 100 liberal to conservative special interest groups.
In addition we interview presidential, congressional, gubernatorial and state legislative candidates and provide special services on issues for journalists, teachers and students. All information and services can be obtained in the following ways:

* The Voter's Research Hotline 1-800-622-SMART
* The Voter's Self-Denfense Manual
Information available through the above sources:
- Biographical and Political Backgrounds
- Addresses and Phone Numbers
- Voting Records
- Campaign Finance Data

Literacy

USA Election Equipment: Standard
Click on a state or territory to see more information
Voters' Guide to Electronic Voting Verified Voting:
Mandatory Manual Audits of Voter-Verified Paper Records
State-by-State Guidelines for Who Can Observe Elections Processes
  Current Congressional Schedule
One Third of Nation's Voters To Face New Voting Equipment in 2006 Statewide Databases of Registered Voters
Digital Divide Information Digital Divide Tools
FEDERAL REGISTER WHAT IS HAPPENING FEDERAL REGISTER RESEARCH

1940 article from Popular Science about   "modern" vote counting.   Thought people might get a kick out of it in   the context of the present voting machine discussions.

Tar and Feather all Electronic Voting Machine Vendors and Election Officials who tamper with our vote.

1800 The real-life election of 1800 was even wilder than Hamilton the musical lets on the actual election of 1800 was far more complex and dramatic — it brought the nation to a constitutional crisis and even, some thought, the brink of open violence.

And Burr's real-life conduct was even more opportunistic and duplicitous than it was in the musical (which features, overall, a toned-down version of the man who'd later be accused of trying to seize American territory to create a new empire for himself). Because Burr was in fact Jefferson's running mate, who was understood by practically everyone to be truly running for vice president.

Until, that is, he saw an opportunity.

Badly flawed constitutional design made the crisis possible

The odd constitutional flaw that led to the electoral crisis of 1800-'01 was a simple one: There was no way the electoral college could distinguish between candidates for president and candidates for vice president.

The way the system initially worked, each state's electors (members of the electoral college) got to cast two votes. When all the votes were in, the person with the most electoral votes would become president (if he had the support of a majority of electors), and the person with the second highest number of votes would become vice president (as Burr notes in "The Adams Administration").

The system was created without any expectation or understanding that organized parties would soon dominate US politics. So once the first parties started putting up both presidential and vice presidential candidates, it quickly became clear that there was a huge potential problem.

Namely: Even if a presidential candidate won a majority of electors, if his vice presidential running mate got those same electors' votes, they'd technically end up in a tie.