Tomorrow is the day we take back our country

Imagine that you've been watching your favorite professional football team all year, and they make it into the playoffs, and finally into the Super Bowl.

Imagine that the game is close - very close - and as the final seconds run down, your quarterback has the ball in the air to an open receiver, who comes down in the end zone... victory!

But suddenly the unthinkable happens. A referee makes a terrible call and the touchdown is called back. Your team loses the game. On an erroneous technicality.

Now imagine that you are losing your home, your job, you have no health care, your life has gone downhill in a thousand different ways in the past eight years... your kid is off at war and can't come home because he or she keeps getting redeployed over and over and over again. You have had it. You are going to change this country, and so you register to vote and you get in there early and you cast that vote for change.

Now imagine that your vote, and others like it all across the country... magically disappear.

The landslide that the polls all indicate is right around the corner... doesn't happen. All because an IT firm is secretly flipping bits inside touch screen voting machines and undermining our democracy. Right under our noses.

It could happen again.

I have been agonizing over this election for years, and tomorrow is the day... but I don't feel any better tonight than I did two years ago. We are the ones who have everything to lose. Our government -- even and especially the Democratic Party, who should have known better -- has done nothing to fix this rampant problem.

Here are two must-read stories from truthout.org -- because our mainstream media is light years behind on this do or die issue that concerns the foundation of our democracy.

The first, from Greg Palast:

It's November 5 and the nation is in shock. Media blame it on the "Bradley effect": Americans supposedly turned into Klansmen inside the voting booth, and Barack Obama turned up with 6 million votes less than calculated from the exit polls. Florida came in for McCain and so did Indiana. Colorado, despite the Democrats' Rocky Mountain high after the Denver convention, stayed surprisingly Red. New Mexico, a state where Anglos are a minority, went McCain by 300 votes, as did Virginia.

That's the nightmare. Here's the cold reality.

Swing state Colorado. Before this election, two Republican secretaries of state purged 19.4 percent of the entire voter roll. One in five voters. Pfft!

Swing state New Mexico. One in nine voters in this year's Democratic caucus found their names missing from the state-provided voter registries. And not just any voters. County by county, the number of voters disappeared was in direct proportion to the nonwhite population. Gore won the state by 366 votes; Kerry lost it by only 5,900. Despite reassurances that all has been fixed for Tuesday, Democrats lost from the list in February told me they're still "disappeared" from the lists this week.

Swing state Indiana. In this year's primary, ten nuns were turned away from the polls because of the state's new voter ID law. They had drivers' licenses, but being in their 80s and 90s, they'd let their licenses expire. Cute. But what isn't cute is this: 566,000 registered voters in that state don't have the ID required to vote. Most are racial minorities, the very elderly and first-time voters; that is, Obama voters. Twenty-three other states have new, vote-snatching ID requirements.

Swing state Florida. Despite a lawsuit battle waged by the Brennan Center for Justice, the state's Republican apparatchiks are attempting to block the votes of 85,000 new registrants, forcing them to pass through a new "verification" process. Funny thing: verification applies only to those who signed up in voter drives (mostly black), but not to voters registering at motor vehicle offices (mostly white).

And so on through swing states controlled by Republican secretaries of state.

Read the rest here...

And yet another from truthout.org (they are obviously as worried tonight as I am. But then, they have been covering this issue for years.)

Is the Election About to Be Stolen in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Elsewhere?

Last Friday, a federal court judge in Cleveland, Ohio, ordered Michael Connell, an information-technology consultant to the McCain '08 campaign, to give a deposition in a court proceeding. Mr. Connell, whose firm, GovTech Solutions, built Ohio's 2004 election results computer network, was in a position to have knowledge about the alleged manipulation of electronic voting results in that presidential contest (a technique known as "flipping") in order to switch the winner in Ohio from Sen. John Kerry to President Bush. The deposition is scheduled to take place today, November 3, one day before the 2008 general election.

Connell is a former associate of Karl Rove, who is believed by those familiar with the events in question to have engaged in witness intimidation to prevent testimony about what happened in Ohio in 2004. They also believe that IT companies associated with the Republican Party have redeveloped the capacity to manipulate electronic voting results in Tuesday's election, both within Ohio and outside, including Pennsylvania and other key battleground states such as Colorado and New Mexico. One such firm, Triad GSI, is managing voter registration databases in 55 of Ohio's 88 counties and is hosting 25 of those databases.

All this has led to speculation that the McCain campaign's insistence that they can win Pennsylvania, Ohio, and other states, despite being (in some places, significantly) behind in most of the polls, could be prompted by having been informed about planned cyber interference with electronic voting results. The reality is that a successful cyber attack only requires a few skilled IT experts with an in-depth understanding of digital security. Election returns in many states are presently emailed from local databases for statewide consolidation, without even the standard safeguards routinely used by banks and corporations. In other words, voting data can be relatively easily hacked.

Read the rest here...

I noticed a special on the hacking of our elections on a public television station this evening. I didn't want to watch it. I'm trying to get some actual sleep tonight. I flipped through the stations, only to find that 'Recount' was playing on HBO. Stolen elections have finally made it into the public awareness. Apparently I am not the only one with that sick, gnawing feeling in my stomach tonight.

May justice and democracy prevail tomorrow. Be vigilant. Be wary. Pay attention. And don't let anyone bully you out of voting.

As Fredrick Douglass once said -- and I've read this twice today, in two different places, so I know its relevant:

Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.

Tomorrow... stay the hell in line!

Because this is your time, your voice in our government of the people.

Don't let ANYONE - EVER - stop you from exercising your right to vote! If you have any problems, find a poll worker and demand to speak with a lawyer.

Americans fighting back

It appears that all across this nation, Americans in every state are actively fighting back against voter suppression propagated by the GOP.

Great news out of Ohio: in spite of George W. Bush's request, the DOJ will not intervene in Ohio's election process:

The Department of Justice will not require Ohio to disclose the names of voters whose registration applications did not match other government databases, according to two people familiar with discussions between state and federal lawyers.

The decision comes about a week after an unusual request from President Bush asking the department to investigate the matter and roughly two weeks after the Supreme Court dismissed a case involving the flagged registration applications.

More good news from Ohio:

(AP) — A federal judge in Ohio has ruled that counties must allow homeless voters to list park benches and other locations that aren't buildings as their addresses.

U.S. District Judge Edmund Sargus also ruled that provisional ballots can't be invalidated because of poll worker errors.

And of course, the governor of Florida has increased the early voting hours in Florida to accommodate everyone who wants to vote ahead of election day! It appears that Florida is fighting to shake off the same 'voting irregularity' stigma that has haunted Ohio for the last four years.

In Florida, there is a huge resistance to handing out provisional ballots (which many believe go largely uncounted.) In an article entitled "Election revolt over provisional ballots," county election officials are rebelling against Republican Secretary of State Kurt Browning and seem determined to let people clear up registration discrepancies at the polls - anything to avoid a provisional ballot:

The two sides disagree over how to interpret the controversial Florida Voter Verification Law, better known as the "no match, no vote" law that applies to anyone who registered to vote after Sept. 8. The law requires that the driver's license or Social Security number provided on a voter registration application match the number in the state's database.

Roughly 12,000 would-be voters have been snagged by the new requirement and should have received letters telling them to contact their local election supervisors to clear up the discrepancies.

If they don't, Browning says elections officials should give provisional ballots to no-match voters who show up at the polls and tell them they have 48 hours to deliver, e-mail or fax any identification documents to the elections office. The documents will then be reviewed by the county canvassing board, which decides if the vote counts.

But Pinellas Supervisor of Elections Deborah Clark announced this month that she'll give no-match voters a chance to correct any problems while they're at the polls on Election Day. If they do, she'll hand them a regular ballot. About 30 other county elections supervisors have announced policies similar to Clark's, to Browning's chagrin.

Browning and his staff contend that all 67 counties should follow the same approach, or the state could face a lawsuit over the lack of uniform vote-counting methods.

Ohio and Florida, both fighting back. Maybe we can overcome the bit-flipping thievery this time.

And the 'Great Voter Purge' continues...

The latest targets? First time voters.

The Great Voter Purge of 2008 doesn't really care if you are White or African American. It doesn't entirely care if you are urban or rural. It doesn't discriminate between first time student voters and elderly retirees. If there is any chance - any chance at all - that you plan to vote for Barack Obama... you might find your voter registration has 'suddenly gone missing.'

From CNN:

ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- College senior Kyla Berry was looking forward to voting in her first presidential election, even carrying her voter registration card in her wallet.

But about two weeks ago, Berry got disturbing news from local election officials.

"This office has received notification from the state of Georgia indicating that you are not a citizen of the United States and therefore, not eligible to vote," a letter from the Fulton County Department of Registration and Elections said.

But Berry is a U.S. citizen, born in Boston, Massachusetts. She has a passport and a birth certificate to prove it. Video Watch some of the concerns of voting experts »

The letter, which was dated October 2, gave her a week from the time it was dated to prove her citizenship. There was a problem, though -- the letter was postmarked October 9.

"It was the most bizarre thing. I immediately called my mother and asked her to send me my birth certificate, and then I was like, 'It's too late, apparently,' " Berry said.

Berry is one of more than 50,000 registered Georgia voters who have been "flagged" because of a computer mismatch in their personal identification information. At least 4,500 of those people are having their citizenship questioned and the burden is on them to prove eligibility to vote.

Experts say lists of people with mismatches are often systematically cut, or "purged," from voter rolls.

It's a scenario that's being repeated all across the country, with cases like Berry's raising fears of potential vote suppression in crucial swing states.

Polls mean nothing now. What most of us are waiting anxiously to see is whether (or not) our election system is so thoroughly compromised that an anticipated landslide victory for Obama can be thwarted.

Eight days and counting.

Judges rule against GOP in Indiana and Nevada

The GOP just can't seem to win these days.

Two rulings came down today -- both in favor of voters (and against the GOP lawsuits thrown up to block or otherwise hamper early voting in urban centers.)

In Indiana, Republican attempts to shut down the early voting centers in Gary, Hammond, and East Chicago failed today when Superior Court Judge Diane Kavadias-Schneider ruled against them:

The Lake County Board of Elections and Registration is hereby enjoined from terminating the operation of in person absentee voting currently being conducted in the offices of the Clerk of the Lake Circuit Court in the courthouse buildings in Gary, Hammond, and East Chicago and the offices of the Lake County Board of Elections and Registration in Crown Point.

It is further ordered that all ballots that have already been cast at the early voting locations in Gary, Hammond, East Chicago, and Crown Point shall not be invalidated except for instances of voter fraud.

And in Nevada, the fight for/against voter suppression has taken a new twist.

Yesterday, Republican chair Sue Lowden asked the Secretary of State to invalidate the registrations of any Nevada citizen whose registration information contained errors or was in any way 'incomplete.' Interestingly, her greatest concern seemed to be the registrations from the urban areas (most likely to vote Democratic.)

Today Nevada Secretary of State, Ross Miller, responded that Nevada Statue 293.5235(6) requires the county to notify the voter of any deficiency and give them 15 days to correct the error. He ruled that because the voters have not been given advance notice of any errors in their registrations, the corrections could be handled at the polls.

Score two for the voters!

Lou! You found the forest!

Is Lou FINALLY starting to get it?

It appears he has set aside his fascination for ACORNs, and focused on the veritable forest of nation-wide voting problems.

Lou Dobbs Tonight
Monday, October 20, 2008

Tonight, we continue to examine the state of our voting system, and most importantly, its integrity as voters prepare to flock to the polls in record numbers. A Superior Court judge ordered stepped up security of 10,000 electronic voting machines in New Jersey Friday. The machines have been proven to be hackable in seven minutes. The court also agreed to release a Princeton University professor's report that questions the reliability of the machines. Princeton's Coalition for Peace Action and others have sued to force the state to return to paper balloting. New jersey does not have a paper trail and electronic machines miscounted voted in the primaries.

Get a clue, Lou

Lou... I swear. Sometimes you're right on the money, when you talk about the way corporations have taken over our government. And then there are those other times... when you are way out in right field, parroting back the paranoid propaganda being spread around by the RNC.

I just received an email alert from Lou Dobbs, letting me know that 'Democracy is at stake,' simply because the Supreme Court overturned a previous ruling that challenged thousands of Ohio registrations (based on complaints by Republicans.) And of course... all the mainstream media can talk about these days is ACORN, ACORN, ACORN; talking points in hand, the wild, frantic drumbeat grows ever louder (and a little more desperate as it appears we're just not buying it anymore.)

Once and for all: ACORN isn't out to destroy Democracy. You can rest assured that no one named 'Mickey Mouse' will show up to vote in Ohio. Even if someone - deliberately or by mistake - had managed to register a Mickey Mouse to vote in Ohio, you can bet that everyone would notice if this



walked into the polls and tried to cast a vote. Deep breath, lose the hysteria.

What you are seeing is a concerted Republican effort to suppress new voters -- voters that are expected to vote overwhelmingly for Obama. Are they to be turned away simply because it benefits the GOP's self interest?

Lou: if you were the GOP, and you couldn't stop the flood of new voters, what would you do? Might you question the legality of their registrations in an attempt to somehow keep them out of the polls on election day? That might make sense if you were losing -- right?

Lou -- were you upset with all of the voting irregularities that occurred in Ohio - under a GOP state government - in 2004? Because these irregularities were the turning point in a very close election, and left us with another four years of George W. Bush. Amazing how such an unpopular president managed to miraculously dodge those exit polls and win Ohio, don't you think?

Registrations don't steal elections Lou... elections are stolen when the votes aren't counted, or are falsely invalidated after they have been cast, or when legally registered voters are turned away from the polls, or when absentee ballots somehow 'disappear,' or when votes are electronically hacked from a basement. All of this actually happened in 2004. Where were you then?

If you want to be enraged about an issue, be enraged about the fact that we still don't have voting machine paper trails in many states. No one can vote without an ID; but their votes can still 'magically disappear' after they are cast, depending on who within state government is in a position to manipulate the system once the votes have been cast.

And Lou... that just ain't ACORN.

For God's sake, do a little research... would you? The UK media is way ahead of you.

The truth about ACORN

George Carlin: Garbage in, garbage out

No Jon Stewart today to lighten my mood. Time to pull out Carlin.



I'm sure Carlin would have approved this scathing and surreal commentary by Matt Taibbi, of The Rolling Stone:

Mad Dog Palin, by Matt Taibbi:

I'm standing outside the XCEL ENERGY CENTER in St. Paul Minnesota Sarah Palin has just finished her speech to the Republican National Convention, accepting the party's nomination for vice president. If I hadn't quit my two-packs-a-day habit earlier this year, I'd be chain-smoking now. So the only thing left is to stand mute against the fit-for-a-cheap-dog-kennel crowd-control fencing you see everywhere at these idiotic conventions and gnaw on weird new feelings of shock and anarchist rage as one would a rawhide chew toy.

All around me, a million cops in their absurd post-9/11 space-combat get-ups stand guard as assholes in papier-mache puppet heads scramble around for one last moment of network face time before the coverage goes dark. Four-chinned delegates from places like Arkansas and Georgia are pouring joyously out the gates in search of bars where they can load up on Zombies and Scorpion Bowls and other "wild" drinks and extramaritally grope their turkey-necked female companions in bathroom stalls as part of the "unbelievable time" they will inevitably report to their pals back home. Only 21st-century Americans can pass through a metal detector six times in an hour and still think they're at a party.

The defining moment for me came shortly after Palin and her family stepped down from the stage to uproarious applause, looking happy enough to throw a whole library full of books into a sewer. In the crush to exit the stadium, a middle-aged woman wearing a cowboy hat, a red-white-and-blue shirt and an obvious eye job gushed to a male colleague they were both wearing badges identifying them as members of the Colorado delegation at the Xcel gates.

"She totally reminds me of my cousin!" the delegate screeched. "She's a real woman! The real thing!"

I stared at her open-mouthed. In that moment, the rank cynicism of the whole sorry deal was laid bare. Here's the thing about Americans. You can send their kids off by the thousands to get their balls blown off in foreign lands for no reason at all, saddle them with billions in debt year after congressional year while they spend their winters cheerfully watching game shows and football, pull the rug out from under their mortgages, and leave them living off their credit cards and their Wal-Mart salaries while you move their jobs to China and Bangalore.

And none of it matters, so long as you remember a few months before Election Day to offer them a two-bit caricature culled from some cutting-room-floor episode of Roseanne as part of your presidential ticket. And if she's a good enough likeness of a loudmouthed middle-American archetype, as Sarah Palin is, John Q. Public will drop his giant-size bag of Doritos in gratitude, wipe the Sizzlin' Picante dust from his lips and rush to the booth to vote for her. Not because it makes sense, or because it has a chance of improving his life or anyone else's, but simply because it appeals to the low-humming narcissism that substitutes for his personality, because the image on TV reminds him of the mean, brainless slob he sees in the mirror every morning.

Sarah Palin is a symbol of everything that is wrong with the modern United States. As a representative of our political system, she's a new low in reptilian villainy, the ultimate cynical masterwork of puppeteers like Karl Rove. But more than that, she is a horrifying symbol of how little we ask for in return for the total surrender of our political power.

Read more...

NYT: Scientists hack into electronic voting machines

The Democrats are addressing our voting hell!

From the New York Times:

Scientists’ Tests Hack Into Electronic Voting Machines
in California and Elsewhere

By CHRISTOPHER DREW
Published: July 28, 2007

Computer scientists from California universities have hacked into three electronic voting systems used in California and elsewhere in the nation and found several ways in which vote totals could potentially be altered, according to reports released yesterday by the state.

The reports, the latest to raise questions about electronic voting machines, came to light on a day when House leaders announced in Washington that they had reached an agreement on measures to revamp voting systems and increase their security.

The House bill would require every state to use paper records that would let voters verify that their ballots had been correctly cast and that would be available for recounts.

We need to throw some big support behind this bill. Our votes are our voice.

Critics say the California findings suggest that Congress should press for a quicker shift from the touch screens to optical scanning, in which voters mark paper ballots. Advocates of those systems say that the paper ballots would be less vulnerable to manipulation than the paper trails generated by the touch-screen computers and that they would hold up better for manual recounts.

If you haven't seen this week's episode of 'NOW,' you should watch the story about voter caging. Unbelievable. Actually, nothing is unbelievable these days, they GOP has raised the bar so high.