The Great GOP Voter Purge

The GOP generally does better when fewer people vote, especially fewer women and racial minorities. So rather than changing their execrable policy goals to appeal to a greater portion of the electorate, they set out to purge the voter rolls of people likely to vote for Democratic candidates. Ian Millhiser at Think Progress tells us about "The Enormous, Secretive Effort To Purge Thousands Of Minorities From 27 States’ Voter Rolls."

It's small comfort to know that if the GOP takes the Senate, they will do so much the way GeeDubya Bush took the 2000 presidency... specifically, by cheating. C'mon, get to the polls and at least make them sweat.

Touch-Screen Machine Poll-utes Votes In PA

Via l'Enfant de la Haute Mer in comments, in Pennsylvania, as Pam Spaulding tells us, a touch-screen voting machine reproducibly highlighted Romney when a voter selected Obama. Being a software developer, he experimented, tapping the buttons in small vertical increments, and found out that the entire area of the Romney button, plus the entire area of the Obama button, again reproducibly selected Romney. Only one small sliver between the two buttons actually caused Obama to be selected. The voter took a cell phone video documenting the phenomenon.

It gets worse. The voter asked the voters on either side of him, and found they had no problems. He then called over a volunteer assistant, who hemmed and hawed, then said something like "Don't worry. Everything will be all right..." and walked away, declining to do more.

Later in the day, that particular machine was pulled from service. How many are there like it in the field? How many states, how many polls, how many votes, are poll‑uted by this kind of tampering?

Jeebus Christ on a crutch in a crap-heap! If the voting machines really are... right now, today... tampering with our votes as we speak, what is there left to call "democracy"?

Harris County's voting machines may still be rigged, but if so, they are more subtle about it. For one thing, they do not have touch screens, but rather fingertip dials that move the selection bar, with a sort of Enter key that selects the currently highlighted candidate. For another, the selection in a race is visible for the entire time that ballot page is visible, and is again displayed for you in a list of your votes in every race at the end of the ballot; at any point, you may go back to earlier pages and change or verify your votes. As I said, this is not total security; such machines are, for example, still vulnerable to the "man-in-the-middle" approach described earlier in the post about Ohio. But at least a few hacks are precluded.

Users of e-voting systems: did you vote for Obama? did you merely THINK you voted for Obama? You'll probably never know.

There should be a "Boston voting machine party" in which these machines are all sent straight to the bottom of the ocean, after which actual voting is returned to paper ballots with a strict chain of custody both before and after they are marked. Yes, there are still ways to cheat on paper ballots, but it can be made much harder than it is with e-voting equipment.

It's 4:09 PM CST... where is YOUR vote?

Blame-mentum!

It must be all but in the bag for Obama: according to two articles on TPM, GOP officials are laying the groundwork to blame Hurricane Sandy for distracting the electorate and allowing Obama to win.

Well, OK; whatever makes them feel better. If they are correct... if Obama actually wins, and miraculously the GOP theft attempt fails and Obama actually takes office... next time, the GOP could try running on actual issues advocating positions real Americans actually support. I'm just sayin'.

This isn't quite over yet. Be sure all your Dem friends have voted, then, if you live in a swing state, join a group keeping an eye on your local polls to make sure they don't steal us blind. (Of course if they use e-voting equipment, there's probably not much you can do.) Even if we win this one, we face a sort of brave new world, but I'll have more to say when this is nailed tighter than a coffin.

GOP SuperPAC Money to Burn

Slightly amusing afterthought: there is talk that much super-PAC money is being spent in these last three days in markets that are not really GOP-competitive. I mean, what are they going to do? If in fact Rmoney loses, the superPACs don't want to face their contributors that there was money unspent.

And contrary to popular images, even they don't have money to burn...

GOP Voter Registration Fraud In Virginia: The Scandal Spreads

Brad Friedman of The Brad Blog, posting on Oct. 25 on Salon, tells us as much as was known a week ago about the voter registration scandal that began with a simple case of a hired Republican voter registrar dumping completed Democratic voter registration forms in a dumpster... and has broadened to include reports of fraudulent voter registrations in Florida as well as reports of additional destroyed Democratic registrations in Colorado and Nevada. And that appears to be just the beginning. I expect to find follow-up information.

H/T Politics Plus
(click for TomCat's post)

A name that threads through all these allegations is Nathan Sproul. Through a series of shell organizations, Sproul set up a GOTV and voter registration organization for the benefit of the Republican Party, then was himself "fired" (but not really), leaving those GOTV/VR org's in place, doing dastardly deeds to voter registrations by prospective Democrats. Even in Texas you could go to jail for that kind of behavior. But apparently Sproul has been at it for years, and no door has clanged shut behind him.

I do not know what I shall do if I become convinced that a presidential election duly won by Obama was stolen by GOP voter registration fraud and GOP manipulation of the votes themselves. But unlike sElection 2000, I shall not take it lying down.

Rep. John Lewis On Voter Suppression And Voter ID: "Iʼve Lived This Before"

If you've ever read Walking With The Wind... the great Democrat from Georgia, Rep. John Lewis's memoir of the civil rights movement... you will know that Lewis is one of the toughest, most indefatigable and unbowed African Americans in our midst, a veritable icon of courage and steadfastness, repeatedly beaten and bloodied and fire-hosed but never subdued in spirit. I am fortunate to have found a used copy of the memoir many years ago; I turn to it when my own spirits need restoration. Lewis never fails to inspire me.

Thus Rep. Lewis is the perfect man to address the often politically untouchable issue of race in American politics. No one living... no one in this world... knows better than Lewis the heartbreaking, outraging consequences of racism once woven into the fabric of our nation's electoral process... and now being rewoven by Republicans today. As Lewis said,

I’ve seen this before. I’ve lived this before. Too many people struggled, suffered and died to make it possible for every American to exercise their right to vote.

The poor. The elderly. And yes, racial, ethnic and selected religious minorities. All those American citizens face deliberate, unrestrained, thinly (if at all) disguised suppression of their votes by today's Republican party, through draconian voter ID laws (e.g., Pennsylvania and Texas), drastic pruning of voter roll in defiance of federal court orders (Florida), direct voter challenges at the polls leading to "provisional" ballots (many states), reduction of hours polls are open (again many states including Ohio), and outright vote-counting fraud executed using electronic voting systems (Ohio among others). Lewis conveys the message in his straightforward, uncompromising style:

Today it is unbelievable that there are Republican officials still trying to stop some people from voting. They are changing the rules, cutting polling hours and imposing requirements intended to suppress the vote. The Republican leader in the Pennsylvania House even bragged that his state’s new voter ID law is ‘gonna allow Gov. Romney to win the state.’ That’s not right, that’s not fair and that is not just.

Do not let this courageous and highly respected American down. Do whatever you can to challenge Republican voter suppression in every state this November. Too much is at stake to let them get away with it. Do NOT permit the return of Jim Crow at the polls!

TruthOut: Court Doc Shows How GOP Hacked 2004 Presidential Election In Ohio

Via ellroon, we have Bob Fritakis at TruthOut:

A new filing in the King Lincoln Bronzeville v. Blackwell case includes a copy of the Ohio Secretary of State election production system configuration that was in use in Ohio's 2004 presidential election when there was a sudden and unexpected shift in votes for George W. Bush.

The filing also includes the revealing deposition of the late Michael Connell. Connell served as the IT guru for the Bush family and Karl Rove. Connell ran the private IT firm GovTech that created the controversial system that transferred Ohio's vote count late on election night 2004 to a partisan Republican server site in Chattanooga, Tennessee owned by SmarTech. That is when the vote shift happened, not predicted by the exit polls, that led to Bush's unexpected victory. Connell died a month and a half after giving this deposition in a suspicious small plane crash.

...

Fritakis, in the rest of his article, dots the I's and crosses the T's. But it certainly looks like the motherfuckers stole Ohio for Bush in 2004.

I don't have any information on what systems Ohio will be using this year, but I doubt there are any more safeguards in place today than there were in 2004. Certainly there aren't in Harris County, Texas, where a Republican county clerk dominated the selection process in 1998 when voting systems were "updated" to an electronic system. Today we have another GOPer in that office, reportedly even less competent than his predecessor, but most of all, we have exactly the same voting system in place as we did then: Hart InterCivic's eSlate.

Until America returns to paper ballots with a strict chain of custody for blank ballots and completed ballots, and a counting process supervised by all interested parties, we will see repeated election theft... GOP election theft... until the republic collapses. But before we change back to verifiable voting systems, I expect Hell and Texas will freeze over in mid-July.

MINOR CORRECTION: Dr. F's last name seems to be Fitrakis. The misspelling was original in the published article.

Rmoney To Pick Paul Ryan? You Gotta Be Kidding Me!

Teddy Partridge of FDL quotes NBC as saying the announcement will be made tomorrow morning. If so, Rmoney may be making a very generous gift of the election to Obama. If there is a Republican in Washington today with less public credibility than Paul Ryan, I don't know who it would be. Ryan may or may not actually be an utter idiot, but he certainly presents as one. I cannot decide whether Rmoney is merely desperate, or lives so far from reality that he thinks Ryan's rantings of the past year or two would actually appeal to a public suffering an economic catastrophe. Maybe both alternatives are true.

Rmoney is apparently following in the tradition of John McCain and of George H.W. Bush in choosing a nonviable veep. (Yes, Poppy Bush was elected anyway. But Rmoney is no Poppy Bush.) But I doubt the GOP intends to give away the election, even if Rmoney is willing to do so. It is thus increasingly clear that Rmoney and the GOP intend to follow in the tradition of GeeDubya Bush in 2000: they're going to fucking steal the presidency in 2012. With the new voter ID laws, and a lineup of courts that may be willing to validate them, Rmoney may well succeed.

I'll say it again: I never thought I'd live to see the day...

Do Republicans Hack The Vote?

That's what Republicans will do if they have the opportunity. I am basing my assertion on what they have done, as demonstrated by statistical anomalies of the recorded vote from exit polls, in more than a third of 300 recent state elections. ellroon points us to Bob Fitrakis at The Free Press, himself a PhD in political science with a high-level understanding of statistics. To get straight to the point, Fitrakis cites statistician Richard Charnin as follows:

One of my favorite mathematicians is Richard Charnin, who on his website using readily available public information, calculates the odds of the so-called ‘red shift" occurring from the 1988 to 2008 presidential elections. The red shift refers to the overwhelming pick up of votes by the Republican Party in recorded votes over what actual voters report to exit pollsters. See Richard Charnin's article[.]

In Charnin's analysis of exit poll data, we can say with a 95% confidence level – that means in 95 out of 100 elections – that the exit polls will fall within a statistically predictable margin of error. Charnin looked at 300 presidential state exit polls from 1988 to 2008, 15 state elections would be expected to fall outside the margin of error. Shockingly, 137 of the 300 state presidential exit polls fell outside the margin of error.

What is the probability of this happening?

"One in one million trillion trillion trlllion trillion trillion trillion," said Charnin.

In other words, there's no way in heaven, hell or earth that it happened as a result of ordinary voting patterns and ordinary exit polling in elections in the real world. Maybe a dozen of the "red-shift" elections could be explained that way... but 137 out of 300 [ADDED], 134 Republican and only 3 Democratic? Don't make me laugh.

(The rest of this post is taken largely from a comment I left on ellroon's site.)

Speaking as a computer professional, not as a partisan, I've read the relevant papers about voting software used in the past several elections on major vendors' machines, and it has so many holes in it that I could hack it (having no prior experience in hacking), and in some areas, even someone who is not a computer professional could hack it, by tweaking certain aspects of the setup for a particular election.

I have no doubt in my mind that two of the last three presidential elections have been stolen outright... and that the last one was not stolen only because the Democratic Party ran a Republican for president. (I know some heads will explode when I say that, but tell me it isn't true... Obama is an Eisenhower Republican, despite being the least flawed candidate offered by either major party this year.)

Some years back, John Dean wrote a book titled Conservatives Without Conscience. I read the book; it was long, repetitive, tedious... and exactly on point. What are we to do when confronted with a party full of people who have no problem facing themselves in the bathroom mirror after they steal an election the night before?

If America cares... and I'm not sure whether they do... they should hold not "tea parties" but "voting machine parties" ... send 'em all to the bottom of the bay, and force a return to some sort of indestructible paper or cardstock ballots, with a strict chain of custody from purchase to polls to counting centers. Otherwise, we're just play-acting at being a democracy... and we will have Republican rule, chosen by a minority of the vote, to the last days of our nation.

GOP Mofos Disenfranchise Florida WWII Veteran

It worked for them in 2000, so they're going to do it again. I'm talking about the motherfucking Florida GOP and Gov. Rick Scott (R), suppressing likely Democratic voters by purging them from the rolls. David Dayen of FDL quotes from the Tampa Bay Times (I selected a slightly different quote):

Bill Internicola was born in Brooklyn 91 years ago and received a Bronze Star for fighting in the Battle of the Bulge in World War II, but, according to the state of Florida, he may not be a U.S. citizen. 

Internicola received a letter in May from the Broward supervisor of elections stating that it received "information from the State of Florida that you are not a United States citizen; however you are registered to vote." The letter was part of a controversial state-led effort to rid the voter rolls of noncitizens. Similar letters were sent to 259 Broward voters. 

Internicola said he was "flabbergasted" by the suggestion that he wasn't a citizen. He called the county's election office and said: "Are you crazy?" 

...

The quote is from the Tampa Bay Times. Among national newspapers, apparently only the NYT is giving the general issue significant coverage. (Dayen, as he almost never does, goes off on a tangent about whether a veteran's vote should be more sacred than a non-veteran's; I'm not going to follow him there.)

When George W. Bush stole Florida by unleashing a rowdy mob of Bush supporters against the recount effort in 2000, a number of people said that we should not talk open rebellion on the first occasion of vote suppression. Back then I said "fuck that shit," but I am not from Florida. OK, it's happening again... big surprise, eh? What are you going to do about it, Floridians? Ted Deutch (D-Boca Raton) and Alcee Hastings (D-Miramar) call Gov. Scott's voter purge efforts "misguided"; I am inclined to much stronger language.

How far can we let them go? How many presidential elections must we let them steal as a matter of interparty comity? I say it again, 12 years later: "fuck that shit!"