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This post is about me and why I came to DU.
I have never believed the narrative about GWB's strange elections. Never. I don't know why but my bullshit meter just popped up the morning I woke up in 2000 and was told that GWB won in FLA.
I started to investigate on line.
I read Black Box Voting by Bev Harris, and Vote Scam by the Collier brothers. I downloaded every article I could find about the companies, the programmers, HAVA voting rules and compiled note book after note book. I gave talks to different peace and justice groups, the local Democratic committee, etc.
My older brother is a computer programmer and at my urging, he looked into the computerization of our elections. It took a while to get him to even look at the issue. Like most of us he was devastated by Bush's second term. Once he did he was as shocked as I was by the info that was coming out in a steady stream. He now works with a voting rights group in Tenn. where they vote on touch screens. Like most voting rights advocates he sees the optical scanner as a better idea.
I don't.
I am in Maine and our small town went from Hand Counted paper ballots to an Optical scan machine. There was very little discussion in the town and it slipped in as a line item in the budget. Most people know how bad the touch screen machines are and would be relieved to have the scanners because they have a paper trail.
That paper is useless if no-one counts it. Only people who have recently experienced the change understand how really different it is on an essential level. The election officials love it because it is quicker. Then again they never let any citizens know they were tired of counting.
After the Harry Hursti Hack of the memory card of a scanner I thought for sure people would finally get it that these are not adding machines. They are not "scanners" like we have at home that take a digital picture of our ballot.
They don't even record each vote. Instead they keep a running total like an odometer. As a vote gets added to either column "a" or column "b" the total number changes.
In the Hursti hack he preloaded onto the memory card, a negative number in one column and the same number, only positive, in the other column. They "zeroed" each other out during the preliminary test.
As each vote came in, one column took a certain number of votes before it even reached 0 and the other column started ahead.
At the end 8 people voted, 8 votes were the result, but who they voted for had been radically changed by the "stuffed" digital ballot box. Because it is a running total there was no way to see what happened without counting the ballots themselves.
I give this background to show that I came to DU because of my genuine interest.
I came across some excellent work being done on DU around the fraud in Ohio. I was here every day and some of the mathematicians and researchers were astonishingly good.
As an aside, little by little, more and more reports are validating the flaws and insecurities that we have been shouting about. For every "conspiracy" that hasn't been proven —brought on by the fact that every "glitch" consistently advantaged one candidate— what has been proven is those conspiracies are certainly possible. Fraud CAN be achieved. BUT, we are told, only by someone with ill intent.
We are expected to prove that it WAS done.
From Clint Curtis giving sworn testimony that he developed a program designed to flip votes, to Chuck Herrin the White hat hacker discovering two sets of books in the GEMs program which is used to tally most votes in the USA, to California's SOS de-certifying all the machines, the message is out there for anyone who WANTS to see.
I remember when the Ohio electoral votes were challenged and how my naive belief in the system was once again shattered The person challenging made it clear that it was just for show and everyone who spoke prefaced their indignant speech by saying they knew it wouldn't change the outcome. I remember being shocked by that.
Wow! That seems like nothing now.
I remember being scorned by most of my friends for my persistence around the election fraud going on— from strange counts to voting roll purges. Now with all the reports they are starting to get it.
What is it?
Paper ballots are great but only if they are randomly audited by hand. In Maine a race has to be within 1% to trigger a recount and then it is always by hand. That leads to a little bit of smug complacency. The more you know about the rabbit hole of the computerization of the USA vote, the more you know how dangerous that is.
So back to me and DU.
I remember when The Election Forum was separated out and how sad that felt. Many great things still get discussed but the passing visitor —like I was— would find it harder to know about all the discoveries and the continuation of the work these voting rights advocates are doing for US.
Now comes the primary and with it some familiar un-ease and distrust. People who have posted here about election issues for a long time, instead of being listened to with respect, are now accused of candidate bashing and hidden agendas. I learned to expect that from Republicans because up until now, one could not avoid pointing out the partisan nature of the apparent anomalies.
I often said to my friends I wish it were the Democrats cheating so I could show my concern and not be seen as partisan. I keep waiting for a new film about election fraud that does not favor the GOP so that I can show it to my Republican selectmen without them discounting me as a disgruntled Democratic operative.
My concern is real. It transcends candidates. It covers all forms of computerized counting without mandatory random hand counted audits.
The pattern that makes me suspicious in ANY race is:
1) Polls not matching the results for only select candidates— the USA calls other countries' elections fraudulent for the same reason— yet in our country it has become taboo to mention a "wrong vote count" as even a POSSIBILITY! This is what the GOP gave us by calling us sore losers. Now we are NEVER going to be called that again by them. In fact if any of our loony embarrassing left wing kooky kooks even brings up the possibility that it might be the count WE will call them sore losers.
There can come to the weenie roast now?
2) Having areas that hand count come out very differently than scanned counts— It might not even be computer fraud. It can be the wrong writing utensil given out to mark the optical scan ballot, or the machine is calibrated to not be sensitive enough to the mark, or too sensitive thus causing over-votes. Again every reason under the sun will be floated except one... the count. Can't even look, can't even check, can't talk about it— at least not in too visible a place. It is too disruptive. Disturbing.
Disturb: a: to destroy the tranquility or composure of <the noisy lawn mower disturbed their sleep> b: to throw into disorder c: alarm d: to put to inconvenience <sorry to disturb you at such a late hour>
Well I think we all need to be disturbed by the fact that it is so uncomfortable for our fellow Democrats to even entertain the idea of a mis-count. Some of us have been following this issue for a long time and our alarm has nothing to do with our candidates except that we are seeing a familiar pattern that disturbs us. It is not our job to come up with the motives but we do anyway, hoping it will help open some very closed minds. Some disturbingly closed minds.
In closing I hope no one thinks for a minute that I think Senator Clinton is involved in anything other than running an exhausting campaign. What happened that disturbs some of us has everything to do with the malevolent usurping of our right to transparent vote counts. Everything from Abramoff payee Ney pushing through HAVA to a Canadian criminal writing the source code for the voting machines disturbs us. We feel a duty to sound the alarm because if the Democratic Party doesn't lead the way, who will?
Would the GOP want to pick our candidate? Delay/Abramoff/Plame/Rove/Cheney/Bush/Cunningham...
Would the GOP pick our candidate if they could... yes.
Did they, I have no way of knowing.
Could it be done?
Yes.
I went up to the head of the Maine Democratic Party who was young enough to be my son. I told him that I thought the best way to restore people's trust would be for winners to ask for random re-counts as a sign of confidence and a desire for truth.
The noble cause of restoring our confidence in the vote would no longer be synonymous with being a sore loser. It would be a win win. If there was fraud it would start to show and we could fix it, if the count was accurate we would all feel better.
In closing, I decided to post (while on a much needed vacation) because when I logged on the first thing I saw was that all threads that question the vote count in NH must be posted in the Election forum.
Once again, people like myself —who put restoring confidence in the vote count at the top of every list— have been asked to make our selves a little less visible.
OK... Sorry if I disturbed anyone.
PS I was going to ad links but the internet keeps going down in the hotel so I am going to just post and have a martini instead.
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