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For The Record  

FTR #470 Democracy Imperiled

Record­ed July 25, 2004
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As the title indi­cates, this broad­cast exam­ines grave threats to what remains of Amer­i­can democ­ra­cy. Much of the first half of the pro­gram exam­ines the issue of elec­tron­ic vot­ing. Con­trolled by a small group of inter­con­nect­ed far-right­ists, com­pa­nies like Diebold, ES&S and Sequoia have proved noto­ri­ous­ly unre­li­able in past elec­tions. Sig­nif­i­cant­ly, the peo­ple in charge of these firms are also close­ly con­nect­ed to the covert oper­a­tions milieu of the 1980’s that spawned the Iran/Contra and Iraq­gate scan­dals. The pro­gram reviews the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a man-made earth­quake affect­ing the elec­tion. In the con­text of the Machi­avel­lian nature of this admin­is­tra­tion, it is worth not­ing that Machi­avel­li coun­seled that a leader destroy a soci­ety with demo­c­ra­t­ic tra­di­tions, lest it regroup and restore those tra­di­tions. The pro­gram con­cludes with an exam­i­na­tion of the pro­found­ly anti-demo­c­ra­t­ic atti­tudes of Paul Weyrich and those in pow­er in the Bush admin­is­tra­tion.

Pro­gram High­lights Include: The Uro­se­vich broth­ers and their pro­found influ­ence on the devel­op­ment of both Diebold and ES&S—two of the com­pa­nies at the epi­cen­ter of elec­tron­ic vot­ing; the rela­tion­ship of the Uro­se­vich broth­ers to the far-right wing Ahman­son fam­i­ly; the Ahman­son family’s links to Paul Weyrich’s Coun­cil on Nation­al Pol­i­cy; the pres­ence on the Coun­cil on Nation­al Pol­i­cy of Iran/Contra play­ers Oliv­er North and Gen. John Singlaub; the close rela­tion­ship of Diebold, ES&S and Repub­li­can Sen­a­tor Chuck Hagel; Diebold’s appar­ent role in help­ing to swing the call­ing of Flori­da for Bush in 2000; the sus­pi­cious per­for­mance of Diebold machines in the 2002 off-year elec­tions; the sus­pi­cious death of Athan Gibbs (who devel­oped a viable alter­na­tive to Diebold machines); Gen­er­al Tom­my Franks’ pre­dic­tion that a ter­ror­ist inci­dent with WMD’s could lead to the impo­si­tion of a mil­i­tary-style gov­ern­ment in the U.S.; the explic­it­ly anti-demo­c­ra­t­ic views of Paul Weyrich and his milieu; a state­ment by the sec­re­tary to for­mer Pres­i­dent Ger­ald Ford that the US entered World War II on the wrong side.

1. Begin­ning with a sub­ject touched on in FTRs 466, 468, the pro­gram dis­cuss­es the issue of elec­tron­ic vot­ing and the small cabal of extreme right-wingers at the foun­da­tion of the com­pa­nies that man­u­fac­ture these machines. One of the most impor­tant of these is the Diebold com­pa­ny. Head­ed by Wal­ly O’Dell—an ardent Bush supporter—the com­pa­ny makes a num­ber of auto­mat­ed devices such as ATM machines. Inter­est­ing­ly, Diebold’s vot­ing machines are the only ones that do not have pro­duce a ver­i­fi­able paper trail. “ . . . If Ohio’s Repub­li­can Sec­re­tary of State Ken­neth Black­well has his way, Diebold will receive a con­tract to sup­ply touch screen elec­tron­ic vot­ing machines for much of the state. None of these Diebold machines will pro­vide a paper receipt of the vote. Diebold, locat­ed in North Can­ton, Ohio, does its pri­ma­ry busi­ness in ATM and tick­et-vend­ing machines. Crit­ics of Diebold point out that vir­tu­al­ly every oth­er machine the com­pa­ny makes pro­vides a paper trail to ver­i­fy the machine’s cal­cu­la­tions. Odd­ly, only the vot­ing machines lack this essen­tial func­tion.”(“Diebold, Elec­tron­ic Vot­ing and the Vast Right-Wing Con­spir­a­cy” by Bob Fitrakis; The Free Press; 2/24/2004; p. 1.)

2. “State Sen­a­tor Tere­sa Fedor of Tole­do intro­duced Sen­ate Bill 167 late last year man­dat­ing that every vot­ing machine in Ohio gen­er­ate a ‘vot­er ver­i­fied paper audit trail.’ Sec­re­tary of State Black­well has denounced any attempt to require a paper trail as an effort to ‘derail’ elec­tion reform. Blackwell’s polit­i­cal career is an inter­est­ing one: he emerged as a black activist in Cincin­nati sup­port­ing munic­i­pal char­ter reform, became an elect­ed Demo­c­rat, then an Inde­pen­dent, and now is a promi­nent Repub­li­can with his eyes on the governor’s man­sion.” (Idem.)

3. The issue at the fore­front of this dis­cus­sion has come into sharp focus as a result of the elec­toral irreg­u­lar­i­ties in the 2000 elec­tion. The 2002 Help Amer­i­ca Vote Act may have actu­al­ly con­tributed to the prob­lem by man­dat­ing that elec­tron­ic vot­ing machines should take the place of punch card machines. “A joint study by the Cal­i­for­nia and Mass­a­chu­setts Insti­tutes of Tech­nol­o­gy fol­low­ing the 2000 elec­tion deter­mined that between 1.5 and 2 mil­lion votes were not count­ed due to con­fus­ing paper bal­lots or faulty equip­ment. The fed­er­al government’s solu­tion to the prob­lem was to pass the Help Amer­i­ca Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002. One of the law’s stat­ed goals was ‘Replace­ment of punch card and lever vot­ing machines.’ The new vot­ing machines would be high-tech touch screen com­put­ers, but if there’s no paper trail, how do you know if there’s been a com­put­er glitch? How can the results be trust­ed? And how do you recount to see if the actu­al votes match the computer’s tal­ly?” (Ibid.; pp. 1–2.)

4. Many crit­ics have focused on the irreg­u­lar­i­ties that have plagued Diebold machines in the past. “Bev Har­ris, author of Black Box Vot­ing: Bal­lot tam­per­ing in the 21st Cen­tu­ry, argues that with­out a paper trail, these machines are open to mas­sive vot­er fraud. Diebold has already placed some 50,000 machines in 37 states and their track record is caus­ing Har­ris, Johns Hop­kins Uni­ver­si­ty pro­fes­sors and oth­ers great con­cern. Johns Hop­kins researchers at the Infor­ma­tion Secu­ri­ty Insti­tute issued a report declar­ing that Diebold’s elec­tron­ic vot­ing soft­ware con­tained ‘stun­ning flaws.’ The researchers con­clud­ed that vote totals could be altered at the vot­ing machines and by remote access. Diebold vig­or­ous­ly refut­ed the Johns Hop­kins report, claim­ing the researchers came to ‘a mul­ti­tude of false con­clu­sions.’” (Ibid.; p. 2.)

5. “Per­haps to set­tle the issue, appar­ent­ly an insid­er leaked doc­u­ments from the Diebold elec­tion Sys­tems web­site and post­ed inter­nal doc­u­ments from the com­pa­ny to Har­ris’ web­site. Diebold went to court to stop, accord­ing to court records, the ‘whole­sale repro­duc­tion’ of some 13,000 pages of com­pa­ny mate­r­i­al. The Asso­ci­at­ed Press report­ed in Novem­ber 2003 that: ‘Com­put­er pro­gram­mers, ISPs and stu­dents at [at] least 20 uni­ver­si­ties, includ­ing the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Berke­ley, and the Mass­a­chu­setts Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy received cease and desist let­ters’ from Diebold. A group of Swarth­more Col­lege stu­dents launched an ‘elec­tron­ic civ­il dis­obe­di­ence’ cam­paign to keep the hacked doc­u­ments per­ma­nent­ly post­ed on the Inter­net.” (Idem.)

6. Irreg­u­lar­i­ties in the Volu­sia Coun­ty (Flori­da) Diebold machines appear to have led to the pre­ma­ture media call of Flori­da as hav­ing been won by Bush. (For more about the Flori­da elec­toral irreg­u­lar­i­ties, see—among oth­er pro­grams—FTRs 259, 268.) “Har­ris writes that the doc­u­ments expose how the main­stream media reversed their call pro­ject­ing Al Gore as win­ner of Flori­da after some­one ‘sub­tract­ed 16, 022 votes from Al Gore, and in still some unde­fined way, added 4000 erro­neous votes to George W. Bush.’ Hours lat­er, the votes were returned. One memo from Lana Hires of Glob­al Elec­tion Sys­tems, now Diebold, reads: ‘I need some answers! Our depart­ment is being audit­ed by the Coun­ty. I have been wait­ing for some­one to give me an expla­na­tion as to why Precinct 216 gave Al Gore a minus 16,022 [votes] when it was uploaded.’ Anoth­er hacked inter­nal memo, writ­ten by Tal­bot Iredale, Senior VP of Research and Devel­op­ment for Diebold Elec­tion Sys­tems, doc­u­ments ‘unau­tho­rized’ replace­ment votes in Volu­sia Coun­ty.” (Idem.)

7. “Har­ris also uncov­ered a reveal­ing 87-page CBS news report and not­ed, ‘Accord­ing to CBS doc­u­ments, the erro­neous 20,000 votes in Volu­sia was direct­ly respon­si­ble for call­ing the elec­tion for Bush.’ The first per­son to call the elec­tion for Bush was Fox elec­tion ana­lyst John Ellis, who had the advan­tage of con­fer­ring with his promi­nent cousins George W. Bush and Flori­da Gov­er­nor Jeb Bush.” (Idem.)

8. In exam­in­ing the issue of elec­tron­ic vot­ing, it is essen­tial to note how a small cabal of close­ly con­nect­ed, extreme right-wingers dom­i­nates the few com­pa­nies involved in mak­ing these machines. The main names are: Bob and Todd Uro­se­vich, the Ahman­son fam­i­ly, Car­olyn Hunt, Chuck Hagel, Diebold, ES&S. Note the rela­tion­ships between these indi­vid­u­als and com­pa­nies that dom­i­nate the elec­tron­ic vot­ing mar­ket. “Increas­ing­ly, inves­tiga­tive writ­ers seek­ing an expla­na­tion have looked to Diebold’s his­to­ry for clues. The elec­tron­ic vot­ing indus­try is dom­i­nat­ed by only a few corporations—Diebold, Elec­tion Sys­tems & Soft­ware (ES&S) and Sequoia. Diebold and ES&S com­bined to count an esti­mat­ed 80% of U.S. black box elec­tron­ic votes. In the ear­ly 1980’s, broth­ers Bob and Todd Uro­se­vich found­ed ES&S’s orig­i­na­tor, Data Mark. The broth­ers Uro­se­vich obtained financ­ing from the far-Right Ahman­son fam­i­ly in 1984, which pur­chased a 68% own­er­ship stake, accord­ing to the Oma­ha World Her­ald. After broth­ers William and Robert Ahman­son infused Data Mark with new cap­i­tal, the name was changed to Amer­i­can Infor­ma­tion Sys­tems (AIS). Cal­i­for­nia news­pa­pers have long doc­u­ment­ed the Ahman­son family’s ties to right-wing evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian and Repub­li­can cir­cles.” (Idem.)

9. Deeply involved in the cap­i­tal­iza­tion of the com­pa­nies that evolved into ES&S, the Ahman­son fam­i­ly is close­ly con­nect­ed to the Coun­cil on Nation­al Pol­i­cy, an insti­tu­tion dom­i­nat­ed by far-right wingers close­ly iden­ti­fied with the covert oper­a­tions of the 1980’s, such as the Iran/Contra and Iraq­gate scan­dals. “In 2001, the Los Ange­les Times report­ed, ‘ . . . pri­mar­i­ly fund­ed by evan­gel­i­cal Christians—particularly the wealthy Ahman­son fam­i­ly of Irvine—the [Dis­cov­ery] Institute’s $1‑million annu­al pro­gram has pro­duced 25 books, a stream of con­fer­ences and more than 100 fel­low­ships for doc­tor­al and post­doc­tor­al research.’ The chief phil­an­thropists of the Dis­cov­ery Insti­tute, that push­es cre­ation­ist sci­ence and edu­ca­tion in Cal­i­for­nia, are Howard and Rober­ta Ahman­son. Accord­ing to Group Watch, in the 1980’s Howard F. Ahman­son, Jr. was a mem­ber of the high­ly secre­tive far-Right Coun­cil for Nation­al Pol­i­cy, an orga­ni­za­tion that includ­ed Lieu­tenant Colonel Oliv­er North, Major Gen­er­al John K. Singlaub and oth­er Iran-Con­tra scan­dal nota­bles, as well as for­mer Klan mem­bers like Richard Shoff. Ahman­son, heir to a sav­ings and loan for­tune, is lit­tle report­ed on in the main­stream U.S. press. But, Eng­lish papers like The Inde­pen­dent are a bit more forth­com­ing on Ahmanson’s pol­i­tics.” (Ibid.; pp. 2–3.)

10. “ ‘On the right, fig­ures such as Richard Mel­lon Scaife and Howard Ahman­son have giv­en hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars over sev­er­al decades to polit­i­cal projects both high (set­ting up the Her­itage Foun­da­tion think-tank, the dri­ving engine of the Rea­gan pres­i­den­cy) and low (bankrolling inves­ti­ga­tions into Pres­i­dent Clinton’s sex­u­al indis­cre­tions and the sui­cide of the White House insid­er Vin­cent Fos­ter),’ wrote The Inde­pen­dent last Novem­ber. The Sun­day Mail described an indi­vid­ual as, ‘ . . . a fun­da­men­tal­ist Chris­t­ian more in the mould of U.S. mul­ti-mil­lion­aire Howard Ahman­son, Jr., who uses his for­tune to pro­mote so-called tra­di­tion­al fam­i­ly val­ues . . . by wav­ing for­tunes under their noses, Ahman­son has the abil­i­ty to cajole can­di­dates into back­ing his right-wing Chris­t­ian agen­da.” (Ibid.; p. 3.)

11. Note the role of Chuck Hagel in the devel­op­ment of ES&S, one of the com­pa­nies deeply involved in the elec­tron­ic vot­ing busi­ness. The com­pa­ny grew con­sid­er­ably when it pur­chased BRC, found­ed in part by the far-right wing Hunt fam­i­ly of Texas. (The Hunts assist­ed in the found­ing of the Coun­cil on Nation­al Pol­i­cy.) “Ahman­son is also a chief con­trib­u­tor to the Chal­cedon Insti­tute that sup­ports the Chris­t­ian recon­struc­tion move­ment. The movement’s phi­los­o­phy advo­cates, among oth­er things, ‘man­dat­ing the death penal­ty for homo­sex­u­als and drunk­ards.’ The Ahman­son fam­i­ly sold their shares in Amer­i­can Infor­ma­tion Sys­tems to the McCarthy Group and the World Her­ald Com­pa­ny, Inc. Repub­li­can Sen­a­tor Chuck Hagel dis­closed in pub­lic doc­u­ments that he was the Chair­man of Amer­i­can Infor­ma­tion Sys­tems and claimed between a $1 to 5 mil­lion invest­ment in the McCarthy Group. In 1997, Amer­i­can Infor­ma­tion Sys­tems pur­chased Busi­ness Records Corp. (BRC), for­mer­ly Texas-based elec­tion com­pa­ny Cronus Indus­tries, to become ES&S. One of the BRC own­ers was Car­olyn Hunt of the right-wing Hunt oil fam­i­ly, which sup­plied much of the orig­i­nal mon­ey for the Coun­cil on Nation­al Pol­i­cy.” (Idem.)

12. Did Hagel’s ES&S con­nec­tion help with his “stun­ning” elec­toral upset? “In 1996, Hagel became the first elect­ed Repub­li­can Nebras­ka sen­a­tor in 24 years when he did sur­pris­ing­ly well in an elec­tion where the votes were ver­i­fied by the com­pa­ny he served as chair­man and [in which] he main­tained a finan­cial invest­ment. In both the 1996 and 2002 elec­tions, Hagel’s Es&S count­ed an esti­mat­ed 80% of his win­ning votes. Due to the con­tract­ing out of ser­vices, con­fi­den­tial­i­ty agree­ments between the State of Nebras­ka and the com­pa­ny kept this mat­ter out of the pub­lic eye. Hagel’s first elec­tion vic­to­ry was described as a ‘stun­ning upset’ by one Nebras­ka news­pa­per.” (Idem.)

13. “Hagel’s offi­cial biog­ra­phy states, ‘Pri­or to his elec­tion to the U.S. Sen­ate, Hagel worked in the pri­vate sec­tor as the Pres­i­dent of McCarthy and Com­pa­ny, an invest­ment bank­ing firm based in Oma­ha, Nebras­ka and served as Chair­man of the Board of Amer­i­can Infor­ma­tion Sys­tems.’ Dur­ing the first Bush pres­i­den­cy, Hagel served as Deputy Direc­tor and Chief Oper­at­ing Offi­cer of the 1990 Eco­nom­ic Sum­mit of Indus­tri­al­ized Nations (G‑7 Sum­mit).” (Idem.)

14. Again, note the inces­tu­ous struc­ture of Diebold, ES&S and both firms’ rela­tion­ship to Hagel and the Uro­se­vich broth­ers. “Bob Uro­se­vich was the Pro­gram­mer and CEO at AIS, before being replaced by Hagel. Bob now heads Diebold Elec­tion Sys­tems and his broth­er Todd is a top exec­u­tive at ES&S. Bob cre­at­ed Diebold’s orig­i­nal elec­tron­ic vot­ing machine soft­ware. Thus, the broth­ers Uro­se­vich, orig­i­nal­ly fund­ed by the far Right, fig­ure in the count­ing of approx­i­mate­ly 80% of elec­tron­ic vot­ing in the Unit­ed States.” (Idem.)

15. “Like Ohio, the State of Mary­land was dis­turbed by the poten­tial for mas­sive elec­tron­ic vot­er fraud. The vot­ers of that state were reas­sured when the state hired SAIC to mon­i­tor Diebold’s sys­tems. SAIC’s for­mer CEO is Admi­ral Bill Owens. Owens served as a mil­i­tary aide to both Vice Pres­i­dent Dick Cheney and for­mer Defense Sec­re­tary Frank Car­luc­ci, who now works with George H.W. Bush at the con­tro­ver­sial Car­lyle Group. Robert Gates, for­mer CIA direc­tor and close friend of the Bush fam­i­ly, also served on the SAIC Board.” (Ibid.; pp. 3–4.)

16. More on the high­ly sus­pi­cious track record of Diebold and ES&S: “Wher­ev­er Diebold and ES&S go, irreg­u­lar­i­ties and his­toric Repub­li­can upsets fol­low. Alas­tair Thomp­son, writ­ing for scoop.co of New Zealand, explored whether or not the 2002 U.S. mid-term elec­tions were ‘fixed by elec­tron­ic vot­ing machines sup­plied by Repub­li­can-affil­i­at­ed com­pa­nies.’ The scoop inves­ti­ga­tion con­clud­ed that: ‘The state where the biggest upset occurred, Geor­gia, is also the state that ran its elec­tion with the most elec­tron­ic vot­ing machines.’ Those machines were sup­plied by Diebold.” (Ibid.; p. 4.)

17. Note that Diebold machines returned iden­ti­cal vote counts for three Repub­li­can can­di­dates in Texas in 2002. “Wired News report­ed that ‘ . . . a

for­mer work­er in Diebold’s Geor­gia ware­house says the com­pa­ny installed patch­es on its machine before the state’s 2002 guber­na­to­r­i­al elec­tion that were nev­er cer­ti­fied by inde­pen­dent test­ing author­i­ties or cleared with Geor­gia elec­tion offi­cials.’ Ques­tions were raised in Texas when three Repub­li­can can­di­dates in Comal Coun­ty each received exact­ly the same num­ber of votes—18,181—on ES&S machines.” (Idem.)

18. Diebold installed uncer­ti­fied soft­ware in machines in 17 Cal­i­for­nia coun­ties using their equip­ment. Manip­u­lat­ing vote counts was a key fea­ture of the for­eign covert oper­a­tions of the Rea­gan and Bush (I) years. Recall that the Ahman­sons (deeply involved with the devel­op­ment of the com­pa­nies that make elec­tron­ic vot­ing machines and their soft­ware) were asso­ci­at­ed with peo­ple like Oliv­er North and John Singlaub—prime movers in many of those covert oper­a­tions. “Fol­low­ing the 2003 Cal­i­for­nia elec­tion, an audit of the com­pa­ny revealed that Diebold Elec­tion Sys­tems vot­ing machines installed uncer­ti­fied soft­ware in all 17 coun­ties using its equip­ment. For­mer CIA Sta­tion Chief John Stock­well writes that one of the favorite tac­tics of the CIA dur­ing the Rea­gan-Bush admin­is­tra­tion in the 1980’s was to con­trol coun­tries by manip­u­lat­ing the elec­tion process. ‘CIA apol­o­gists leap up and say, ‘Well, most of these things are not so bloody.’ And that’s true. You’re giv­ing politi­cians some mon­ey so he’ll throw his [sic] par­ty in this direc­tion or that one, or make false speech­es on your behalf, or some­thing like that. It may be non-vio­lent, but it’s still ille­gal inter­ven­tion in oth­er coun­tries’ affairs, rais­ing the ques­tion of whether or not we’re going to have a world in which laws, rules of behav­ior are respect­ed,’ Stock­well wrote. Doc­u­ments illus­trate that the Rea­gan and Bush admin­is­tra­tions sup­port­ed com­put­er manip­u­la­tion in both Noriega’s rise to pow­er in Pana­ma and in Mar­cos’ attempt to retain pow­er in the Philip­pines. Many of the Rea­gan administration’s staunchest sup­port­ers were mem­bers of the Coun­cil on Nation­al Pol­i­cy.” (Idem.)

19. Athan Gibbs and his Tru­Vote Inter­na­tion­al machines pro­vid­ed one ray of hope for those con­cerned about the per­ils of elec­tron­ic vot­ing. “Ohio Sen­a­tor Fedor con­tin­ues to fight valiant­ly for Sen­ate Bill 167 and the Holy Grail of the ‘vot­er ver­i­fied paper audit trail.’ Pro­po­nents of a paper trail were embold­ened when Athan Gibbs, Pres­i­dent and CEO of Tru­Vote Inter­na­tion­al, demon­strat­ed a vot­ing machine at a vendor’s fair in Colum­bus that pro­vides two sep­a­rate vot­ing receipts. The first paper receipt dis­plays the voter’s touch screen selec­tion under plex­i­glass that falls into a lock­box after the vot­er approves. Also, the Tru­Vote sys­tem pro­vides the vot­er with a receipt that includes a unique vot­er ID and pin num­ber which can be used to call in to a vot­er audit inter­net con­nec­tion to make sure the vote cast was actu­al­ly count­ed. Brooks Thomas, Coor­di­na­tor of Elec­tions in Ten­nessee, stat­ed, ‘I’ve not seen any­thing that com­pares to the Gibbs’ Tru­Vote val­i­da­tion sys­tem. . . .’ The Assis­tant Sec­re­tary of State of Geor­gia, Ter­rel L. Slay­ton, Jr., claimed Gibbs had come up with the ‘per­fect solu­tion.’ . . .” (Idem.)

20. HR 2239 is one piece of leg­is­la­tion that would require a paper vot­ing trail for all elec­tron­ic vot­ing machines. “ . . . U.S. Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Rush Holt intro­duced HR 2239, the Vot­er Con­fi­dence and Increased Acces­si­bil­i­ty Act of 2003 that would require elec­tron­ic vot­ing machines to pro­duce a paper trail so that vot­ers may ver­i­fy that their screen touch­es match their actu­al vote. Elec­tion offi­cials would also have a paper trail for recounts. As Black­well pres­sures the Ohio leg­is­la­ture to adopt elec­tron­ic vot­ing machines with­out a paper trail, Athan Gibbs won­ders, ‘Why would you buy a vot­ing machine from a com­pa­ny like Diebold which pro­vides a paper trail for every sin­gle machine it makes except its vot­ing machines? And then, when you ask it to ver­i­fy its num­bers, it hides behind ‘trade secrets.’ Maybe the Diebold deci­sion makes sense, if you believe, to para­phrase Hen­ry Kissinger, that democ­ra­cy is too impor­tant to leave up to the votes of the peo­ple.” (Ibid.; p. 5.)

21. The broad­cast then reviews the death of the afore­men­tioned Athan Gibbs, a crit­ic of com­put­er vot­ing machines that do not pro­vide a paper trail. Gibbs, who (as not­ed above) had devel­oped a tech­nol­o­gy that assured a viable account­ing of votes, was killed in a car/truck col­li­sion in Texas. “The sub­ject line on yesterday’s e‑mail read: ‘Anoth­er mys­te­ri­ous acci­dent solves a Bush prob­lem. Athan Gibbs dead, Diebold lives.’ The attached news sto­ry briefly described the untime­ly Fri­day, March 12th death of per­haps America’s most influ­en­tial advo­cate of a ver­i­fied vot­ing paper trail in the era of touch screen com­put­er vot­ing. Gibbs, an accoun­tant for more than 30 years and the inven­tor of the Tru­Vote sys­tem, died when his vehi­cle col­lid­ed with an 18-wheeled truck which rolled his Chevy Blaz­er sev­er­al times and forced it over the high­way retain­ing wall where it came to rest on its roof. . . .” (“Mys­te­ri­ous Death Ben­e­fits Bush” by Bob Fitrakis; Coastal Post; 4/2004; p. 1.)

22. Review­ing (from FTR#468) an emphat­i­cal­ly spec­u­la­tive item, the pro­gram exam­ines recent fore­casts of earth­quake activ­i­ty for Cal­i­for­nia lat­er this year. This infor­ma­tion is pre­sent­ed in the con­text of a num­ber of past broad­casts in which it has been estab­lished that tech­nol­o­gy exists for the delib­er­ate trig­ger­ing of earth­quakes, where suf­fi­cient slip­page exists on a fault sys­tem to pro­duce such an event. (For more about this, see FTR#69. FTRs 434, 440 dis­cuss the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a man-made quake in Cal­i­for­nia cal­cu­lat­ed to affect the elec­tion results.) The pos­si­bil­i­ty that a major quake occur­ring short­ly before the elec­tion might have a sig­nif­i­cant impact on the out­come should be care­ful­ly con­sid­ered. Such a dis­as­ter could lead to the delay or can­cel­la­tion of the elec­tion in Cal­i­for­nia and would have far-reach­ing con­se­quences for the U.S. as well. If the quake were severe, it could lead to an impo­si­tion of mar­tial law in the U.S., due to the far-reach­ing eco­nom­ic and eco­log­i­cal con­se­quences atten­dant upon such an event. A major Cal­i­for­nia quake would also hand polit­i­cal cen­ter stage to the Ter­mi­na­tor and George W. They could be pack­aged as the sav­iors of Cal­i­for­nia. The grate­ful cit­i­zens’ [delayed] votes would go to Bush, even though Schwarzeneg­ger will be the one who gar­ners most of the action. Such an event could well be used to posi­tion Schwarzeneg­ger for a run for nation­al office. “Sci­en­tists have found strik­ing evi­dence of a three-year cycle of earth­quakes on the San Andreas Fault, a devel­op­ment that might lead to the first prac­ti­cal short-term earth­quake fore­cast­ing in cen­tral Cal­i­for­nia. The new research, which one expert called a tour de force of geo­science, sug­gests that the next peak of the cycle is like­ly to come late this year. . . .”
(“San Andreas Quakes Show Cycli­cal Pat­tern: UC-Berke­ley Study Finds Fault Slip­ping in Peri­od­ic Bursts” by Keay David­son; San Fran­cis­co Chron­i­cle; 1/9/2004; p. 1.)

23. Yet anoth­er pre­dic­tion of a quake for Cal­i­for­nia for lat­er this year. “A US geo­physi­cist has set the sci­en­tif­ic world ablaze by claim­ing to have cracked a holy grail: accu­rate earth­quake pre­dic­tion, and warn­ing that a big one will soon hit south­ern Cal­i­for­nia. A Russ­ian-born Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia at Los Ange­les pro­fes­sor Vladi­mi

r Keilis-Borok says he can fore­see major quakes by track­ing minor tem­blors and his­tor­i­cal pat­terns in seis­mic hotspots that could indi­cate more vio­lent shak­ing is on the way. And he has made a chill­ing pre­dic­tion that a quake mea­sur­ing at least 6.4 mag­ni­tude on the Richter scale will hit a 31,200-square-kilometer (12,000-square-mile) area of south­ern Cal­i­for­nia by Sep­tem­ber 5. . . .”
(“Expert Warns Cal­i­for­nia to Brace for Big Quake by Sep­tem­ber” (AFP); Yahoo.com; 4/15/2004; pp. 1–2.)

24. The pro­gram notes that Schwarzeneg­ger recent­ly replaced the head of the Cal­i­for­nia Nation­al Guard with a Repub­li­can. This may, or may not be of sig­nif­i­cance. Cer­tain­ly, the Nation­al Guard will be cen­tral­ly involved in any major dis­as­ter response in Cal­i­for­nia. Whether or not this is coin­ci­den­tal or of any sig­nif­i­cance at all remains to be seen. Schwarzeneg­ger also recent­ly replaced the head of the Cal­i­for­nia High­way Patrol—another insti­tu­tion that would be piv­otal­ly involved in a major emer­gency response by the state’s infra­struc­ture. “Gov. Arnold Schwarzeneg­ger abrupt­ly removed Maj. Gen. Paul Mon­roe as com­man­der of the Cal­i­for­nia Nation­al Guard on Tues­day and replaced him with Maj. Gen. Thomas Eres, who has served as direc­tor of the guard’s office of home­land secu­ri­ty. . . . His [Monroe’s] replace­ment, Eres, 59, takes over imme­di­ate­ly. Eres rose through the ranks dur­ing 35 years of ser­vice in the Nation­al Guard. In civil­ian life, he is senior part­ner in the Sacra­men­to law firm of Nos­saman, Gun­th­n­er, Knox & Elliott. He is a Repub­li­can. Mon­roe is a Demo­c­rat. . . .”
(“Schwarzeneg­ger Removes Nation­al Guard Com­man­der” by Carl Nolte; San Fran­cis­co Chron­i­cle; 3/4/2004; p. A19.)

25. In his intro­duc­tion to the por­tion of the pro­gram deal­ing with Cal­i­for­nia quake pre­dic­tions, Mr. Emory notes that this infor­ma­tion falls in a gray area that hov­ers between “real­i­ty” and “para­noia.” In that same vein, a [hope­ful­ly] humor­ous com­ment by Flori­da Gov­er­nor Jeb Bush may well be noth­ing more than the taste­less joke it appears to be. Let’s hope so, any­way. “ . . . Gov. Jeb Bush joked dur­ing a Flori­da Cab­i­net meet­ing Wednes­day that the peo­ple of San Fran­cis­co may be endan­gered and, ‘That’s prob­a­bly good news for the coun­try.’ The sub­ject was envi­ron­men­tal land and Bush was look­ing at a map show­ing loca­tions with a lot of dif­fer­ent wildlife. ‘It looks like the peo­ple of San Fran­cis­co are an endan­gered species, which may not be a bad thing. That’s prob­a­bly good news for the coun­try.’ Peo­ple in the room broke into laugh­ter. ‘Did I just say that out loud?’ the gov­er­nor asked.’”
(“Jeb Bush Says Peo­ple of San Fran­cis­co Are Endan­gered Species” by Jim Spark­man; Chron­Watch; 11/17/2003; p. 1.)

26. Among the fac­tors man­dat­ing dis­cus­sion of these trou­ble­some and (to some) far-fetched rumi­na­tions con­cern­ing pos­si­ble seis­mic sub­ver­sion of the elec­toral and demo­c­ra­t­ic process­es is the overt­ly Machi­avel­lian nature of this admin­is­tra­tion. One of the strat­a­gems that Machi­avel­li coun­seled in The Prince was the delib­er­ate use of anni­hi­la­tion to inter­dict a population’s renascent demo­c­ra­t­ic instincts. “Indeed, there is no sur­er way of keep­ing pos­ses­sion than by dev­as­ta­tion. Who­ev­er becomes the mas­ter of a city accus­tomed to free­dom, and does not destroy it, may expect to be destroyed him­self; because, when there is a rebel­lion, such a city jus­ti­fies itself by call­ing on the name of lib­er­ty and its ancient insti­tu­tions, nev­er for­got­ten despite the pass­ing of time and the ben­e­fits received from the new ruler. What­ev­er the conqueror’s actions or fore­sight, if the inhab­i­tants are not dis­persed and scat­tered, they will for­get nei­ther that name nor those insti­tu­tions; and at first oppor­tu­ni­ty they will at once have recourse to them, as did Pisa after hav­ing been kept in servi­tude for a hun­dred years by the Flo­ren­tines. . . .But in republics there is more life, more hatred, a greater desire for revenge; the mem­o­ry of their ancient lib­er­ty does not and can­not let them rest; in their case the surest way is to wipe them out. . . .”
(The Prince; Nic­co­lo Machi­avel­li; Pen­guin Clas­sics [trans­lat­ed by George Bull]; ISBN 0–14-044107–7; pp. 48–49.)

27. There has been wide­spread spec­u­la­tion about the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a ter­ror­ist inci­dent that might affect the elec­tion. Gen­er­al Tom­my Franks gave an inter­view in late 2003 in which he weighed the grave dan­ger to Amer­i­can democ­ra­cy that a ter­ror­ist inci­dent with WMD’s (weapons of mass destruc­tion) would pose. Those who see Al Qae­da and relat­ed orga­ni­za­tions as sim­ple agent-prova­ca­teurs con­trolled by the Bush admin­is­tra­tion are mak­ing a seri­ous mis­take. Both Al Qae­da and the Bush admin­is­tra­tion are tools of the Under­ground Reich—Bush & co. do not con­trol Al Qae­da. Nonethe­less, many in this admin­is­tra­tion would wel­come anoth­er dead­ly ter­ror­ist inci­dent as a vehi­cle for elim­i­nat­ing what remains of Amer­i­can democ­ra­cy. (As dis­cussed in—among oth­er programs—FTRs 372, 412, 441, 471—this admin­is­tra­tion and its allies might be more close­ly com­pared with the French pow­er elite in the pre-World War II peri­od. They active­ly wel­comed the Ger­man vic­to­ry in World War II, which they saw as the ide­al vehi­cle for elim­i­nat­ing French democ­ra­cy. The rela­tion­ship between this admin­is­tra­tion and Al Qae­da is anal­o­gous to the rela­tion­ship between the French pow­er elite and the Ger­man invaders. The Ger­man inva­sion of France in World War II was not a provo­ca­tion intend­ed to expand French influ­ence. Nonethe­less, it was antic­i­pat­ed and great­ly aid­ed by the French pow­er elite, who col­lab­o­rat­ed enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly with the Third Reich.) “Gen. Tom­my Franks says that if the Unit­ed States is hit with a weapon of mass destruc­tion that inflicts large casu­al­ties, the Con­sti­tu­tion will like­ly be dis­card­ed in favor of a mil­i­tary form of gov­ern­ment. Franks, who suc­cess­ful­ly led the U.S. mil­i­tary oper­a­tion to lib­er­ate Iraq, expressed his wor­ries in an exten­sive inter­view he gave to the men’s lifestyle mag­a­zine Cig­ar Affi­ciona­do. In the magazine’s Decem­ber edi­tion, the for­mer com­man­der of the military’s Cen­tral Com­mand warned that if ter­ror­ists suc­ceed­ed in using a weapon of mass destruc­tion (WMD) against the U.S. or one of our allies, it would like­ly have cat­a­stroph­ic con­se­quences for our cher­ished repub­li­can form of gov­ern­ment.”
(“Gen. Franks Doubts Con­sti­tu­tion Will Sur­vive WMD Attack” by John O. Edwards; NewsMax.com; 12/21/2003; p. 1.)

28. “Dis­cussing the hypo­thet­i­cal dan­gers posed to the U.S. in the wake of Sept. 11, Franks said that ‘the worst thing that could hap­pen’ is if ter­ror­ists acquire and then use a bio­log­i­cal, chem­i­cal or nuclear weapon that inflicts heavy casu­al­ties. If that hap­pens, Franks said, ‘ . . . the West­ern world, the free world, los­es what it cher­ish­es most, and that is free­dom and lib­er­ty we’ve seen for a cou­ple of hun­dred years in this grand exper­i­ment that we call democ­ra­cy.’” (Idem.)

29. “Franks then offered ‘in a prac­ti­cal sense’ what he thinks would hap­pen in the after­math of such an attack. ‘It means the poten­tial of a weapon of mass destruc­tion and a ter­ror­ist, mas­sive, casu­al­ty-pro­duc­ing event some­where in the Weste

rn world—it may be in the Unit­ed States of America—that caus­es our pop­u­la­tion to ques­tion our own Con­sti­tu­tion and to begin to mil­i­ta­rize our coun­try in order to avoid a repeat of anoth­er mass, casu­al­ty-pro­duc­ing event. Which in fact, then begins to unrav­el the fab­ric of our Con­sti­tu­tion. Two steps, very, very impor­tant.’” (Idem.)

30. The pro­gram takes a look at the ide­ol­o­gy of Paul Weyrich. It is worth not­ing the close rela­tion­ship between Weyrich’s Coun­cil on Nation­al Pol­i­cy and the devel­op­ers of Diebold, ES&S etc. (Weyrich is also the founder of the Free Con­gress Foun­da­tion, one of the focal points of FTR#465.) As we look ahead to the elec­tions, we should not fail to note the enthu­si­asm with which the far-right ele­ments asso­ci­at­ed with the Bush admin­is­tra­tion view the elim­i­na­tion of the insti­tu­tions of Amer­i­can democ­ra­cy. Their French coun­ter­parts in the pre-World War II peri­od held sim­i­lar atti­tudes. It remains to be seen whether the “Vichy Amer­i­cans” of the Bush admin­is­tra­tion facil­i­tate the destruc­tion of our democ­ra­cy. “On Jan­u­ary 28, 2002, The Amer­i­can Prospect, Inc. pub­lished ‘Fair-Weath­er Friend; Going Down as it Came Up; School Sprays; They’re Back!’ a brief excerpt reads: ‘Two years ago, ur-con­ser­v­a­tive Paul Weyrich stunned the reli­gious right by call­ing for a retreat from tem­po­ral con­cerns. ‘Con­ser­v­a­tives have learned to suc­ceed in pol­i­tics,’ he wrote in an open let­ter that’s still avail­able on the Web site. ‘But that did not result in the adop­tion of our agen­da. The rea­son, I think, is that pol­i­tics itself has failed. And pol­i­tics has failed because of the col­lapse of the cul­ture.’ The right no longer had a ‘moral major­i­ty,’ he wrote. The solu­tion? ‘To look at ways to sep­a­rate our­selves from the insti­tu­tions that have been cap­tured by the ide­ol­o­gy of Polit­i­cal Cor­rect­ness, or by oth­er ene­mies of our tra­di­tion­al cul­ture.’ In essence, he said, the reli­gious right should espouse cul­tur­al and polit­i­cal separatism—by set­ting up its own schools, tele­vi­sion net­works, and even courts of law. The rest of the coun­try breathed a sigh of relief. No more sil­ly Dis­ney boy­cotts by south­ern Bap­tists. No more flaky school-board mem­bers, push­ing cre­ation­ism. No more Paul Weyrich!”
(“Paul Weyrich’s Teach­ing Man­u­al?”; pp. 1–2.)

31. “ ‘The whew, alas, was pre­ma­ture. It turns out that what Weyrich and his folks real­ly had in mind was less sep­a­ratism than gueril­la warfare—a ‘New Tra­di­tion­al­ist’ move­ment that, accord­ing to its man­i­festo, writ­ten by Weyrich pro­tégé Eric Heubeck and bear­ing the grandiose title ‘The Inte­gra­tion of The­o­ry and Prac­tice: A pro­gram for the New Tra­di­tion­al­ist Move­ment,’ would seek ‘to advance a true tra­di­tion­al­ist counter-cul­ture based on virtue, excel­lence, and self-dis­ci­pline.’ The New Traditionalists—who sound a lot like the Old Traditionalists—will ‘reject the mate­ri­al­ism, hedo­nism, con­sumerism, ego­ism, and the cult of self-actu­al­iza­tion which per­me­ate mod­ern life.’ Heubeck elab­o­rates: ‘We will not try to reform exist­ing insti­tu­tions. We only intend to weak­en them, and even­tu­al­ly destroy them. [Empha­sis added.] We will endeav­or to knock our oppo­nents off-bal­ance and unset­tle them at every oppor­tu­ni­ty. . .’” (Ibid.; p. 2.)

32. “ . . . The Bush admin­is­tra­tion is appar­ent­ly quite cozy with Weyrich. This quote from a Time mag­a­zine arti­cle is apro­pos, Time mag­a­zine wrote this: ‘Each Wednes­day, Rove dis­patch­es a top admin­is­tra­tion offi­cial to attend the reg­u­lar con­ser­v­a­tive-coali­tion lunch­es held at Paul Weyrich’s Free Con­gress Foun­da­tion. When activists call his office with a prob­lem, Rove doesn’t pass them off to an aide. He often responds him­self. When Weyrich heard a few weeks that Bush’s bud­get slashed fund­ing for a favorite project called the Police Corps, which gives schol­ar­ships and train­ing to police cadets, he com­plained to the White House. To Weyrich’s sur­prise, Rove called back, ‘We’ve tak­en care of it,’ Rove said. ‘The prob­lem is solved.’” (Idem.)

33. Con­clud­ing with an anec­dote illus­tra­tive of the anti-Demo­c­ra­t­ic, pro-fas­cist views present in the Amer­i­can polit­i­cal estab­lish­ment, the pro­gram presents an encounter a Wash­ing­ton lob­by­ist had with a promi­nent South­ern reac­tionary His views were echoed by the pri­vate sec­re­tary to then House Minor­i­ty leader [and lat­er Pres­i­dent] Ger­ald Ford. “In Jan­u­ary 1968, Haden Kirk­patrick, pub­lish­er of racing’s bible, Thor­ough­bred Record, and his wife gave a small din­ner par­ty at the Pavil­lon Restau­rant in New York. Dur­ing din­ner, we all start­ed dis­cussing the state of nation­al and inter­na­tion­al affairs. Haden turned to me and said: ‘The trou­ble is and always has been Franklin Delano Roo­sevelt. He got us in the Sec­ond World War on the wrong side.’ I was speech­less.”
(The Wash­ing­ton Pay-Off; by Robert N. Win­ter-Berg­er; Copy­right 1972 by Robert N. Win­ter-Berg­er; Lyle Stu­art, Inc. [HC]; ISBN 73–185421; p. 297.)

34. “Sev­er­al days lat­er, back in Wash­ing­ton, I recount­ed this sto­ry to Mil­dred Leonard, for many years Jer­ry Ford’s pri­vate sec­re­tary. [This refers to for­mer House Minor­i­ty Leader, Vice-Pres­i­dent and Pres­i­dent Ger­ald Ford.] Before I could add my per­son­al reac­tion to Haden’s remark, Mil­dred looked up at me and said: ‘You know, he’s right, Mr. Win­ter-Berg­er.’ I was even more amazed, hear­ing this in the Capi­tol of the Unit­ed States from the sec­re­tary of the House Minor­i­ty Leader.” (Idem.)

Discussion

8 comments for “FTR #470 Democracy Imperiled”

  1. For­mer Ohio Sec­re­tary of State Ken Black­well is now rais­ing mon­ey to pro­mote the GOP’s new push to rig the elec­toral col­lege:

    The Atlantic
    The GOP Plan to Take the Elec­toral-Vote-Rig­ging Scheme Nation­al
    Jan 25 2013, 11:35 AM ET

    Repub­li­can leg­is­la­tors in sev­er­al states have begun push­ing to appor­tion elec­toral-col­lege votes by con­gres­sion­al dis­trict, a move that has Democ­rats up in arms. Had a sim­i­lar scheme been in effect in 2012, nation­al­ly or in a hand­ful of key states, Mitt Rom­ney could have won the pres­i­den­cy despite los­ing the pop­u­lar vote. (David Gra­ham explains the idea, and why it’s so con­tro­ver­sial, here.)

    Up to now, these efforts appear to have sprout­ed inde­pen­dent­ly as the work of indi­vid­ual law­mak­ers in Vir­ginia, Michi­gan, Ohio, and Penn­syl­va­nia. The Vir­ginia plan has passed the state House of Del­e­gates and could become law as soon as next week.

    But now a Repub­li­can oper­a­tive has a plan to take the idea nation­al.

    Jor­dan Gehrke, a D.C.-based strate­gist who’s worked on pres­i­den­tial and Sen­ate cam­paigns, is team­ing up with Ken Black­well, a for­mer Ohio Repub­li­can sec­re­tary of state, to raise mon­ey for an effort to pro­pose sim­i­lar elec­toral reforms in states across the coun­try, he told me this week.

    Gehrke and Black­well have been talk­ing to major donors and plan to send a fundrais­ing email to grass­roots con­ser­v­a­tives ear­ly next week. The mon­ey would go toward pro­mot­ing sim­i­lar plans to appor­tion elec­toral votes by con­gres­sion­al dis­trict in states across the coun­try, poten­tial­ly even hir­ing lob­by­ists in state cap­i­tals.

    ...

    A word of advice to any donors to Black­well’s cam­paign: don’t plan on any audits for how the mon­ey is spent. That’s not how he rolls:

    The Free Press
    Diebold, elec­tron­ic vot­ing and the vast right-wing con­spir­a­cy
    Feb­ru­ary 24, 2004

    The Gov­er­nor of Ohio, Bob Taft, and oth­er promi­nent state offi­cials, com­mute to their down­town Colum­bus offices on Broad Street. This is the so-called “Gold­en Fin­ger,” the safe route through the major­i­ty black inner-city near east side. The Broad Street BP sta­tion, just east of down­town, is the place where afflu­ent sub­ur­ban­ites from Bex­ley can stop, gas up, get their cof­fee and New York Times. Those in need of cash vis­it BP’s Diebold man­u­fac­tured Cash­Source+ ATM machine which pro­vides a paper receipt of the trans­ac­tion to all cus­tomers upon request.

    Many of Taft’s and Pres­i­dent George W. Bush’s major donors, like Diebold’s cur­rent CEO Walden “Wal­ly” O’Dell, reside in Colum­bus’ north­west sub­urb Upper Arling­ton. O’Dell is on record stat­ing that he is “com­mit­ted to help­ing Ohio deliv­er its elec­toral votes to the Pres­i­dent” this year. On Sep­tem­ber 26, 2003, he host­ed an Ohio Repub­li­can Par­ty fundrais­er for Bush’s re-elec­tion at his Cotswold Manor man­sion. Tick­ets to the fundrais­er cost $1000 per cou­ple, but O’Dell’s fundrais­ing let­ter urged those attend­ing to “Donate or raise $10,000 for the Ohio Repub­li­can Par­ty.”

    Accord­ing to the Colum­bus Dis­patch: “Last year, O’Dell and his wife Patri­cia, cam­paigned for pas­sage of two liquor options that made their por­tion of Tremont Road wet.

    On Novem­ber 5, Upper Arling­ton res­i­dents nar­row­ly passed mea­sures that allowed fundrais­ing par­ties to offer more than beer, even though his 10,800-square-foot home is a res­i­dence, a per­mit is required because alco­hol is includ­ed in the price of fundrais­ing tick­ets. O’Dell is also allowed to serve “beer, wine and mixed drinks” at Sun­day fundrais­ers.

    O’Dell’s fund-rais­ing let­ter fol­lowed on the heels of a vis­it to Pres­i­dent Bush’s Craw­ford Texas ranch by “Pio­neers and Rangers,” the des­ig­na­tion for peo­ple who had raised $100,000 or more for Bush’s re-elec­tion.

    If Ohio’s Repub­li­can Sec­re­tary of State Ken­neth Black­well has his way, Diebold will receive a con­tract to sup­ply touch screen elec­tron­ic vot­ing machines for much of the state. None of these Diebold machines will pro­vide a paper receipt of the vote.

    Diebold, locat­ed in North Can­ton, Ohio, does its pri­ma­ry busi­ness in ATM and tick­et-vend­ing machines. Crit­ics of Diebold point out that vir­tu­al­ly every oth­er machine the com­pa­ny makes pro­vides a paper trail to ver­i­fy the machine’s cal­cu­la­tions. Odd­ly, only the vot­ing machines lack this essen­tial func­tion.

    State Sen­a­tor Tere­sa Fedor of Tole­do intro­duced Sen­ate Bill 167 late last year man­dat­ing that every vot­ing machine in Ohio gen­er­ate a “vot­er ver­i­fied paper audit trail.” Sec­re­tary of State Black­well has denounced any attempt to require a paper trail as an effort to “derail” elec­tion reform. Blackwell’s polit­i­cal career is an inter­est­ing one: he emerged as a black activist in Cincin­nati sup­port­ing munic­i­pal char­ter reform, became an elect­ed Demo­c­rat, then an Inde­pen­dent, and now is a promi­nent Repub­li­can with his eyes on the Governor’s man­sion.
    ...

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | January 25, 2013, 2:57 pm
  2. The US’s epi­dem­ic of vot­er-fraud fraud just keeps get­ting worse:

    MSNBC
    Kobach vot­er-fraud alle­ga­tions exposed as fraud­u­lent

    By Steve Benen
    02/10/15 04:01 PM

    When it comes to the so-called “Repub­li­can war on vot­ing,” few fig­ures are quite as noto­ri­ous as Kansas Sec­re­tary of State Kris Kobach ®. The far-right official’s antics dur­ing last fall’s U.S. Sen­ate race in Kansas were them­selves remark­able, but even before then, Kobach has earned a rep­u­ta­tion as a pio­neer in vot­er-sup­pres­sion tac­tics.

    Not sur­pris­ing­ly, fre­quent claims about “vot­er fraud” – a phe­nom­e­non that large­ly exists in the imag­i­na­tion of far-right activists – have become a Kobach sta­ple, though one par­tic­u­lar inci­dent is prov­ing to be a real prob­lem.

    Dur­ing last year’s elec­tion, the Kansas Sec­re­tary of State chas­tised U.S. Attor­ney Bar­ry Gris­som, com­plain­ing to the media that Kobach’s office had referred exam­ples of vot­er fraud to the Kansas-based fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tor, but Gris­som has refused to pros­e­cute. Worse, Kobach said the U.S. Attor­ney didn’t “know what he’s talk­ing about” when Gris­som said vot­er fraud doesn’t exist in Kansas.

    The AP reports today that when Kobach made these claims, he appears to have been brazen­ly lying (thanks to my col­league Tri­cia McK­in­ney for the heads-up).

    [I]n a Nov. 6 let­ter sent from Gris­som to Kobach and obtained by The Asso­ci­at­ed Press through an open records request, the pros­e­cu­tor respond­ed that his office received no such refer­rals from Kobach, and chid­ed the sec­re­tary of state for his state­ments.

    “Going for­ward, if your office deter­mines there has been an act of vot­er fraud please for­ward the mat­ter to me for inves­ti­ga­tion and pros­e­cu­tion,” Gris­som wrote. “Until then, so we can avoid mis­state­ments of facts for the future, for the record, we have received no vot­er fraud cas­es from your office in over four and a half years. And, I can assure you, I do know what I’m talk­ing about.”

    Wait, it gets worse.

    Kobach now con­cedes that when he said he’d referred vot­er-fraud cas­es to the U.S. Attorney’s office, he had not, in real­i­ty, referred vot­er-fraud cas­es to the U.S. Attorney’s office. But, the right-wing offi­cial told the AP, Kobach’s pre­de­ces­sor had alert­ed the fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tor to two rel­e­vant cas­es and Gris­som ignored those refer­rals.

    It turns out, that’s not true, either: fed­er­al inves­ti­ga­tors looked into those 2011 alle­ga­tions and, as the AP report not­ed, they con­clud­ed they were not vot­er fraud.

    Why in the world would Kobach make such demon­stra­bly false alle­ga­tions? Because he wants Kansas’ leg­is­la­ture to empow­er his office direct­ly to go after vot­er-fraud cas­es – which, remem­ber, are large­ly imag­i­nary.

    ...

    Huh, so Kansas’s Sec­re­tary of State, Kris Kobach, was claim­ing last fall that the US Attor­ney based in Kansas was ignor­ing all these cas­es of vot­er fraud that his office was send­ing them. But upon review it turns out that they did­n’t send any­thing at all.

    Clear­ly, the solu­tion here for how to address the issue of Kris Kobach’s fan­ta­sy vot­er fraud is to give Kobach even more pow­er to pros­e­cute all these cas­es him­self, with­out rely­ing on fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tors. Or local pros­e­cu­tors. Yeah, that should do the trick:

    Asso­ci­at­ed Press

    Kobach seek­ing pow­er to pros­e­cute sus­pect­ed vot­er fraud him­self

    The pro­posed leg­is­la­tion would also expand the Kansas attor­ney general’s pow­er to inde­pen­dent­ly pros­e­cute local elec­tion offens­es with­out get­ting coun­ty pros­e­cu­tors’ approval. It also increas­es vot­er fraud penal­ties.

    Feb­ru­ary 10, 2015

    By ROXANA HEGEMAN

    Kansas Sec­re­tary of State Kris Kobach, the archi­tect behind some of the nation’s strictest vot­er ID require­ments, is ask­ing law­mak­ers to give him the pow­er to press vot­er fraud charges because he says pros­e­cu­tors do not pur­sue cas­es he refers.

    The state’s top fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tor, how­ev­er, says Kobach has not sent any cas­es his way. Some coun­ty pros­e­cu­tors say cas­es that have been referred did not jus­ti­fy pros­e­cu­tion.

    Kobach pub­licly chas­tised Kansas-based U.S. Attor­ney Bar­ry Gris­som late last year, telling Tope­ka tele­vi­sion sta­tion WIBW he had referred vot­er fraud cas­es to Gris­som and that Gris­som didn’t “know what he’s talk­ing about” when he said vot­er fraud doesn’t exist in Kansas.

    But in a Nov. 6 let­ter sent from Gris­som to Kobach and obtained by the Asso­ci­at­ed Press through an open-records request, the pros­e­cu­tor respond­ed that his office received no such refer­rals from Kobach and chid­ed the sec­re­tary of state for his state­ments.

    ...

    Kobach acknowl­edged last week that his office nev­er has sent sus­pect­ed vot­er fraud cas­es to Gris­som, cit­ing instead what he said was inac­tion on cas­es referred by his pre­de­ces­sor. Gris­som said the FBI deter­mined two cas­es referred before Kobach took office in Jan­u­ary 2011 were not vot­er fraud.

    Kobach said last week that his office “felt it would be more pro­duc­tive to refer cas­es first to Kansas coun­ty attor­neys rather than send­ing them first to Mr. Grissom’s office.”

    “That is the approach we have tak­en for the last few years,” he said.

    Kobach told law­mak­ers last month that in the 2010 and 2012 Kansas elec­tions, for which there were 1.7 mil­lion reg­is­tered vot­ers, his office found 18 cas­es in which it appeared some­one dou­ble-vot­ed by vot­ing in advance and then at the polls.

    He said 15 cas­es were referred to coun­ty pros­e­cu­tors; one was dropped because the vot­er had died, one was sent to the FBI, and one was referred to the Texas attor­ney gen­er­al, who Kobach said was more aggres­sive about pur­su­ing vot­er fraud cas­es than some Kansas pros­e­cu­tors.

    Kobach said action was tak­en in only sev­en cas­es, which is why he needs the pow­er to press charges him­self.

    The Sedg­wick Coun­ty Dis­trict Attorney’s Office, locat­ed in the state’s largest met­ro­pol­i­tan area, said it inves­ti­gat­ed the one case Kobach referred there, but the facts behind it didn’t war­rant pros­e­cu­tion.

    The chief of staff for the Shawnee Coun­ty Attorney’s Office, Lee McGowan, said Kobach nev­er referred a vot­er fraud case to him, even though the case Kobach sent to the Texas attor­ney general’s office involved a Shawnee Coun­ty vot­er.

    “We have 105 coun­ties with 105 coun­ty attor­neys – I don’t know how hav­ing 106 is going to make it any bet­ter,” said Bar­ry Dis­ney, the senior deputy pros­e­cu­tor at the Riley Coun­ty attorney’s office. “I just don’t see the need for it.”

    In addi­tion to giv­ing the state’s top elec­tion office pros­e­cu­to­r­i­al author­i­ty, pro­posed leg­is­la­tion being pushed by Kobach would expand the Kansas attor­ney general’s pow­er to inde­pen­dent­ly pros­e­cute local elec­tion offens­es with­out get­ting coun­ty pros­e­cu­tors’ approval, which cur­rent­ly is required by Kansas law. It also increas­es vot­er fraud penal­ties.

    Pro­po­nents of strong vot­er ID laws say they’re designed to com­bat vot­er fraud. Crit­ics say they’re craft­ed to keep Demo­c­ra­t­ic-lean­ing con­stituen­cies – such as minori­ties and poor peo­ple – away from the polls.

    Stud­ies have shown minor­i­ty and low-income vot­ers are more like­ly to lack a driver’s license and have access to secure hous­ing, lead­ing to more fre­quent changes in address­es and vot­ing precincts.

    Ok, this clar­i­fies things a bit regard­ing why Kris Kobach claimed there was all this vot­er fraud going on but did­n’t actu­al­ly send the cas­es to the US Attor­ney’s office: Kris Kobach decid­ed to send these cas­es to coun­ty pros­e­cu­tors instead. Specif­i­cal­ly, after review 1.7 mil­lion votes cast in 2010 and 2012, Kobach’s office from a whole eigh­teen cas­es of pos­si­ble vot­er fraud. Fif­teen of those eigh­teen cas­es were referred to coun­ty pros­e­cu­tors. And since action was tak­en in only sev­en of those fif­teen cas­es, Kris Kobach now wants the Kansas state laws changed to give him the pow­er to pros­e­cute all these vot­er fraud cas­es all on his own.

    So will Kansas’s leg­is­la­ture grant Kobach his wish and allow an Attor­ney Gen­er­al was a track record of exag­ger­at­ing or lying about the extent of vot­er fraud cas­es act so he can pro­tect the pub­lic from 0.001% vot­er fraud? Yes. Yes they will:

    TPM DC
    Brown­back May Empow­er Kris Kobach To Pros­e­cute ‘Vot­er Fraud’ Cas­es Him­self

    By Daniel Strauss
    Pub­lished June 4, 2015, 6:00 AM EDT

    Kansas Gov. Sam Brown­back ® has five days before he must decide whether to sign a bill expand­ing the pow­er of Sec­re­tary of State Kris Kobach ® to pros­e­cute vot­er fraud cas­es.

    If Brown­back does sign the leg­is­la­tion, which has already passed both cham­bers of the state leg­is­la­ture, Kobach would be giv­en the pow­er to pros­e­cute vot­er fraud cas­es even when, accord­ing to crit­ics, local pros­e­cu­tors had opt­ed against mov­ing for­ward with those cas­es.

    Kobach is a promi­nent fig­ure in con­ser­v­a­tive “vot­er fraud” cir­cles, loud­ly declar­ing that vot­er fraud is ram­pant and push­ing new laws that have the effect of restrict­ing access to vot­ing, espe­cial­ly among vot­ers who tend to favor Democ­rats. Vot­ing experts, on the oth­er hand, point to stud­ies that show vot­er fraud is rel­a­tive­ly rare with neg­li­gi­ble impact on elec­tion out­comes.

    “I very much wor­ry about Kobach get­ting addi­tion­al pros­e­cu­to­r­i­al author­i­ty, as he seems to be some­one who is will­ing to make false or exag­ger­at­ed claims of vot­er fraud to fit his polit­i­cal nar­ra­tive,” elec­tion law expert Rich Hasen told TPM in an email.

    Under cur­rent Kansas law, Kobach must refer cas­es of vot­er fraud to local pros­e­cu­tors. Under the bill sit­ting on Brown­back­’s desk, those pros­e­cu­tors would still han­dle vot­er fraud cas­es but Kobach’s office could move crim­i­nal charges on its own. “The bill also would upgrade penal­ties for sev­er­al vot­ing offens­es to felonies from mis­de­meanors,” accord­ing to the Tope­ka Cap­i­tal-Jour­nal.

    Brown­back­’s office is mum about whether the gov­er­nor will sign the leg­is­la­tion.

    ...

    Kobach has been push­ing for this pros­e­cu­to­r­i­al author­i­ty for a while. In his re-elec­tion cam­paign in 2014 he por­trayed him­self as par­tic­u­lar­ly tough on vot­er fraud. He’s craft­ed some of the strictest vot­er ID laws in the coun­try and led the charge in call­ing for his state to require proof of cit­i­zen­ship in order to reg­is­ter to vote.

    In an inter­view with the Cap­i­tal-Jour­nal in May, after the bill passed by a slim 63–57 vote mar­gin in the Kansas House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives (it need­ed 63 votes to pass), Kobach said his office had iden­ti­fied 100 cas­es of vot­er fraud in the 2014 gen­er­al elec­tion cycle alone.

    The Asso­ci­at­ed Press in Feb­ru­ary not­ed that Kobach has griped about pros­e­cu­tors drag­ging their feet on vot­er fraud cas­es he refers to them. Kobach pre­vi­ous­ly squab­bled with Kansas U.S. Attor­ney Bar­ry Gris­som in 2014 over vot­er fraud cas­es, telling a local tele­vi­sion sta­tion that Gris­som had no idea “what he’s talk­ing about” when the fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tor said the ram­pant vot­er fraud Kobach has warned of does­n’t exist.

    Kobach’s cru­sade against vot­er fraud has been under­whelm­ing. In 2013 he reviewed 84 mil­lion votes in 22 states but only came up with 14 exam­ples of alleged vot­er fraud that were referred for pros­e­cu­tion, or a tiny 0.00000017 per­cent of the 84 mil­lion votes..

    In April TPM also report­ed that the chief data offi­cer for the Repub­li­can Nation­al Com­mit­tee sug­gest­ing that vot­er fraud real­ly only con­sti­tutes “about 1 per­cent” of votes cast.

    So the Kansas leg­is­la­ture (bare­ly) gave Kobach the green light to begin aggres­sive­ly pros­e­cut­ing all the vot­er fraud cas­es he can find. And, inter­est­ing­ly, just last month he claims to have found 100 cas­es of fraud in Kansas alone in 2014, which, if real, would appear to sug­gest a mas­sive increase in the amount of vot­er fraud from pre­vi­ous years giv­en Kobach’s own find­ings of 18 cas­es among 1.7 votes cast in 2010/2012 and only 14 cas­es the 22 mil­lion votes his office review in 2013.

    So once gov­er­nor Brown­back signs this new pow­er into law we’ll pre­sum­ably get to see just what kinds of cas­es trig­ger Kris Kobach’s fraud anten­nae. But since he claimed that those 100 poten­tial cas­es were cas­es of “dou­ble vot­ing”, that pre­sum­ably means he has­n’t start­ed look­ing into oth­er far more seri­ous types of vote fraud. Like this:

    The Asso­ci­at­ed Press

    Wichi­ta State math­e­mati­cian sues Kris Kobach, Sedg­wick Coun­ty elec­tions com­mis­sion­er seek­ing to audit vot­ing machines
    Woman wants to inves­ti­gate machines for vot­er fraud or demo­graph­ic trend

    By Rox­ana Hege­man
    Post­ed: April 1, 2015 — 4:58pm

    WICHITA — A Wichi­ta State Uni­ver­si­ty math­e­mati­cian sued the top Kansas elec­tion offi­cial Wednes­day seek­ing paper tapes from elec­tron­ic vot­ing machines, an effort to explain sta­tis­ti­cal anom­alies favor­ing Repub­li­cans in counts com­ing from large precincts across the coun­try.

    Beth Clark­son, chief sta­tis­ti­cian for the university’s Nation­al Insti­tute for Avi­a­tion Research, filed the open records law­suit in Sedg­wick Coun­ty Dis­trict Court as part of her per­son­al quest to find the answer to an unex­plained pat­tern that tran­scends elec­tions and states. The law­suit was amend­ed Wednes­day to name Sec­re­tary of State Kris Kobach and Sedg­wick Coun­ty Elec­tions Com­mis­sion­er Tabitha Lehman.

    Clark­son, a cer­ti­fied qual­i­ty engi­neer with a Ph.D. in sta­tis­tics, has ana­lyzed elec­tion returns in Kansas and else­where over sev­er­al elec­tions that indi­cate “a sta­tis­ti­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant” pat­tern where the per­cent­age of Repub­li­can votes increase the larg­er the size of the precinct.

    While it is well-rec­og­nized that small­er, rur­al precincts tend to lean Repub­li­can, sta­tis­ti­cians have been unable to explain the con­sis­tent pat­tern favor­ing the Repub­li­cans that trends upward as the num­ber of votes cast in a precinct or oth­er vot­ing unit goes up. In pri­maries, the favored can­di­date appears to always be the Repub­li­can estab­lish­ment can­di­date, above a tea par­ty chal­lenger. And the upward trend for Repub­li­cans occurs once a vot­ing unit reach­es rough­ly 500 votes.

    “This is not just an anom­aly that occurred in one place,” Clark­son said. “It is a pat­tern that has occurred repeat­ed­ly in elec­tions across the Unit­ed States.”

    The pat­tern could be vot­er fraud or a demo­graph­ic trend that has not been picked up by exten­sive polling, she said.

    “I do not know why this trend is there, but I know that the pat­tern is there and one way to estab­lish that it is or is not elec­tion fraud is to go and do a phys­i­cal audit of paper records of vot­ing machines,” she said.

    Clark­son wants the hard-copies to check the error rate on elec­tron­ic vot­ing machines that were used in a vot­ing sta­tion in Sedg­wick Coun­ty to estab­lish a sta­tis­ti­cal mod­el.

    A spokes­woman for the sec­re­tary of state’s office said in an email that the office has not received a copy of the law­suit and is there­fore unable to com­ment on it. A phone mes­sage left at the Sedg­wick Coun­ty elec­tions office for Lehman was not imme­di­ate­ly returned.

    Clark­son became more inter­est­ed in the issue after read­ing a paper writ­ten by sta­tis­ti­cians Fran­cois Cho­quette and James John­son in 2012 of the Repub­li­can pri­ma­ry results show­ing strong sta­tis­ti­cal evi­dence of elec­tion manip­u­la­tion in Iowa, New Hamp­shire, Ari­zona, Ohio, Okla­homa, Alaba­ma, Louisiana, Wis­con­sin, West Vir­ginia and Ken­tucky.

    Clark­son said she couldn’t believe their find­ings, so she checked their math and found it was cor­rect and checked their mod­el selec­tion and found it appro­pri­ate. And then she pulled addi­tion­al data from oth­er elec­tions they hadn’t ana­lyzes and found the same pat­tern.

    ...

    So will Kobach takes a look into that kind of vot­er fraud once he has no excus­es what­so­ev­er for ignor­ing it? We’ll see...

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | June 4, 2015, 12:12 pm
  3. Check out the results of the DEF CON secu­ri­ty con­fer­ence “Vot­ing Machine Hack­ing Vil­lage”, a con­test to hack the rough­ly 30 dif­fer­ent vot­ing machines over a three day peri­od. It’s the kind of results that should make one ques­tion the results of elec­tions across the US: by the end of the con­test every last vot­ing machine was hacked:

    Giz­mo­do

    Every Vot­ing Machine at This Hack­ing Con­fer­ence Got Total­ly Pwned

    Kate Con­ger
    Mon­day 7/31/2017 12:25pm

    A noisy cheer went up from the crowd of hack­ers clus­tered around the vot­ing machine tucked into the back cor­ner of a casi­no con­fer­ence room—they’d just man­aged to load Rick Astley’s “Nev­er Gonna Give You Up” onto the Win­Vote, effec­tive­ly rick­rolling democ­ra­cy.

    The hack was easy to exe­cute. Two of the hack­ers work­ing on the touch­screen vot­ing machine, who iden­ti­fied only by their first names, Nick and Josh, had man­aged to install Win­dows Media Play­er on the machine and use it to play Astley’s clas­sic-turned-trolling-track.

    The rick­roll stunt was just one hack at the secu­ri­ty con­fer­ence DEF CON, which ran a three-day Vot­ing Machine Hack­ing Vil­lage to test the secu­ri­ty of var­i­ous machines and net­works used in US elec­tions. By the end of the week­end, every one of the rough­ly 30 machines at the vil­lage, includ­ing those used to tab­u­late votes and to check vot­ers in when they go to the polls, had been hacked. Even though sev­er­al of the exploits end­ed up pay­ing trib­ute to Ast­ley, they’re not jokes—they also present a seri­ous les­son about the secu­ri­ty vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties in vot­ing machines that leave them open to tam­per­ing and manip­u­la­tion. And the more vul­ner­a­ble our vot­ing infra­struc­ture is shown to be, the less con­fi­dence vot­ers may feel.

    “The real take­away is that you can install any soft­ware on this,” Nick told Giz­mo­do. “There’s no con­trol.” Nick had sim­ply con­nect­ed a key­board to an exposed USB port at the back of the Win­Vote, which was used in elec­tions as recent­ly as 2014, and was able to install what­ev­er soft­ware he want­ed from there.

    The vot­ing vil­lage is the brain­child of a who’s‑who list of secu­ri­ty experts: DEF CON founder Jeff Moss, cryp­tog­ra­ph­er Matt Blaze, com­put­er pro­gram­mer Har­ri Hursti (whose hack of Diebold vot­ing machines in 2005 bears the name “the Hursti Hack”), and oth­ers. Researchers have been uncov­er­ing prob­lems with vot­ing sys­tems for more than a decade, but the 2016 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion cat­a­pult­ed their work into the nation­al spot­light. Now the entire coun­try, and maybe the world, is pay­ing atten­tion. But poll work­ers and for­mer cam­paign offi­cials say that their pri­ma­ry secu­ri­ty con­cerns still aren’t with vot­ing machines them­selves but with pro­tect­ing vot­er reg­is­tra­tion sys­tems and defend­ing against basic phish­ing attacks like the ones used to gain entry to the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Nation­al Committee’s net­work.

    Meet the machines

    “This is the great Satan,” said Joseph Loren­zo Hall, the chief tech­nol­o­gist at the Cen­ter for Democ­ra­cy & Tech­nol­o­gy, ges­tur­ing dis­mis­sive­ly at the Win­Vote.

    The machine con­tains a cel­lu­lar modem chip that allows its soft­ware to be updat­ed remote­ly. “Unfor­tu­nate­ly, it also means that you can log into the damn thing from across the street if you know the right cre­den­tials,” Hall explained. “What’s hun­dreds of miles between net­worked friends?”

    The Win­Vote was the first machine to fall, with a hack­er achiev­ing remote code exe­cu­tion on the machine with­in the first hours of the vil­lage. Win­Votes were decer­ti­fied by Virginia’s elec­tion board in 2015 because of their secu­ri­ty vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties.

    Amer­i­can vot­ing sys­tems are large­ly cob­bled togeth­er with anti­quat­ed tech­nol­o­gy. Vot­ing machines can vary by state and coun­ty, and have to be cer­ti­fied by the Elec­tion Assis­tance Com­mis­sion. But oth­er devices, like the elec­tron­ic poll books used in some juris­dic­tions to check in vot­ers at their polling sta­tions, aren’t sub­ject to the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion process. Add in the vot­er reg­is­tra­tion data­bas­es themselves—which were report­ed­ly breached in 39 states last year—and you have a con­vo­lut­ed and vul­ner­a­ble sys­tem ripe for attack.

    The machines are most­ly new to the hack­ers at DEF CON. “They’re not very much fun, they’re like very bor­ing ATMs,” Hall joked. It’s obvi­ous that elec­tion sys­tems aren’t very secure, but it’s impor­tant to under­stand why the secu­ri­ty prob­lems exist in the first place, and why they’re so hard to fix.

    The secu­ri­ty indus­try encour­ages reg­u­lar soft­ware updates to patch bugs and keep machines as impen­e­tra­ble as pos­si­ble. But updat­ing the machines used in vot­ing sys­tems isn’t as easy as installing a patch because the machines are sub­ject to strict cer­ti­fi­ca­tion rules.

    Any major soft­ware update would require the state to redo its cer­ti­fi­ca­tion process. “It costs over $1 mil­lion to get cer­ti­fied,” Joshua Franklin, a secu­ri­ty spe­cial­ist with the Nation­al Insti­tute of Stan­dards and Technology’s cyber­se­cu­ri­ty and pri­va­cy appli­ca­tion unit, explained to atten­dees. Franklin said that even though the Elec­tion Assis­tance Commission’s most recent elec­tion secu­ri­ty stan­dards were released in 2015, most state’s machines are only com­pli­ant with stan­dards from 2002 because of the pro­hib­i­tive costs of updates.

    The cost breaks down to about $30-$40 per vot­er, esti­mates Tom Stan­io­n­is, an IT man­ag­er for a coun­ty elec­tion agency in Cal­i­for­nia who attend­ed the vil­lage in his per­son­al capac­i­ty. Most states just don’t have the mon­ey.

    “The real­i­ty is, we’ve known about issues with vot­ing machines for a long time,” Stan­io­n­is told Giz­mo­do. Since pur­chas­ing brand new sys­tems is out of the ques­tion, Stan­io­n­is said most states do their best to pro­tect the sys­tems they have, walling them off from the inter­net and stor­ing them secure­ly when they’re not being used.

    The rat king of decen­tral­ized state ven­dors and machines might actu­al­ly be a good defense dur­ing a gen­er­al election—it would force hack­ers to suc­cess­ful­ly tar­get many dis­parate sys­tems. “It would be real­ly hard in most juris­dic­tions to do any­thing to affect the vot­ing machines,” Stan­io­n­is said.

    Dif­fi­cult doesn’t mean impos­si­ble, though, and that’s what DEF CON’s hack­ers have set out to prove. If a hack­er tucked away in a cor­ner of a Las Vegas casi­no can alter a vote count, then sure­ly a nation-state attack­er can too.

    “The thing you have to ask about any new tech­nol­o­gy is, com­pared with the tech­nol­o­gy that pro­ceed­ed it, does this make that threat eas­i­er or hard­er? Does it make us bet­ter off or worse off?” Blaze told atten­dees. “Does what­ev­er the tech­nol­o­gy we’re using make this threat an eas­i­er threat or a tougher threat? That’s the ques­tion we haven’t real­ly been sharply ask­ing for very long.”

    ...

    ———-

    “Every Vot­ing Machine at This Hack­ing Con­fer­ence Got Total­ly Pwned” by Kate Con­ger; Giz­mo­do; 7/31/2017

    “The rick­roll stunt was just one hack at the secu­ri­ty con­fer­ence DEF CON, which ran a three-day Vot­ing Machine Hack­ing Vil­lage to test the secu­ri­ty of var­i­ous machines and net­works used in US elec­tions. By the end of the week­end, every one of the rough­ly 30 machines at the vil­lage, includ­ing those used to tab­u­late votes and to check vot­ers in when they go to the polls, had been hacked. Even though sev­er­al of the exploits end­ed up pay­ing trib­ute to Ast­ley, they’re not jokes—they also present a seri­ous les­son about the secu­ri­ty vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties in vot­ing machines that leave them open to tam­per­ing and manip­u­la­tion. And the more vul­ner­a­ble our vot­ing infra­struc­ture is shown to be, the less con­fi­dence vot­ers may feel.”

    30 dif­fer­ent machines and every last one was hacked. With­in a few days. And if you hap­pen to think this rep­re­sents a sub­stan­tial risk to the integri­ty of US elec­tions, sur­prise!, the GOP strong­ly dis­agrees, in word and action:

    The Huff­in­g­ton Post

    Repub­li­cans Want To Defund The Com­mis­sion That Fights Vot­ing Machine Hack­ing
    There is absolute­ly no jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for abol­ish­ing the Elec­tion Assis­tance Com­mis­sion.

    Rep. Ste­ny H. Hoy­er, Con­trib­u­tor Demo­c­ra­t­ic Whip in the U.S. House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives & Rep­re­sent­ing the Fifth Dis­trict of Mary­land
    08/02/2017 12:58 pm ET | Updat­ed

    This past week­end, hack­ers gath­ered in Las Vegas with a sim­ple mis­sion: break into America’s elec­tron­ic vot­ing machines and take con­trol. With­in min­utes, some had already suc­ceed­ed – but that’s a good thing. These hack­ers were part of a work­shop held to iden­ti­fy vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties so they can be fixed well before any Amer­i­cans cast actu­al votes next elec­tion. This exer­cise under­scores the very real dan­ger posed by out­dat­ed and inse­cure vot­ing-machine soft­ware – as well as the impor­tant mis­sion our gov­ern­ment must con­tin­ue under­tak­ing to close these vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties and safe­guard our elec­tions.

    How­ev­er, in their FY2018 fund­ing pro­pos­al, Repub­li­cans are going after the small but high­ly suc­cess­ful agency that pro­tects the integri­ty of our vot­ing sys­tems: the Elec­tion Assis­tance Com­mis­sion. In June, House Repub­li­cans includ­ed a pro­vi­sion in their Finan­cial Ser­vices and Gen­er­al Gov­ern­ment Appro­pri­a­tions bill that would abol­ish the Elec­tion Assis­tance Com­mis­sion.

    Many Amer­i­cans may not have heard of the Elec­tion Assis­tance Com­mis­sion, a four-mem­ber bipar­ti­san agency that Con­gress estab­lished in 2002 as part of the Help Amer­i­ca Vote Act, but nonethe­less they ben­e­fit great­ly from its work. Cre­at­ed to address the flaws in our nation’s vot­ing infra­struc­ture, which con­tributed to the dis­pute sur­round­ing the 2000 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, the Elec­tion Assis­tance Com­mis­sion pro­tects Amer­i­cans’ votes by help­ing to ensure that state and local author­i­ties adopt best prac­tices and uphold the high­est stan­dards of secu­ri­ty for vot­ing tech­nol­o­gy.

    I was proud to be the lead Demo­c­ra­t­ic spon­sor of the bipar­ti­san Help Amer­i­ca Vote Act leg­is­la­tion that estab­lished the Elec­tion Assis­tance Com­mis­sion and charged it with help­ing state and local elec­tion offi­cials ensure free, fair, and safe elec­tions. Today, in a mea­sure of the Elec­tion Assis­tance Commission’s suc­cess, forty-sev­en of the fifty states rely on its vot­ing machine cer­ti­fi­ca­tion process and for mon­i­tor­ing of report­ed issues. The Elec­tion Assis­tance Com­mis­sion is crit­i­cal in facil­i­tat­ing the shar­ing of infor­ma­tion among states with regard to best prac­tices and rapid­ly iden­ti­fy­ing and address­ing flaws.

    ...

    Giv­en these threats and the Elec­tion Assis­tance Commission’s role in pro­tect­ing Amer­i­can vot­ers, abol­ish­ing the Com­mis­sion would be down­right fool­ish. For sev­er­al years, extreme right-wing Mem­bers of the House have been deter­mined to abol­ish the Elec­tion Assis­tance Com­mis­sion, with­out suc­cess, as a strong bipar­ti­san major­i­ty has con­tin­ued to rec­og­nize its ben­e­fits. With the inclu­sion of the dan­ger­ous pro­vi­sion to end the Elec­tion Assis­tance Commission’s work now includ­ed in one of the most impor­tant gov­ern­ment fund­ing bills the House will con­sid­er, it is now up to senior appro­pri­a­tors and the Elec­tion Assis­tance Commission’s bipar­ti­san sup­port­ers to step up and demand the provision’s removal.

    The rea­sons the Elec­tion Assis­tance Commission’s oppo­nents have giv­en for abol­ish­ing the Com­mis­sion have ranged from an insis­tence that it costs tax­pay­ers too much to the claim that it has become a bloat­ed bureau­cra­cy to the con­vic­tion that the Elec­tion Assis­tance Com­mis­sion intrudes on states’ rights. None of these rea­sons hold water. For one, the most Con­gress has ever fund­ed the Elec­tion Assis­tance Com­mis­sion over the course of a year was $10 mil­lion, and that was ear­ly in the agency’s exis­tence when it was focused on ini­tial­ly imple­ment­ing Help Amer­i­ca Vote Act. In recent years, the agency’s annu­al appro­pri­a­tion has rough­ly been $5 mil­lion. Fur­ther­more, at its peak, the Elec­tion Assis­tance Com­mis­sion employed just 60 indi­vid­u­als; near­ly all of those work­ing at the Com­mis­sion are experts in the field of elec­tion law and vot­ing tech­nol­o­gy. With regard to the ques­tion of its impact on states’ rights, the Elec­tion Assis­tance Com­mis­sion has vir­tu­al­ly no rule-mak­ing author­i­ty and, there­fore, has prac­ti­cal­ly no author­i­ty over how state and local elec­tion offi­cials car­ry out their elec­tions.

    There is absolute­ly no jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for abol­ish­ing the Elec­tion Assis­tance Com­mis­sion. Even the Trump admin­is­tra­tion includ­ed $9.2 mil­lion in fund­ing for the Com­mis­sion in its FY2018 bud­get pro­pos­al. While it’s very dis­ap­point­ing to see this pro­vi­sion abol­ish­ing the Elec­tion Assis­tance Com­mis­sion includ­ed in the ini­tial ver­sion of House Repub­li­cans’ fund­ing bill, there is still ample oppor­tu­ni­ty to cor­rect this error. That’s why I’m call­ing on all those from both par­ties who vot­ed for Help Amer­i­ca Vote Act in 2002 and who have sup­port­ed strength­en­ing our elec­tion sys­tems in the years since to do every­thing in our pow­er to have that pro­vi­sion removed and to enable the Elec­tion Assis­tance Com­mis­sion to con­tin­ue its crit­i­cal work.

    ...

    ———-

    ———-

    “Repub­li­cans Want To Defund The Com­mis­sion That Fights Vot­ing Machine Hack­ing” by Rep. Ste­ny H. Hoy­er; The Huff­in­g­ton Post; 08/02/2017

    “How­ev­er, in their FY2018 fund­ing pro­pos­al, Repub­li­cans are going after the small but high­ly suc­cess­ful agency that pro­tects the integri­ty of our vot­ing sys­tems: the Elec­tion Assis­tance Com­mis­sion. In June, House Repub­li­cans includ­ed a pro­vi­sion in their Finan­cial Ser­vices and Gen­er­al Gov­ern­ment Appro­pri­a­tions bill that would abol­ish the Elec­tion Assis­tance Com­mis­sion.

    And what was the GOP’s excuse for gut­ting the fund­ing of the fed­er­al agency tasked with try­ing to actu­al­ly address these issues? They says this under­fund­ed and under­staffed agency that has no rule-mak­ing author­i­ty is a waste of mon­ey, part of a bloat­ed bureau­cra­cy, and a vio­la­tion of states-rights:

    ...
    The rea­sons the Elec­tion Assis­tance Commission’s oppo­nents have giv­en for abol­ish­ing the Com­mis­sion have ranged from an insis­tence that it costs tax­pay­ers too much to the claim that it has become a bloat­ed bureau­cra­cy to the con­vic­tion that the Elec­tion Assis­tance Com­mis­sion intrudes on states’ rights. None of these rea­sons hold water. For one, the most Con­gress has ever fund­ed the Elec­tion Assis­tance Com­mis­sion over the course of a year was $10 mil­lion, and that was ear­ly in the agency’s exis­tence when it was focused on ini­tial­ly imple­ment­ing Help Amer­i­ca Vote Act. In recent years, the agency’s annu­al appro­pri­a­tion has rough­ly been $5 mil­lion. Fur­ther­more, at its peak, the Elec­tion Assis­tance Com­mis­sion employed just 60 indi­vid­u­als; near­ly all of those work­ing at the Com­mis­sion are experts in the field of elec­tion law and vot­ing tech­nol­o­gy. With regard to the ques­tion of its impact on states’ rights, the Elec­tion Assis­tance Com­mis­sion has vir­tu­al­ly no rule-mak­ing author­i­ty and, there­fore, has prac­ti­cal­ly no author­i­ty over how state and local elec­tion offi­cials car­ry out their elec­tions.
    ...

    So for every­one in the US, wel­come to Vot­ing Machine Hack­ing Vil­lage! It’s where you live. And have been liv­ing for a while, so the wel­comes aren’t real­ly nec­es­sary. Regard­less, wel­come home!

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | August 2, 2017, 1:28 pm
  4. Here’s an exam­ple of how the US polit­i­cal sys­tem remains wild­ly vul­ner­a­ble to bad faith actors and exceed­ing­ly sim­ple dis­in­for­ma­tion cam­paigns. In this case it appears to be a dis­in­for­ma­tion cam­paign start­ed by a sin­gle anony­mous snarky tweet that end­ed up get­ting ampli­fied by a twit­ter-bot net­work and result­ed in the wide­spread asser­tions by Repub­li­cans that last week’s elec­tion in Ken­tucky was some­how rigged: for­mer Ken­tucky gov­er­nor Matt Bevin final­ly con­ced­ed defeat today in last week’s elec­tion to Demo­c­rat Matt Beshear. The rea­son for the delay in admit­ting defeat was Bev­in’s request for a recount. The fact that a recount was request­ed isn’t con­tro­ver­sial but the rea­son for that request turns out to be a per­fect exam­ple of how bad faith accep­tance of low qual­i­ty dis­in­for­ma­tion is now the norm for Repub­li­can pol­i­tics and rep­re­sents a real threat to democ­ra­cy by casu­al­ly lead­ing to the valid­i­ty of elec­tion results. Short­ly after it became clear Bevin was going to lose, a flood of alle­ga­tions about “irreg­u­lar­i­ties” in the elec­tion flood twit­ter mak­ing alle­ga­tions like thou­sands of absen­tee bal­lots being ille­gal­ly count­ed. There was no actu­al basis for the claims and one of the most wide­ly cit­ed claim came from a sin­gle tweet by a user @Overlordkraken1 who tweet­ed out, “just shred­ded a box of Repub­li­can mail in bal­lots,” adding “Bye bye Bevin.” The tweet list­ed the user’s loca­tion as Louisville, but with Louisville mis­spelled. Bot net­works imme­di­ate­ly pounced on these evi­dence-free claims and soon a right-wing meme born:

    Louisville Couri­er Jour­nal

    Thou­sands of Twit­ter ‘bots’ tar­get­ed Ken­tucky with fake news on elec­tion night

    Joe Son­ka
    Pub­lished 1:35 p.m. ET Nov. 11, 2019

    LOUISVILLE — As the final votes trick­led in dur­ing last week’s Ken­tucky guber­na­to­r­i­al elec­tion, a net­work of auto­mat­ed Twit­ter accounts sud­den­ly sprang into action.

    They spread mis­in­for­ma­tion about the elec­tion being rigged, accord­ing to the CEO of a com­pa­ny that tracks polit­i­cal mis­in­for­ma­tion on social media.

    Gideon Blocq, the founder and CEO of Vine­Sight, told The Couri­er Jour­nal his com­pa­ny wit­nessed thou­sands of accounts with “bot-like” auto­mat­ed behav­ior spread­ing mis­in­for­ma­tion about the race, includ­ing a screen­shot of a tweet by one account claim­ing to have destroyed bal­lots with votes for incum­bent Repub­li­can Gov. Matt Bevin.

    “Imme­di­ate­ly at the end of the count­ing of the votes, these sto­ries start­ed pop­ping up in par­al­lel, all about the elec­tion being rigged,” Block said.

    One of the tweets spread­ing the fur­thest came from user @Overlordkraken1, which tweet­ed at 8:39 p.m. he had “just shred­ded a box of Repub­li­can mail in bal­lots,” adding “Bye bye Bevin.” The tweet list­ed the user’s loca­tion as Louisville, though it mis­spelled the word.

    Bevin would end up los­ing to Demo­c­ra­t­ic Andy Beshear by 5,189 votes, though the gov­er­nor told sup­port­ers at 10 p.m. Tues­day that he would not con­cede the race, sight­ing unspec­i­fied vot­ing “irreg­u­lar­i­ties.”

    The next day, Bevin request­ed an offi­cial recan­vass of the vote, alleg­ing wide­spread fraud and “thou­sands of absen­tee bal­lots that were ille­gal­ly count­ed.” In a Couri­er Jour­nal fact check of Bev­in’s claims, local elec­tions offi­cials refer to the alle­ga­tions as “ridicu­lous” and “flat­ly not true.”

    The gov­er­nor has not pro­vid­ed any proof for such claims, and spokesper­sons for his office and cam­paign have not respond­ed to ques­tions ask­ing if this tweet plays into Bev­in’s alle­ga­tions.

    After being retweet­ed at least 91 times, the account was sus­pend­ed — though Blocq said a screen­shot of the tweet was then post­ed Tues­day night and “we saw huge bot net­works just push­ing it around.”

    While the sus­pend­ed account was like­ly a real per­son just “trolling” with the shred­ding tweet, Blocq said “thou­sands” of bot accounts spread the screen­shot in par­al­lel with oth­er tweets alleg­ing that the elec­tion was rigged, show­ing “this is not a small oper­a­tion... it is not just one per­son doing this.”

    By ear­ly Wednes­day, some­one cre­at­ed a meme sug­gest­ing thou­sands of votes for Bevin were not count­ed because every oth­er Repub­li­can can­di­date on the bal­lot did so well. That also spread rapid­ly among social media. For exam­ple, one Twit­ter account with more than 117,000 fol­low­ers tweet­ed the meme along with the word “rigged!” which was retweet­ed more than 1,000 times over the next day, most­ly by bot accounts.

    ...

    While the influ­ence of Krem­lin-backed groups to spread mis­in­for­ma­tion in the 2016 pres­i­den­tial cam­paign is well doc­u­ment­ed, Blocq said he could not deter­mine the ori­gin of the bot net­work push­ing tweets about the Ken­tucky race, as he can only see pub­licly-avail­able data. How­ev­er, he said that those work­ing at Twit­ter would have more answers about the loca­tion of the bots.

    Twit­ter told The New York Times this week­end that the spread of mis­in­for­ma­tion regard­ing the Ken­tucky race for gov­er­nor large­ly appeared to orig­i­nate in the Unit­ed States.

    The Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­ri­ty tracks for­eign inter­fer­ence in U.S. elec­tions that exploits divi­sions through the spread of mis­in­for­ma­tion on social net­works.

    Bev­in’s request­ed recan­vass will take place on Thurs­day, with vot­ing offi­cials in each coun­ty check­ing to make sure they trans­mit­ted the cor­rect num­bers to the sec­re­tary of state.

    Repub­li­can state leg­is­la­tors have expressed skep­ti­cism that the recan­vass will sig­nif­i­cant­ly change the offi­cial vote totals and warned against Bevin cre­at­ing a “fish­ing expe­di­tion” by con­test­ing the elec­tion in the leg­is­la­ture if that is the case.

    Some leg­is­la­tors have also urged the gov­er­nor to present evi­dence of fraud or vot­ing irreg­u­lar­i­ties to the pub­lic if he has any, say­ing mak­ing such claims with­out any proof under­mines faith in the demo­c­ra­t­ic sys­tem.

    “Any attempt by Gov. Bevin to under­mine these results in the leg­is­la­ture is wrong and should be viewed as a direct attack on the demo­c­ra­t­ic process.” state Sen. Mor­gan McGar­vey, D‑Louisville, said. “Once the recan­vass is com­plete, the Gen­er­al Assem­bly must accept the out­come of this elec­tion and help Gov.-elect Beshear pre­pare for the 2020 bud­get.

    ———-

    “Thou­sands of Twit­ter ‘bots’ tar­get­ed Ken­tucky with fake news on elec­tion night” by Joe Son­ka; Louisville Couri­er Jour­nal; 11/11/2019

    “While the sus­pend­ed account was like­ly a real per­son just “trolling” with the shred­ding tweet, Blocq said “thou­sands” of bot accounts spread the screen­shot in par­al­lel with oth­er tweets alleg­ing that the elec­tion was rigged, show­ing “this is not a small oper­a­tion... it is not just one per­son doing this.”

    A sin­gle troll tweet gets picked up by a bot net­work and all of a sud­den that joke tweet gets treat­ed as real, despite the fact that none of the peo­ple who end­ed up refer­ring to these memes had any proof what­so­ev­er. Includ­ing Bev­in’s cam­paign, which relied on these vague alle­ga­tions for his recount demand but remained silent when asked for evi­dence.

    And while Bev­in’s cam­paign has now final­ly con­ced­ed the race, it’s not like the meme that the elec­tion was some­how stolen by the Democ­rats is going to just go away. Espe­cial­ly since, in the days fol­low­ing the elec­tion, Bevin went around talk­ing about how he did­n’t want to win a “dirty elec­tion” and sug­gest­ing that it was­n’t legit­i­mate:

    WDRB

    Gov. Matt Bevin cites pos­si­ble vot­ing fraud and ‘irreg­u­lar­i­ties’ as grounds for elec­tion recan­vass

    Nov 12, 2019 Updat­ed Nov 12, 2019

    LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) — Ken­tucky Gov. Matt Bevin said this week that he would not want to win a “dirty elec­tion,” and restat­ed his con­cerns about the poten­tial ille­git­i­ma­cy of Ken­tuck­y’s guber­na­to­r­i­al elec­tion.

    “I will tell you this, I would rather lose a clean elec­tion than to win a dirty elec­tion and I’ll be darned if I want to lose a dirty elec­tion. So to that end, let’s just make sure it’s legit,” he said.

    Bevin made the remarks Sun­day at the Young Amer­i­ca’s Foun­da­tion Fall Col­lege Retreat in Cal­i­for­nia.

    Bevin, a Repub­li­can and first-term gov­er­nor, lost the Nov. 5 elec­tion to Demo­c­ra­t­ic chal­lenger Andy Beshear, the state’s attor­ney gen­er­al and son of Bev­in’s pre­de­ces­sor, Steve Beshear.

    The younger Beshear got about 5,000 more votes than Bevin, but that was just a frac­tion of 1% of all votes cast. Bevin has not con­ced­ed, and instead has asked for a recan­vass, which is set for Thurs­day. Board of Elec­tion offi­cials will look at each vot­ing machine to make sure all vote totals were added cor­rect­ly.

    Bevin also has cit­ed “irreg­u­lar­i­ties” as a rea­son for not con­ced­ing, draw­ing sharp crit­i­cism from some state leg­is­la­tors, who have asked the gov­er­nor to pro­vide evi­dence for his claims. So far, Bevin has declined.

    ———-

    “Gov. Matt Bevin cites pos­si­ble vot­ing fraud and ‘irreg­u­lar­i­ties’ as grounds for elec­tion recan­vass”; WDRB; 11/12/2019

    ““I will tell you this, I would rather lose a clean elec­tion than to win a dirty elec­tion and I’ll be darned if I want to lose a dirty elec­tion. So to that end, let’s just make sure it’s legit,” he said.”

    He does­n’t want to “win dirty”. But he sure has no prob­lem los­ing dirty. That’s exact­ly what this his: the Repub­li­cans using a twit­ter-bot meme cam­paign to paint the incom­ing Demo­c­ra­t­ic admin­is­tra­tion as ille­git­i­mate and “dirty”. And they clear­ly know this is dirty because they clear­ly know there’s no actu­al evi­dence. Oth­er­wise they would point to it.

    And note that this isn’t just Bev­in’s cam­paign oppor­tunis­ti­cal­ly using these twit­ter memes. Just yes­ter­day, a new­ly formed group call­ing itself Cit­i­zens for Elec­tion Integri­ty held a news con­fer­ence call­ing for an inves­ti­ga­tion into the “irreg­u­lar­i­ties”. Bevin him­self tweet­ed in sup­port of the group, say­ing “For those inter­est­ed in the integri­ty of the elec­tion process in Ken­tucky and in Amer­i­ca (which should be ALL of us), this looks like an event worth attend­ing...” The group claims to just be self-described “moms”, but it turns out the group’s exec­u­tive direc­tor, Eri­ka Cal­i­han, was appoint­ed by Bevin to the Judi­cial Nom­i­nat­ing Com­mis­sion for the Ken­tucky Court of Appeals and Supreme Court in Jan­u­ary. One of the group’s claims is that the elec­tion was hacked but they pro­vid­ed no cred­i­ble evi­dence:

    Lex­ing­ton Her­ald Leader

    Group’s claims of irreg­u­lar­i­ties in Ken­tucky gov­er­nor elec­tion quick­ly debunked

    BY DANIEL DESROCHERS
    NOVEMBER 13, 2019 04:16 PM

    FRANKFORT
    A small group of self-described “moms” held a news con­fer­ence in the Ken­tucky Capi­tol Wednes­day after­noon to make claims of irreg­u­lar­i­ties in last week’s guber­na­to­r­i­al elec­tion, all of which were almost imme­di­ate­ly proven inac­cu­rate or irrel­e­vant.

    The group, which called itself the Cit­i­zens for Elec­tion Integri­ty, demand­ed that the State Board of Elec­tions release vot­er logs and data per­tain­ing to the elec­tion even though its claims were shown to be unfound­ed.

    ...

    On Wednes­day, Bevin lent the group cred­i­bil­i­ty on Twit­ter. “For those inter­est­ed in the integri­ty of the elec­tion process in Ken­tucky and in Amer­i­ca (which should be ALL of us), this looks like an event worth attend­ing...” he wrote. “I will plan to be in atten­dance at 2:00pm today in Frank­fort as my sched­ule allows...”

    He did not attend.

    The group is new­ly cre­at­ed, has no web­site and only cre­at­ed a Face­book page Mon­day. Its exec­u­tive direc­tor, Eri­ka Cal­i­han, sup­port­ed Bevin’s cam­paign and was appoint­ed by Bevin to the Judi­cial Nom­i­nat­ing Com­mis­sion for the Ken­tucky Court of Appeals and Supreme Court in Jan­u­ary.

    “Ken­tuck­ians do not deserve spec­u­la­tion for what has hap­pened,” Cal­i­han said. “Ken­tuck­ians deserve answers.”

    She then pro­ceed­ed to spec­u­late that Kentucky’s elec­tion had been hacked with­out pro­vid­ing any cred­i­ble evi­dence. She claimed the state’s elec­tion sys­tem was vul­ner­a­ble to attack because the state uses an online sys­tem to present unof­fi­cial elec­tion results to the pub­lic on elec­tion night.

    When pressed to present evi­dence that sup­port­ed its claims, the group called for an inves­ti­ga­tion.

    “We’re just moms,” Cal­i­han said. “Why are we doing this, we don’t want to be doing this. I’d rather be relax­ing with my kids, but here I am. We want the attor­ney gen­er­al to inves­ti­gate that.”

    The Office of the Attor­ney Gen­er­al said that by law it can­not pro­vide details about spe­cif­ic com­plaints or pend­ing elec­tions.

    “The nature of the calls dur­ing this cycle were typ­i­cal of the calls received in pre­vi­ous cycles,” said deputy Attor­ney Gen­er­al J. Michael Brown. “The most com­mon ques­tions received through the hot­line were pro­ce­dur­al or gen­er­al legal ques­tions.”

    Fayette Coun­ty Clerk Don Blevins said coun­ties keep vote totals on com­put­ers that are not con­nect­ed to the inter­net and that none of the vot­ing machines are con­nect­ed to the inter­net.

    “I’d like to point out that the web­site used for returns on elec­tion night is for pub­lic infor­ma­tion only and is not used to report elec­tion results,” Blevins said.

    The group high­light­ed four exam­ples of sup­posed vot­er fraud. The first was that of a col­lege stu­dent named Jacob Burd, whose fam­i­ly alleges that some­one vot­ed in his name in Jef­fer­son Coun­ty on Elec­tion Day. The group showed a video of Burd say­ing he was in Tam­pa that day and did not vote.

    The Jef­fer­son Coun­ty Board of Elec­tions said there are two Jacob Burds that vote at the same polling loca­tion, but are in dif­fer­ent precincts. One is 19 and the oth­er is not. The clerk’s office said it appeared the old­er Jacob Burd signed in the younger Jacob Burd’s place and the infor­ma­tion has been report­ed to the attor­ney general’s office.

    The group then high­light­ed the state’s unof­fi­cial vote totals in two coun­ties — Menifee and Ander­son — to ques­tion the integri­ty of the elec­tion.

    In Ander­son Coun­ty, elec­tion results pre­sent­ed on the county’s web­site did not match results on the State Board of Elec­tions web­site. Ander­son Coun­ty Clerk Jason Den­ny explained that the coun­ty acci­den­tal­ly failed to include absen­tee bal­lot totals in the num­bers sent to the state on elec­tion night.

    How­ev­er, the county’s offi­cial elec­tion results reflect the absen­tee bal­lots and every vote was count­ed, Den­ny said.

    “It looks like there was a dis­crep­an­cy,” Den­ny said. “It wasn’t.”

    The State Board of Elec­tions posts unof­fi­cial results on its web­site to inform the press and pub­lic about the elec­tion in a time­ly man­ner, but the board doesn’t cer­ti­fy the elec­tion based on the results dis­played on its web­site. Instead, each coun­ty sends a sep­a­rate form, signed by a Demo­c­rat, a Repub­li­can, the Coun­ty Clerk and the sher­iff, that cer­ti­fies the county’s offi­cial elec­tion results. Those results are then put into a report that is approved by the State Board of Elec­tions.

    The State Board of Elec­tions web­site also dis­played a dis­crep­an­cy in Menifee Coun­ty results. The web­site showed there were more votes cast in all six statewide elec­tions than total bal­lots cast. Menifee Coun­ty Clerk Krys­tal Chap­man said the dis­crep­an­cy was caused by the fact that the num­ber of total bal­lots cast did not include absen­tee bal­lots on the web­site.

    The group also cit­ed screen­shots of CNN on elec­tion night as evi­dence that elec­tion results were hacked. About 500 votes shift­ed from Bevin to Beshear on the two screen­shots.

    The group did not explain why this infor­ma­tion was rel­e­vant, since Ken­tucky elec­tion offi­cials do not use the num­bers dis­played on CNN when tal­ly­ing elec­tion results.

    ———-

    “Group’s claims of irreg­u­lar­i­ties in Ken­tucky gov­er­nor elec­tion quick­ly debunked” by DANIEL DESROCHERS; Lex­ing­ton Her­ald Leader; 11/13/2019

    “The group is new­ly cre­at­ed, has no web­site and only cre­at­ed a Face­book page Mon­day. Its exec­u­tive direc­tor, Eri­ka Cal­i­han, sup­port­ed Bevin’s cam­paign and was appoint­ed by Bevin to the Judi­cial Nom­i­nat­ing Com­mis­sion for the Ken­tucky Court of Appeals and Supreme Court in Jan­u­ary.

    The new­ly form group of “moms” assert­ing the elec­tion was hacked just hap­pens to have an exec­u­tive direc­tor who was a Bevin polit­i­cal appointee this year. What a coin­ci­dence. But they assure us they’re just con­cerned moms:

    ...
    “We’re just moms,” Cal­i­han said. “Why are we doing this, we don’t want to be doing this. I’d rather be relax­ing with my kids, but here I am. We want the attor­ney gen­er­al to inves­ti­gate that.”
    ...

    And as with Bevin, when asked for evi­dence of their claims, they pro­vide the flim­sy exam­ples and call for an inves­ti­ga­tion. In oth­er words, they know they are mak­ing base­less claims:

    ...

    She then pro­ceed­ed to spec­u­late that Kentucky’s elec­tion had been hacked with­out pro­vid­ing any cred­i­ble evi­dence. She claimed the state’s elec­tion sys­tem was vul­ner­a­ble to attack because the state uses an online sys­tem to present unof­fi­cial elec­tion results to the pub­lic on elec­tion night.

    When pressed to present evi­dence that sup­port­ed its claims, the group called for an inves­ti­ga­tion.

    ...

    The group also cit­ed screen­shots of CNN on elec­tion night as evi­dence that elec­tion results were hacked. About 500 votes shift­ed from Bevin to Beshear on the two screen­shots.

    The group did not explain why this infor­ma­tion was rel­e­vant, since Ken­tucky elec­tion offi­cials do not use the num­bers dis­played on CNN when tal­ly­ing elec­tion results.
    ...

    But hey, at least we final­ly found a way to make the GOP take the real threat of hack­ing elec­tron­ic vot­ing machines seri­ous­ly. Of course, mak­ing base­less claims isn’t real­ly tak­ing this seri­ous­ly and, if any­thing, will dam­age the cred­i­bil­i­ty of future legit­i­mate con­cerns about elec­tion hack­ing. But it’s progress. Sort of.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | November 14, 2019, 5:06 pm
  5. Doubts over whether or not Pres­i­dent Trump will peace­ful­ly leave office are surg­ing again. For rea­sons that are now typ­i­cal: an arti­cle came out about a Repub­li­can plot to steal the elec­tion and then Trump said some­thing crazy about the elec­tion. Specif­i­cal­ly, the Atlantic just pub­lished a piece about Repub­li­can plans to guar­an­tee a Trump vic­to­ry that includes maneu­vers like order­ing the seizure of bal­lots and ask­ing states to choose the elec­tors them­selves — a move that would over­ride the vote — jus­ti­fied under the premise that mail-in bal­lots are so woe­ful­ly cor­rupt­ed by Demo­c­ra­t­ic-led vot­er fraud efforts that the only option is to ignore the vote. Then Trump him­self refused to answer affir­ma­tive­ly when direct­ly asked dur­ing a press con­fer­ence whether or not he can guar­an­tee the peace­ful trans­fer of pow­er, say­ing, “Well, we’ll have to see what hap­pens,” and going on to make dis­turb­ing state­ments about how mail-in bal­lots should be stopped instead.

    So with alle­ga­tions of mass mail-in vot­er fraud set to be a core Big Lie the Repub­li­cans are going to rely on to steal anoth­er pres­i­den­tial elec­tion it rais­es an inter­est­ing ques­tion about the pro­pa­gan­da efforts that would be used to car­ry this out: will Hans Spakovsky, the GOP’s long-stand­ing ped­dler of fraud­u­lent vot­er fraud alle­ga­tions, be rec­og­nized on one of the key sources of Trump’s mail-in vot­er fraud claims? It’s a pret­ty rel­e­vant ques­tion giv­en that Spakovsky has a long track record of being proven wrong but con­tin­ues to be treat­ed as a cred­i­ble expert by Repub­li­cans. Recall how Spakovksy’s work for Repub­li­cans on court cas­es in recent years had to be done in secret because his very pres­ence on the case dam­aged the cred­i­bil­i­ty of the Repub­li­can side in the eyes of fed­er­al judges. That’s how tox­ic the guy is when you step out­side the right-wing bub­ble.

    It’s also worth recall­ing how, back in 2012, one of Spakovsky’s chief part­ners in cre­at­ing pro­mot­ing the GOP’s vot­er fraud hoax, John Fund, was pro­mot­ing absen­tee fraud as a loom­ing dan­ger for the elec­tion and was fear­ing the US would expe­ri­ence “six or sev­en Flori­das this Novem­ber” where the state results are locked up in court and the vic­tor enters or con­tin­ues office under a cloud of ques­tions over their legit­i­ma­cy. So the sce­nario that Trump is open­ly pre­dict­ing and basi­cal­ly ensur­ing takes place in 2020 — pre­vent­ing the count­ing of the vote under of wave of con­test­ed state elec­tions — is a sce­nario Fund and Spakovksy were plan­ning out in 2012, which is reminder that Trump prob­a­bly isn’t just wing­ing it as he imple­ments this strat­e­gy. This has prob­a­bly been in the GOP play book for years.

    But as the fol­low­ing ProP­ub­li­ca piece describes, there’s anoth­er rea­son Hans Spakovsky — and the integri­ty and qual­i­ty of his work — should prob­a­bly become part of the nation­al dis­course if this elec­toral dooms­day sce­nario plays out: it turns out he’s been hold­ing meet­ing with sec­re­taries of state for months now warn­ing them about vot­er fraud sce­nar­ios and giv­ing them advise on how to mit­i­gate that vot­er fraud. And he’s only been giv­ing these meet­ing to Repub­li­can sec­re­taries of state in secret and has been giv­ing advice like pre­vent­ing more than one mail-in drop-off box in an entire coun­ty. And while Spakovsky has­n’t been pub­licly speak­ing out about mail-in vot­ing this year he has pre­vi­ous­ly argued that only the elder­ly and those with health risks should not vote absen­tee in any form. So he’s in favor of rolling back absen­tee vot­ing even more than the pre-pan­dem­ic rules and this is the GOP’s vot­er-fraud guru. It’s all big hint that Trump isn’t run­ning some cocka­mamie ‘vot­er fraud’ fraud scheme he come up with on his own. He’s run­ning a cocka­mamie scheme the GOP has prob­a­bly had ready to go for years and Hans Spakovsky is the per­son who most like­ly craft­ed it:

    ProP­ub­li­ca

    Before Lim­it­ing Bal­lot Drop Box­es to One Per Coun­ty, Top Ohio Elec­tion Offi­cials Secret­ly Con­sult­ed Pro­mot­er of Debunked Vot­ing Fraud Fears

    After Black union work­ers peti­tioned the state for more secure bal­lot drop box­es, top elec­tion offi­cials called Hans von Spakovsky, a lead­ing pur­vey­or of dis­cred­it­ed vot­ing fraud claims, and then put a strict lim­it on the box­es instead.

    by Mike Spies and Jake Pear­son
    Sept. 24, 2020 4 a.m. EDT

    On July 15, a civ­il rights group formed by Black union work­ers called on the Ohio sec­re­tary of state to make vot­ing amid the pan­dem­ic eas­i­er and safer. It advo­cat­ed plac­ing mul­ti­ple secure bal­lot drop box­es in coun­ties across the state.

    When a deputy to Repub­li­can Sec­re­tary of State Frank LaRose received the A. Philip Ran­dolph Institute’s press release, he respond­ed quick­ly — but not to the group. Instead, accord­ing to records obtained by ProP­ub­li­ca, the deputy con­tact­ed the Her­itage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky, a lead­ing advo­cate for the dis­cred­it­ed argu­ment that Amer­i­can elec­tions are taint­ed by wide­spread vot­ing fraud.

    “I just left a voice­mail at your office, but want­ed to fol­low up via email as well,” wrote Grant Shaf­fer, the deputy assis­tant sec­re­tary of state. “If you have a few min­utes, I’d love to dis­cuss the attached press release.”

    That was the sec­ond email Shaf­fer sent von Spakovsky’s office that day. Ear­li­er, he had RSVP’d to an Aug. 4 vir­tu­al brief­ing host­ed by the con­ser­v­a­tive activist. Sec­re­taries of state are respon­si­ble for over­see­ing elec­tions, and dur­ing the pan­dem­ic von Spakovsky has orga­nized at least two remote, off-the-record strat­e­gy ses­sions exclu­sive­ly for Repub­li­can sec­re­taries and their staffs to dis­cuss vot­ing secu­ri­ty amid what will be one of the most con­test­ed and unusu­al elec­tions in gen­er­a­tions, ProP­ub­li­ca report­ed last week.

    “I’ll be hap­py to attend this brief­ing,” Shaf­fer wrote to von Spakovsky’s assis­tant. “The Sec­re­tary can attend for part of the time, and our sched­uler will be fol­low­ing up with you short­ly on that top­ic. Is there any­thing we can help out with or be pre­pared to present?”

    It is not known what Shaf­fer and von Spakovsky specif­i­cal­ly said over the phone about the drop box request, or if the call took place. But on Aug. 12, a week after the vir­tu­al brief­ing, and a month after Shaf­fer sought von Spakovksy’s coun­sel, LaRose issued a direc­tive pro­hibit­ing each of Ohio’s 88 coun­ties from installing more than one drop box with­in its bor­ders.

    The secretary’s office, mean­while, nev­er respond­ed to the A. Philip Ran­dolph Insti­tute, accord­ing to the group’s lawyer, David Carey, a senior staff attor­ney with the Amer­i­can Civ­il Lib­er­ties Union of Ohio. He said he was “baf­fled” that LaRose’s deputy would reach out to von Spakovsky and not his client. “If the sec­re­tary is turn­ing the vot­ing sys­tems in Ohio into a par­ti­san endeav­or, that is a mat­ter of extreme­ly grave con­cern,” he said.

    ...

    While he hasn’t pub­licly opined on secure bal­lot box­es, von Spakovsky has repeat­ed­ly argued that every­one besides the elder­ly and those with health risks should not vote absen­tee in any form and only vote at their polling place.

    Sec­re­taries of state have wide lat­i­tude to act in ways that can make it eas­i­er or hard­er to vote. While most are par­ti­san elect­ed offi­cials, they are expect­ed to car­ry out poli­cies that aren’t more harm­ful to one par­ty than the oth­er.

    In keep­ing with the nation­al trend, a record num­ber of Ohio’s near­ly 8 mil­lion reg­is­tered vot­ers are expect­ed to cast absen­tee bal­lots in Novem­ber to avoid spread­ing the coro­n­avirus at the polls. Plac­ing a bal­lot in a secure drop box would give vot­ers an alter­na­tive to both vot­ing in per­son and to mail­ing in a bal­lot, espe­cial­ly for those wor­ried about the tumult with­in the U.S. Postal Ser­vice.

    Evi­dence sug­gests that Democ­rats are more like­ly to vote remote­ly than Repub­li­cans, and any actions lim­it­ing vot­ing by mail could sup­press turnout and hurt the party’s chances of tak­ing the White House. Ohio is a cru­cial bat­tle­ground state, and Cuya­hoga Coun­ty alone accounts for near­ly a mil­lion vot­ers spread across more than 1,200 square miles and includes the Demo­c­ra­t­ic strong­hold of Cleve­land.

    Despite the behind-the-scenes com­mu­ni­ca­tion with von Spakovsky, the sec­re­tary appeared pub­licly open to the idea of adding more drop box­es, ask­ing the state attor­ney gen­er­al in late July for legal guid­ance on whether Ohio law allows for “one or more addi­tion­al secure recep­ta­cles” per coun­ty.

    But on Aug. 11, before the attor­ney gen­er­al weighed in, LaRose with­drew his request and the fol­low­ing day issued his one-box-per-coun­ty direc­tive.

    Two weeks lat­er, Ohio Democ­rats sued LaRose in state court in Colum­bus. In a 31-page rul­ing issued on Sept. 15, Judge Richard Frye found that pro­hibit­ing coun­ty elec­tion offi­cials from adding extra drop box­es in their dis­tricts “was unrea­son­able and unlaw­ful.”

    “Treat­ing vot­ers dif­fer­ent­ly with­out regard to obvi­ous fac­tors like the pop­u­la­tion and geo­graph­ic size of their coun­ty is arbi­trary,” he wrote.

    Frye’s rul­ing has been stayed pend­ing an appeal by LaRose, who is argu­ing the court exceed­ed its author­i­ty when it struck down his one-box-per-coun­ty direc­tive. The A. Philip Ran­dolph Insti­tute and oth­er vot­ing rights groups filed a sep­a­rate law­suit over the con­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty of LaRose’s direc­tive late last month in fed­er­al court. The Trump cam­paign has inter­vened in that case, which is ongo­ing and is part of a larg­er effort it is car­ry­ing out over vot­er rules in at least a dozen law­suits across the coun­try.

    The Ohio attor­ney gen­er­al declined to pro­vide a com­ment for this sto­ry, also cit­ing lit­i­ga­tion, and denied a ProP­ub­li­ca records request ask­ing for the guid­ance the office was prepar­ing for LaRose on the grounds that it was sub­ject to “attor­ney-client priv­i­lege and/or work-prod­uct doc­trines.”

    Von Spakovsky, whose argu­ments that vot­ing fraud is wide­spread have been large­ly debunked, began host­ing secret, Repub­li­can-only meet­ings for state elec­tion admin­is­tra­tors after Trump was elect­ed, records obtained by ProP­ub­li­ca show. At the Aug. 4 vir­tu­al meet­ing, a Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­ri­ty offi­cial was false­ly intro­duced to atten­dees as their “liai­son to the elec­tion com­mu­ni­ty.”

    Shaf­fer and anoth­er offi­cial from the Ohio sec­re­tary of state’s office also attend­ed a von Spakovsky meet­ing in 2019, where the then-head of the Depart­ment of Justice’s Civ­il Rights Divi­sion appeared on a pan­el with the con­ser­v­a­tive lawyer, an action the for­mer divi­sion chief under Pres­i­dent Barack Oba­ma called “unprece­dent­ed.”

    Repub­li­cans con­sid­er von Spakovsky the lead­ing expert on vot­er fraud, but his work is not peer reviewed and two years ago a judge found that his tes­ti­mo­ny on the top­ic was “premised on sev­er­al mis­lead­ing and unsup­port­ed exam­ples” and includ­ed “false asser­tions.”

    ———–

    “Before Lim­it­ing Bal­lot Drop Box­es to One Per Coun­ty, Top Ohio Elec­tion Offi­cials Secret­ly Con­sult­ed Pro­mot­er of Debunked Vot­ing Fraud Fears” by Mike Spies and Jake Pear­son; ProP­ub­li­ca; 09/24/2020

    “That was the sec­ond email Shaf­fer sent von Spakovsky’s office that day. Ear­li­er, he had RSVP’d to an Aug. 4 vir­tu­al brief­ing host­ed by the con­ser­v­a­tive activist. Sec­re­taries of state are respon­si­ble for over­see­ing elec­tions, and dur­ing the pan­dem­ic von Spakovsky has orga­nized at least two remote, off-the-record strat­e­gy ses­sions exclu­sive­ly for Repub­li­can sec­re­taries and their staffs to dis­cuss vot­ing secu­ri­ty amid what will be one of the most con­test­ed and unusu­al elec­tions in gen­er­a­tions, ProP­ub­li­ca report­ed last week.

    Exclu­sive secret off-the-record remote meet­ings for Repub­li­can sec­re­taries of state only with Hans Spakovksy. And in the case of Ohio, one of the secret meet­ings with Spakovksy took place right before the Repub­li­can sec­re­tary of state sud­den­ly issued the one-drop-box-per-coun­ty order. That’s not like super sus­pi­cious or any­thing...

    ...
    It is not known what Shaf­fer and von Spakovsky specif­i­cal­ly said over the phone about the drop box request, or if the call took place. But on Aug. 12, a week after the vir­tu­al brief­ing, and a month after Shaf­fer sought von Spakovksy’s coun­sel, LaRose issued a direc­tive pro­hibit­ing each of Ohio’s 88 coun­ties from installing more than one drop box with­in its bor­ders.

    ...

    While he hasn’t pub­licly opined on secure bal­lot box­es, von Spakovsky has repeat­ed­ly argued that every­one besides the elder­ly and those with health risks should not vote absen­tee in any form and only vote at their polling place.

    ...

    Despite the behind-the-scenes com­mu­ni­ca­tion with von Spakovsky, the sec­re­tary appeared pub­licly open to the idea of adding more drop box­es, ask­ing the state attor­ney gen­er­al in late July for legal guid­ance on whether Ohio law allows for “one or more addi­tion­al secure recep­ta­cles” per coun­ty.

    But on Aug. 11, before the attor­ney gen­er­al weighed in, LaRose with­drew his request and the fol­low­ing day issued his one-box-per-coun­ty direc­tive.
    ...

    And note how these secret Repub­li­cans-only meet­ings for state elec­tion admin­is­tra­tors with Spakovksy have been going on since Trump was elect­ed. These seeds were plant­ed a while ago. The les­son from Hans Spakovsky is that if you apply your­self and nev­er give up you too can grow up to craft the lie that will destroy your coun­try:

    ...
    Von Spakovsky, whose argu­ments that vot­ing fraud is wide­spread have been large­ly debunked, began host­ing secret, Repub­li­can-only meet­ings for state elec­tion admin­is­tra­tors after Trump was elect­ed, records obtained by ProP­ub­li­ca show. At the Aug. 4 vir­tu­al meet­ing, a Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­ri­ty offi­cial was false­ly intro­duced to atten­dees as their “liai­son to the elec­tion com­mu­ni­ty.”

    Shaf­fer and anoth­er offi­cial from the Ohio sec­re­tary of state’s office also attend­ed a von Spakovsky meet­ing in 2019, where the then-head of the Depart­ment of Justice’s Civ­il Rights Divi­sion appeared on a pan­el with the con­ser­v­a­tive lawyer, an action the for­mer divi­sion chief under Pres­i­dent Barack Oba­ma called “unprece­dent­ed.”

    Repub­li­cans con­sid­er von Spakovsky the lead­ing expert on vot­er fraud, but his work is not peer reviewed and two years ago a judge found that his tes­ti­mo­ny on the top­ic was “premised on sev­er­al mis­lead­ing and unsup­port­ed exam­ples” and includ­ed “false asser­tions.”
    ...

    Will Spakovsky’s secret lead­er­ship role in this scheme end up becom­ing part of the nation­al sto­ry when the upcom­ing elec­tion night­mare begins to play out or will he remain a GOP shad­ow min­ion? Will Spakovksy’s track-record of mak­ing false asser­tions be high­light­ed to the pub­lic? Might this be a rea­son he’s hold­ing these meet­ings in secret and not pub­licly push­ing his vot­er fraud claims? These are some of the ques­tions raised by the fact that the plot to destroy Amer­i­can democ­ra­cy appears to be an old Spakovsky-brand plot.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | September 24, 2020, 4:56 pm
  6. Did Pres­i­dent Trump’s legal chal­lenges to the elec­tion results final­ly ‘jump the shark’? That’s at least one way to inter­pret what tran­spired over the week­end. First we had Sid­ney Pow­ell ‘release the Krak­en’ on Thurs­day by mak­ing alle­ga­tions of a vast inter­na­tion­al con­spir­a­cy to steal the US pres­i­den­tial elec­tion for Joe Biden (but not any of the down-bal­lot races for some rea­son) cen­tered around the vot­ing machine firm Smart­mat­ic. Pow­ell was stand­ing right next to the rest of Trump’s legal team — Rudy Giu­liani and Jen­na Ellis — when she made these state­ments.

    On Sat­ur­day, Pow­ell then went on News­max and told the audi­ence that Geor­gia’s Repub­li­can gov­er­nor, Bri­an Kemp, was involved with this inter­na­tion­al con­spir­a­cy. And now only was Geor­gia stolen from Trump, but the vote rig­ging also cheat­ed Repub­li­can Doug Collins — a major Trump backer — from win­ning the sec­ond-place spot in one of Geor­gia’s two sen­ate races this year over fel­low Repub­li­can Kel­ly Loef­fler. Loef­fler is fac­ing a run-off elec­tion against Demo­c­rat Raphael Warnock in Jan­u­ary. So Pow­ell basi­cal­ly alleged Geor­gia’s Repub­li­cans are in on the vot­er fraud. On Sun­day, Giu­liani and Ellis for­mal­ly dis­owned Pow­ell and assert­ed she was nev­er actu­al­ly part of Trump’s legal team. Pow­ell insists she is still work­ing on expos­ing the vast inter­na­tion­al vot­er fraud con­spir­a­cy.

    We’ll see if we hear any­thing more from Sid­ney Pow­ell and how this fias­co might impact the Trump team’s vast vot­er fraud alle­ga­tions. But it’s worth not­ing one of the more amaz­ing devel­op­ments relat­ed to Geor­gia’s elec­tions that’s emerged in all of this: Geor­gia has LONG been the most noto­ri­ous state in terms of using old elec­tron­ic vot­ing machines THAT LACK A PAPER TRAIL OR ANY VIABLE MEANS OF DOING RECOUNTS. Geor­gia used the same old Diebold-man­u­fac­tured elec­tron­ic vot­ing From 2002 UNTIL 2020. It was only in 2019 when Geor­gia final­ized the pur­chase of new Domin­ion Sys­tems bal­lot-mark­ing devices, giv­ing the state some­thing resem­bling a paper trail for the first time in 18 years. And for 18 years, Geor­gia has been the state most known for ‘red-shift’ in the actu­al elec­toral out­come, where the Repub­li­cans were con­sis­tent­ly the ben­e­fi­cia­ries when­ev­er the count­ed vot­ed devi­ate from polls and the expect­ed out­comes. Bring­ing nation­al atten­tion to Geor­gia’s trou­ble­some elec­tron­ic vot­ing machines NOW seems like a wild gam­bit. Are Repub­li­cans SURE they want a real review of Geor­gia’s elec­tron­ic vot­ing sys­tems? Because that seems like the kind of thing the Democ­rats would love to see hap­pen. Or at least they should.

    So in addi­tion to see­ing how far the Trump team can go in pro­mot­ing its vast Smartmatic/Dominion elec­tron­ic vot­ing machine fraud sto­ry, we now also get to watch and see how suc­cess­ful­ly the Repub­li­cans and the media can go in avoid­ing any men­tion of the fact that Geor­gia has been the like­ly ground zero for REPUBLICAN elec­tron­ic vot­ing machine fraud from 2002–2020 and that there’s NEVER been any mean­ing­ful inves­ti­ga­tion of this. Now that Pow­ell is claim­ing Geor­gia’s REPUBLICANS are in on this 2020 fraud it’s going to be a lot hard­er to ignore the pri­or 18 years when Repub­li­cans uni­form­ly ruled the state.

    Ok, first, here’s a TPM sum­ma­riz­ing the con­spir­a­cy alle­ga­tion that the full Trump legal team appeared to be back­ing dur­ing their press con­fer­ence on Thurs­day involv­ing Smart­mat­ic and Domin­ion. The evi­dence Pow­ell pro­vid­ed for the con­spir­a­cy was a sin­gle affi­davit from some­one who claimed they observed votes being manip­u­lat­ed in Venezue­la’s elec­tions using Smart­mat­ic soft­ware in 2013. As the arti­cle notes, that affi­davit was as part of the legal effort to pre­vent the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of Geor­gia’s vote, so the evi­dence for mass vot­er fraud using Smart­mat­ic soft­ware in Geor­gia (on Domin­ion vot­ing machines) con­sists of a some­one claim­ing they wit­nessed Smart­mat­ic soft­ware being used to manip­u­late Venezue­la’s elec­tion in 2013:

    Talk­ing Points Memo
    News

    The Glo­ri­ous Rise And Fall Of Sid­ney Powell’s Trump Cam­paign Gig

    By Matt Shuham
    Novem­ber 23, 2020 2:35 p.m.

    Sid­ney Pow­ell last­ed bare­ly one Scara­muc­ci as a mem­ber of Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump’s legal team, but boy was it a wild ride.

    The right-wing lawyer best known for defend­ing for­mer Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Advis­er Michael Fly­nn went out in a blaze of glo­ry, assert­ing in a mono­logue at the Repub­li­can Party’s head­quar­ters Thurs­day that a glob­al cabal of com­mu­nists had con­spired with Democ­rats to steal Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump’s sec­ond term from him.

    “We will not be intimidated...We are going to clean this mess up now. Pres­i­dent Trump won by a land­slide. We are going to prove it. And we are going to reclaim the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca for the peo­ple who vote for freedom.”—Sidney Pow­ell pic.twitter.com/8KCEOGuL7w— GOP (@GOP) Novem­ber 19, 2020

    With­in three days, she was tossed over­board by the two attor­neys who’d tak­en the stage with her.

    “Sid­ney Pow­ell is prac­tic­ing law on her own,” the Trump cam­paign said in a state­ment Sun­day. It was signed by Rudy Giu­liani and Jen­na Ellis, the two Trump lawyers who had yelled, harangued and astral-pro­ject­ed along­side Pow­ell in that crowd­ed RNC con­fer­ence room.

    Pow­ell has put on a brave face, say­ing in a state­ment lat­er Sun­day that she nev­er billed the cam­paign for her ser­vices, and that she was still plan­ning on fil­ing an “epic” law­suit to pre­vent a Joe Biden pres­i­den­cy.

    She signed the state­ment with a hash­tag, “#KrakenOn­S­teroids,” that beck­oned to hap­pi­er times: On Thurs­day, after she had fin­ished the legal equiv­a­lent of a flat-Earth­er con­ven­tion along­side Pow­ell and Giu­liani, Ellis wrote that her fel­low cam­paign lawyers had, in fact, “RELEASED THE KRAKEN.”

    .@RudyGiuliani and @SidneyPowell1 RELEASED THE KRAKEN!— Jen­na Ellis (@JennaEllisEsq) Novem­ber 19, 2020

    From The Fever Swamps To Prime­time

    Pow­ell rep­re­sent­ed the clear­est, most direct con­nec­tion between the Trump cam­paign and the vast net­work of con­spir­a­cy the­o­rists whose claims about vot­er fraud and rigged elec­tions have fueled Trump’s griev­ances for months.

    For exam­ple, over the week­end she boost­ed a Twit­ter thread from Dave Hayes, a QAnon con­spir­a­cy the­o­rist who goes by “The Pray­ing Medic” because he claims to com­mu­ni­cate with God.

    Accord­ing to the Pray­ing Medic thread she retweet­ed, Pow­ell has received “an avalanche of first-hand, eye­wit­ness tes­ti­mo­ny from hun­dreds of patri­ots” which, even­tu­al­ly, will be used make the indis­putable case that Don­ald Trump real­ly won the elec­tion. (“Some­how, patri­ots neu­tral­ized elec­tion rig­ging” in 2016, The Pray­ing Medic clar­i­fied.)

    On-stage with Giu­liani and Ellis, Pow­ell walked through anoth­er QAnon com­mu­ni­ty favorite — the asser­tion that vot­ing machine ven­dor Domin­ion Vot­ing Sys­tems rigged the elec­tion for Biden. Pow­ell assert­ed the company’s soft­ware was “cre­at­ed in Venezuela at the direc­tion of Hugo Chavez to make sure he nev­er lost an elec­tion.”

    As evi­dence, she cit­ed to a sin­gle affi­davit from some­one who claimed they observed votes being manip­u­lat­ed in Venezuela using a soft­ware called Smart­mat­ic. The affi­ant wrote that Domin­ion relies upon soft­ware “that is a descen­dant of the Smart­mat­ic Elec­toral Man­age­ment Sys­tem,” and that the 2020 U.S. elec­tions were “eeri­ly rem­i­nis­cent” of Venezuela’s 2013 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion.

    A spokesper­son for Domin­ion char­ac­ter­ized Powell’s claims as “not phys­i­cal­ly pos­si­ble.” And while the affi­ant Pow­ell cit­ed is still anony­mous, the case in which they were involved — an effort to pre­vent Geor­gia from cer­ti­fy­ing the elec­tion results — was reject­ed by a fed­er­al judge a few hours after the RNC press con­fer­ence.

    “We see on social media peo­ple talk­ing about ‘block­busters’ and ‘krak­ens,’” Gabriel Ster­ling, Vot­ing Sys­tems Man­ag­er for the Geor­gia Sec­re­tary of State’s office, told reporters Mon­day. “I want to remind every­body that krak­ens are myths.”

    ‘Hope­ful­ly This Week…’

    By the time Pow­ell took the stage Thurs­day, she’d already cycled through one round of inter­net con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries.

    In a Nov. 6 inter­view with Lou Dobbs — two days before the network’s first ref­er­ence to Pow­ell as a Trump cam­paign lawyer — she referred to a the­o­ry about “Ham­mer & Score­card,” a pur­port­ed super­com­put­er scheme that would have been able to flip mas­sive amounts of bal­lots.

    “That would’ve amount­ed to a mas­sive change in the vote that would’ve gone across the coun­try and explains a lot of what we’re see­ing,” she said.

    The the­o­ry fell out of fash­ion a few days lat­er, when The Dai­ly Beast not­ed that the man push­ing it, Den­nis Mont­gomery, had a decades-long his­to­ry of secur­ing huge pay­days based on non­sense the­o­ries — such as when Mont­gomery con­vinced the U.S. gov­ern­ment that he was able to decode mes­sages to Al Qae­da hid­den in al Jazeera broad­casts.

    And Powell’s more recent asser­tions of wide­spread fraud — for exam­ple, that there are “thou­sands” of co-con­spir­a­tors across sev­er­al states, as she claimed on Sat­ur­day — go well beyond what’s been claimed in var­i­ous courts.

    So far, nei­ther the Trump cam­paign nor Pow­ell have tried to con­vince a judge under penal­ty of per­jury that seedy vot­ing soft­ware, com­mu­nists, bribery or wide­spread, sys­tem­at­ic fraud are to blame for Trump’s loss. And nei­ther respond­ed to TPM’s ques­tions Mon­day.

    But vic­to­ry is just around the cor­ner!

    On Sat­ur­day, Pow­ell told News­max that “hope­ful­ly this week, we will get it ready to file.”

    ...

    On Nov. 10, an archived ver­sion of her web­site shows, Pow­ell asked patri­ots for dona­tions for urgent elec­tion lit­i­ga­tion: “Over $500,000 must be raised in the next twen­ty-four hours for these suits to be filed. Mil­lions more will need to be raised to ensure vic­to­ry.”

    Two weeks lat­er, though her name still isn’t attached to any lit­i­ga­tion, Pow­ell kept ask­ing for mon­ey. “The future of our Repub­lic,” she assures donors, “is at stake.”

    ———–

    “The Glo­ri­ous Rise And Fall Of Sid­ney Powell’s Trump Cam­paign Gig” By Matt Shuham; Talk­ing Points Memo; 11/23/2020

    So far, nei­ther the Trump cam­paign nor Pow­ell have tried to con­vince a judge under penal­ty of per­jury that seedy vot­ing soft­ware, com­mu­nists, bribery or wide­spread, sys­tem­at­ic fraud are to blame for Trump’s loss. And nei­ther respond­ed to TPM’s ques­tions Mon­day.”

    It’s a clue: None of the many claims made before the press have been made in court. Although some­one did sign an affi­davit claim­ing they wit­nessed Smart­mat­ic soft­ware being used in Venezuela to manip­u­late the vote there in 2013. It’s not exact­ly com­pelling evi­dence, espe­cial­ly since there’s no evi­dence that Domin­ion vot­ing sys­tems uses Smart­mat­ic’s soft­ware:

    ...
    The right-wing lawyer best known for defend­ing for­mer Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Advis­er Michael Fly­nn went out in a blaze of glo­ry, assert­ing in a mono­logue at the Repub­li­can Party’s head­quar­ters Thurs­day that a glob­al cabal of com­mu­nists had con­spired with Democ­rats to steal Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump’s sec­ond term from him.

    ...

    On-stage with Giu­liani and Ellis, Pow­ell walked through anoth­er QAnon com­mu­ni­ty favorite — the asser­tion that vot­ing machine ven­dor Domin­ion Vot­ing Sys­tems rigged the elec­tion for Biden. Pow­ell assert­ed the company’s soft­ware was “cre­at­ed in Venezuela at the direc­tion of Hugo Chavez to make sure he nev­er lost an elec­tion.”

    As evi­dence, she cit­ed to a sin­gle affi­davit from some­one who claimed they observed votes being manip­u­lat­ed in Venezuela using a soft­ware called Smart­mat­ic. The affi­ant wrote that Domin­ion relies upon soft­ware “that is a descen­dant of the Smart­mat­ic Elec­toral Man­age­ment Sys­tem,” and that the 2020 U.S. elec­tions were “eeri­ly rem­i­nis­cent” of Venezuela’s 2013 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion.

    A spokesper­son for Domin­ion char­ac­ter­ized Powell’s claims as “not phys­i­cal­ly pos­si­ble.” And while the affi­ant Pow­ell cit­ed is still anony­mous, the case in which they were involved — an effort to pre­vent Geor­gia from cer­ti­fy­ing the elec­tion results — was reject­ed by a fed­er­al judge a few hours after the RNC press con­fer­ence.

    “We see on social media peo­ple talk­ing about ‘block­busters’ and ‘krak­ens,’” Gabriel Ster­ling, Vot­ing Sys­tems Man­ag­er for the Geor­gia Sec­re­tary of State’s office, told reporters Mon­day. “I want to remind every­body that krak­ens are myths.”
    ...

    And since the crux of Pow­ell’s alle­ga­tions are that Domin­ion was using Smart­mat­ic’s soft­ware, it’s worth not­ing that both com­pa­nies are com­plete­ly deny­ing any rela­tion­ship at all. There is one rela­tion­ship though: Smart­mat­ic bought Sequoia Vot­ing Sys­tems in 2005 and sold it a cou­ple years lat­er. Recall how Sequoia had ties to both the GOP and orga­nized crime. In 2010, Domin­ion pur­chased Sequoia. This was the same year Domin­ion pur­chased the rem­nants of Diebold’s elec­tion sys­tems. So it’s hypo­thet­i­cal­ly con­ceiv­able that Smart­mat­ic could have some sort of abil­i­ty to influ­ence the votes record­ed on Domin­ion’s sys­tems if Smart­mat­ic embed­ded var­i­ous ‘bugs’ in Sequoia’s soft­ware back in 2006–2007 that pro­vides remote access to the machines and those ‘bugs’ were car­ried through all the way to Domin­ion’s soft­ware today, more than a decade lat­er. But that’s not the alle­ga­tion the Trump team is mak­ing. Instead, they’re claim­ing that Smart­mat­ic secret­ly owns Domin­ion through an inter­me­di­ary called Indra and all of the soft­ware used on Domin­ion’s machines are Smart­mat­ic soft­ware. No evi­dence of this exists:

    Asso­ci­at­ed Press

    Smart­mat­ic does not own Domin­ion Vot­ing Sys­tems

    By ALI SWENSON
    Novem­ber 17, 2020

    CLAIM: Domin­ion Vot­ing Sys­tems, one of the most wide­ly used elec­tion tech­nol­o­gy firms in the Unit­ed States, is owned by the com­pa­ny Smart­mat­ic through an inter­me­di­ary com­pa­ny called Indra.

    AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. Both Domin­ion and Smart­mat­ic have released state­ments say­ing no own­er­ship rela­tion­ship exists between the two com­pet­ing firms. Indra Sis­temas, a Span­ish com­pa­ny, told The Asso­ci­at­ed Press in an email it has nev­er devel­oped any project or had a com­mer­cial, con­trac­tu­al or cor­po­rate rela­tion­ship with either firm.

    THE FACTS: Since U.S. vot­ers chose Joe Biden as their new pres­i­dent-elect, Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump and his sup­port­ers have sought to under­mine trust in the results, despite a lack of evi­dence of any wide­spread irreg­u­lar­i­ties in the 2020 elec­tion.

    One strat­e­gy has been to launch a bar­rage of false claims toward Domin­ion, whose equip­ment is used for vot­ing and vote tab­u­la­tion in more than 30 states, includ­ing bat­tle­grounds like Michi­gan and Geor­gia.

    The lat­est of those claims, ampli­fied by Trump lawyers Rudy Giu­liani and Sid­ney Pow­ell in recent tele­vi­sion inter­views, attempt­ed to link Domin­ion and com­pet­ing vot­ing tech­nol­o­gy firm Smart­mat­ic, despite the fact that the two com­pa­nies have no active part­ner­ship or own­er­ship deal.

    “Domin­ion is a com­pa­ny that’s owned by anoth­er com­pa­ny called Smart­mat­ic through an inter­me­di­ary com­pa­ny named Indra,” Giu­liani told Fox Busi­ness host Lou Dobbs in an inter­view on Nov. 12. “Domin­ion is a Cana­di­an com­pa­ny but all of its soft­ware is Smart­mat­ic soft­ware.”

    Domin­ion, for one, is not a Cana­di­an com­pa­ny. It has been major­i­ty owned since 2018 by Sta­ple Street Cap­i­tal, a New York pri­vate equi­ty firm. And both Domin­ion and Smart­mat­ic have issued state­ments say­ing Smart­mat­ic nei­ther owns Domin­ion nor pro­vides it with any soft­ware or equip­ment.

    Pow­ell per­pet­u­at­ed the false claims and implied the alleged con­nec­tion was a sign of for­eign elec­tion inter­fer­ence in her own inter­view with Dobbs on Nov. 15. She fur­ther claimed Domin­ion soft­ware had deep ties to Venezuela.

    “I can hard­ly wait to put forth all the evi­dence we have on Domin­ion,” she said, “start­ing with the fact that it was cre­at­ed to pro­duce altered vot­ing results in Venezuela for Hugo Chavez and then shipped inter­na­tion­al­ly to manip­u­late votes for pur­chase in oth­er coun­tries, includ­ing this one.”

    Smart­mat­ic is an inter­na­tion­al com­pa­ny incor­po­rat­ed in Flori­da by Venezue­lan founders. There’s no rea­son to believe Domin­ion has ties to Venezuela, nor a part­ner­ship with Smart­mat­ic, accord­ing to Eddie Perez, a vot­ing tech­nol­o­gy expert at the OSET Insti­tute, a non­par­ti­san elec­tion tech­nol­o­gy research and devel­op­ment non­prof­it.

    “It appears that Mr. Giu­liani is mak­ing some wild and unfound­ed claims that are con­nect­ing the dots between com­pa­nies that appear to be unre­lat­ed,” Perez said.

    While Smart­mat­ic tech­nol­o­gy has been used in Venezue­lan elec­tions, accu­sa­tions by gov­ern­ment oppo­nents that the com­pa­ny rigged elec­tions there are unsub­stan­ti­at­ed. In fact, in 2017, the com­pa­ny accused Venezuela’s gov­ern­ment of elec­toral fraud.

    Some social media users attempt­ed to link Domin­ion and Smart­mat­ic through a com­pa­ny both firms have owned. Smart­mat­ic pur­chased the vot­ing machine com­pa­ny Sequoia Vot­ing Sys­tems in 2005 but sold it two years lat­er after objec­tions were raised over its part­ner­ship with a com­pa­ny in which Venezuela’s gov­ern­ment had invest­ed. Three years lat­er, Domin­ion acquired Sequoia.

    Elec­tion secu­ri­ty experts say it’s dif­fi­cult to know for cer­tain whether some Sequoia code may be used in Dominion’s soft­ware because of the industry’s lim­it­ed trans­paren­cy. Both Domin­ion and Smart­mat­ic say they do not use each other’s soft­ware.

    “Domin­ion has no com­pa­ny own­er­ship rela­tion­ships with any mem­ber of the Pelosi fam­i­ly, the Fein­stein fam­i­ly, or the Clin­ton Glob­al Ini­tia­tive, Smart­mat­ic, Scytl, or any ties to Venezuela,” Domin­ion said in a state­ment on its web­site. “Domin­ion works with all polit­i­cal par­ties; our cus­tomer base and our gov­ern­ment out­reach prac­tices reflect this non­par­ti­san approach.”

    Smart­mat­ic con­curred in its own state­ment, say­ing, “Smart­mat­ic has nev­er owned any shares or had any finan­cial stake in Domin­ion Vot­ing Sys­tems. Smart­mat­ic has nev­er pro­vid­ed Domin­ion Vot­ing Sys­tems with any soft­ware, hard­ware or oth­er tech­nol­o­gy. The two com­pa­nies are com­peti­tors in the mar­ket­place.”

    Smart­mat­ic only pro­vid­ed tech­nol­o­gy and soft­ware to Los Ange­les Coun­ty in the 2020 elec­tion, the com­pa­ny told the AP. Its tech­nol­o­gy was not used in any bat­tle­ground states, includ­ing Penn­syl­va­nia, Geor­gia, Ari­zona, Neva­da, Michi­gan or North Car­oli­na.

    A spokesman for Indra told the AP in an email it had no rela­tion­ship with either com­pa­ny, nor with the 2020 U.S. pres­i­den­tial elec­tion.

    ...

    ————-

    “Smart­mat­ic does not own Domin­ion Vot­ing Sys­tems” by ALI SWENSON; Asso­ci­at­ed Press; 11/17/2020

    “Domin­ion is a com­pa­ny that’s owned by anoth­er com­pa­ny called Smart­mat­ic through an inter­me­di­ary com­pa­ny named Indra,” Giu­liani told Fox Busi­ness host Lou Dobbs in an inter­view on Nov. 12. “Domin­ion is a Cana­di­an com­pa­ny but all of its soft­ware is Smart­mat­ic soft­ware.”

    Domin­ion is secret­ly owned by Smart­mat­ic and uses Smart­mat­ic’s soft­ware. THAT’s the core of the Trump team’s vot­er fraud argu­ments. Argu­ments that are com­pli­cat­ed by the fact that there’s no evi­dence that Smart­mat­ic owns Domin­ion and no evi­dence of Smart­mat­ic’s soft­ware being used any­where in the US out­side of Los Ange­les coun­ty in 2020. The clos­et rela­tion­ship we can find between Smart­mat­ic and Domin­ion is the fact they’ve both owned Sequoia:

    ...
    Domin­ion, for one, is not a Cana­di­an com­pa­ny. It has been major­i­ty owned since 2018 by Sta­ple Street Cap­i­tal, a New York pri­vate equi­ty firm. And both Domin­ion and Smart­mat­ic have issued state­ments say­ing Smart­mat­ic nei­ther owns Domin­ion nor pro­vides it with any soft­ware or equip­ment.

    ...

    Smart­mat­ic is an inter­na­tion­al com­pa­ny incor­po­rat­ed in Flori­da by Venezue­lan founders. There’s no rea­son to believe Domin­ion has ties to Venezuela, nor a part­ner­ship with Smart­mat­ic, accord­ing to Eddie Perez, a vot­ing tech­nol­o­gy expert at the OSET Insti­tute, a non­par­ti­san elec­tion tech­nol­o­gy research and devel­op­ment non­prof­it.

    “It appears that Mr. Giu­liani is mak­ing some wild and unfound­ed claims that are con­nect­ing the dots between com­pa­nies that appear to be unre­lat­ed,” Perez said.

    ...

    Some social media users attempt­ed to link Domin­ion and Smart­mat­ic through a com­pa­ny both firms have owned. Smart­mat­ic pur­chased the vot­ing machine com­pa­ny Sequoia Vot­ing Sys­tems in 2005 but sold it two years lat­er after objec­tions were raised over its part­ner­ship with a com­pa­ny in which Venezuela’s gov­ern­ment had invest­ed. Three years lat­er, Domin­ion acquired Sequoia.

    Elec­tion secu­ri­ty experts say it’s dif­fi­cult to know for cer­tain whether some Sequoia code may be used in Dominion’s soft­ware because of the industry’s lim­it­ed trans­paren­cy. Both Domin­ion and Smart­mat­ic say they do not use each other’s soft­ware.

    ...

    Smart­mat­ic only pro­vid­ed tech­nol­o­gy and soft­ware to Los Ange­les Coun­ty in the 2020 elec­tion, the com­pa­ny told the AP. Its tech­nol­o­gy was not used in any bat­tle­ground states, includ­ing Penn­syl­va­nia, Geor­gia, Ari­zona, Neva­da, Michi­gan or North Car­oli­na.

    A spokesman for Indra told the AP in an email it had no rela­tion­ship with either com­pa­ny, nor with the 2020 U.S. pres­i­den­tial elec­tion.
    ...

    So has Domin­ion just been using Sequoia soft­ware with­out touch­ing or even exam­in­ing the code since it was pur­chased in 2010? That’s the alle­ga­tion the Trump team is making...along with the alle­ga­tion that Smart­mat­ic secret­ly owns Domin­ion. And while there does­n’t appear to be any evi­dence of this, it’s note­wor­thy that Smart­mat­ic actu­al­ly pub­licly charged the Venezue­lan gov­ern­ment with manip­u­lat­ing votes in 2017. So if Smart­mat­ic is part of an inter­na­tion­al com­mu­nist con­spir­a­cy it’s not very good at it:

    ...
    While Smart­mat­ic tech­nol­o­gy has been used in Venezue­lan elec­tions, accu­sa­tions by gov­ern­ment oppo­nents that the com­pa­ny rigged elec­tions there are unsub­stan­ti­at­ed. In fact, in 2017, the com­pa­ny accused Venezuela’s gov­ern­ment of elec­toral fraud.
    ...

    And if we’re ask­ing whether or not Domin­ion is still using Sequoia’s soft­ware, poten­tial­ly giv­ing out­siders the abil­i­ty to remote­ly exe­cute any ‘bugs’ that may have been embed­ded in that soft­ware, we have to ask the same about Domin­ion’s pur­chase of Diebold. Are Domin­ion’s machine’s today still using Diebold soft­ware? Has that soft­ware been exam­ined for any ‘bugs’? It’s a ques­tion that’s not just rel­e­vant for the 2020 elec­tion. For Geor­gia, it’s a ques­tion that’s rel­e­vant for all the oth­er elec­tions going back to 2002. Because as Geor­gia’s Repub­li­can Sec­re­tary of State Brad Raf­fensperg­er point­ed out a cou­ple of weeks ago, this is the first time since 2002 that Geor­gia has even had a paper trail to audit.
    From 2002–2018, recounts in Geor­gia were effec­tive­ly impossible...along with Democ­rats win­ning statewide elec­tions:

    Geor­gia Recorder

    Georgia’s top elec­tions offi­cial calls for full recount of pres­i­den­tial votes

    By Jill Nolin -
    Novem­ber 11, 2020

    Post updat­ed 6 p.m. Novem­ber 11 with full write-through.

    Georgia’s top elec­tion offi­cial has called for a full recount of the near­ly 5 mil­lion votes cast in the state’s close­ly watched pres­i­den­tial elec­tion – and he wants it done by hand and by the state’s Nov. 20 dead­line to cer­ti­fy results.

    Sec­re­tary of State Brad Raffensperger’s Wednes­day announce­ment came a day after Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump’s cam­paign request­ed a hand count after com­ing up short in Geor­gia, although Raf­fensperg­er said that did not influ­ence his deci­sion.

    “We’re doing this because it’s real­ly what makes the most sense,” Raf­fensperg­er said. “With the nation­al sig­nif­i­cance of this race and the close­ness of this race, we have to run a statewide audit.”

    As of Wednes­day, Demo­c­rat Joe Biden led Trump by about 14,000 votes in a state the pres­i­dent won by 5 per­cent­age points just four years ago. The president-elect’s mar­gin of vic­to­ry in Geor­gia – a state that has not helped put a Demo­c­rat in the White House since 1992 – is the tight­est in the nation. At stake are Georgia’s 16 elec­toral col­lege votes.

    Biden became pres­i­dent-elect after emerg­ing the win­ner in Penn­syl­va­nia Sat­ur­day, but Trump con­tin­ues to chal­lenge the results there, in Geor­gia and in oth­er states. One law­suit filed in Geor­gia tar­get­ing absen­tee bal­lots has been dis­missed.

    “Because we now have that ver­i­fi­able paper bal­lot, for the first time in 18 years we’re going to have some­thing to count instead of just press­ing a but­ton and get­ting the same answer,” Raf­fensperg­er said, refer­ring to the state’s new vot­ing sys­tem that cre­ates a paper trail. “So, we’ll be count­ing every sin­gle piece of paper, every sin­gle bal­lot, every sin­gle law­ful­ly cast legal bal­lot.”

    A hand recount is the most labor-inten­sive and expen­sive option, says Trey Hood, a polit­i­cal sci­en­tist at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Geor­gia. It remains to be seen exact­ly how much it will cost for work­ers to count by hand the record-set­ting near­ly 5 mil­lion bal­lots that were cast in this elec­tion.

    And in some ways, this is unchart­ed ter­ri­to­ry for Geor­gia. The state’s new $104 mil­lion touch­screen machines print a bal­lot that includes a scannable QR code and the text of the voter’s choic­es. Once a vot­er reviews the print­out, the bal­lot is offi­cial­ly cast once its insert­ed in a high-speed scan­ner that reads the QR code.

    Instead of quick­ly res­can­ning the bal­lots, work­ers will con­duct the recount by hand and read the print­ed text indi­cat­ing each voter’s choice.

    Hood said he was sur­prised by Raffensperger’s deci­sion to go all-in on the recount, which he chalked up to the intense polit­i­cal pres­sure that was com­ing from with­in his own par­ty. U.S. Sens. David Per­due and Kel­ly Loef­fler called on Raf­fensperg­er – who is also a Repub­li­can – to resign Mon­day over unspec­i­fied “fail­ures.”

    With a 14,000-vote mar­gin of error, Hood said he does not expect the recount to change the out­come of the elec­tion.

    “It’s not close enough,” Hood said. “Are you going to see the exact same count? No. I don’t know what it’s going to be – it’s going to be a cou­ple hun­dred votes one way or a cou­ple hun­dred votes the oth­er way, prob­a­bly.”

    Ker­win Swint, Ken­ne­saw State University’s direc­tor of the School of Gov­ern­ment and Inter­na­tion­al Affairs, agrees that the audit is unlike­ly turn the elec­tion in Trump’s favor.

    “Well, 14,000 votes is a lot to make up for,” he said. “These kinds of recounts nor­mal­ly don’t result in that. It’s usu­al­ly a cou­ple hun­dred – that kind of thing. But you nev­er know. That’s why you do it.”

    The added cost of a hand count – what­ev­er it may be – will fall to Georgia’s 159 coun­ties, although Raf­fensperg­er said Wednes­day that the state may be able to help reim­burse the coun­ties lat­er.

    Local offi­cials will like­ly need to add per­son­nel – pos­si­bly by call­ing back poll work­ers – to reduce the amount of over­time paid out to elec­tion staffers, and they will need addi­tion­al secu­ri­ty – poten­tial­ly even 24-hour secu­ri­ty – where bal­lots are being count­ed, said Todd Edwards, deputy leg­isla­tive direc­tor with the Asso­ci­a­tion Coun­ty Com­mis­sion­ers of Geor­gia.

    “We’ll con­tin­ue our part­ner­ship to ensure that this is a fair, trans­par­ent and accu­rate elec­tion to the great­est extent we pos­si­bly can at the coun­ty lev­el,” Edwards said of the costs.

    Edwards called it a “tall task” for the state’s largest coun­ties to com­plete a hand count in time for the state to meet its Nov. 20 dead­line. But he said they would make every effort to fin­ish their share of the vote. Ful­ton Coun­ty alone han­dled near­ly 525,000 bal­lots in the pres­i­den­tial race.

    As of Thurs­day, about 37% of coun­ties – includ­ing Ful­ton – had not fin­ished cer­ti­fy­ing their results. Those results must still be cer­ti­fied local­ly by Fri­day. The slow-going tal­ly is large­ly due to the record num­ber of absen­tee bal­lots – about 1.3 mil­lion – that were sub­mit­ted dur­ing the pan­dem­ic.

    Raf­fensperg­er called the hand count a three in one: an audit, a recount and a recan­vass. State law requires an audit, although it does not require it to be on this scale. He acknowl­edged Wednes­day that it will be a “heavy lift.”

    “It’s a big process. There’ll be a method­i­cal process. It will be an accu­rate process, and I’m sure that there will be plen­ty of over­sight,” Raf­fensperg­er said as local elec­tion offi­cials stood behind him on the steps of the state Capi­tol. “We want to make sure that both par­ties have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to observe this because we under­stand the stakes are high.”

    ...

    ———–

    “Georgia’s top elec­tions offi­cial calls for full recount of pres­i­den­tial votes” by Jill Nolin; Geor­gia Recorder; 11/11/2020

    “Because we now have that ver­i­fi­able paper bal­lot, for the first time in 18 years we’re going to have some­thing to count instead of just press­ing a but­ton and get­ting the same answer,” Raf­fensperg­er said, refer­ring to the state’s new vot­ing sys­tem that cre­ates a paper trail. “So, we’ll be count­ing every sin­gle piece of paper, every sin­gle bal­lot, every sin­gle law­ful­ly cast legal bal­lot.””

    From 2002–2020, the clos­est thing Geor­gia could come to a recount is just push­ing a but­ton that gives the same answer. Com­plete­ly unver­i­fi­able vot­ing on Diebold machines. Why isn’t the Trump team wor­ried about Domin­ion’s pur­chase of Diebold’s vot­ing sys­tems in 2010 too? Not a peep about it. Hmmm...

    And note the impor­tance of the hand-recount Geor­gia ordered: As we’ve seen, even elec­tron­ic vot­ing machines that print out paper bal­lots can be rigged. That’s because these machines print out the vot­ers’ pref­er­ences BUT ALSO PRINT A BARCODE THAT ENCODES THE VOTERS’ SELECTIONS AND ITS THE BARCODE THAT IS READ WHEN AUTOMATIC RECOUNTS TAKE PLACE. So it’s tech­ni­cal­ly pos­si­ble to rig an elec­tion where the infor­ma­tion is ONLY switched in the Bar­code but not the print­ed selec­tion the vot­ers see. But in Geor­gia’s case, they are hav­ing peo­ple read the actu­al print­ed vot­er selec­tions instead of rely­ing on the bar­codes:

    ...
    A hand recount is the most labor-inten­sive and expen­sive option, says Trey Hood, a polit­i­cal sci­en­tist at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Geor­gia. It remains to be seen exact­ly how much it will cost for work­ers to count by hand the record-set­ting near­ly 5 mil­lion bal­lots that were cast in this elec­tion.

    And in some ways, this is unchart­ed ter­ri­to­ry for Geor­gia. The state’s new $104 mil­lion touch­screen machines print a bal­lot that includes a scannable QR code and the text of the voter’s choic­es. Once a vot­er reviews the print­out, the bal­lot is offi­cial­ly cast once its insert­ed in a high-speed scan­ner that reads the QR code.

    Instead of quick­ly res­can­ning the bal­lots, work­ers will con­duct the recount by hand and read the print­ed text indi­cat­ing each voter’s choice.

    Hood said he was sur­prised by Raffensperger’s deci­sion to go all-in on the recount, which he chalked up to the intense polit­i­cal pres­sure that was com­ing from with­in his own par­ty. U.S. Sens. David Per­due and Kel­ly Loef­fler called on Raf­fensperg­er – who is also a Repub­li­can – to resign Mon­day over unspec­i­fied “fail­ures.”
    ...

    As we can see, Geor­gia’s labor-inten­sive recount is also effec­tive­ly an audit for tab­u­la­tor device rig­ging. Some­thing that was­n’t at all pos­si­ble from 2002–2020.

    So as this hur­ri­cane of vote rig­ging alle­ga­tions pro­ceeds to play out, let’s hope to see a lot more focus on vote rig­ging in Geor­gia. Repub­li­can vote rig­ging from 2002–2018 using Diebold machines, in par­tic­u­lar.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | November 23, 2020, 5:42 pm
  7. What will end up being a big­ger scan­dal: the Depart­ment of Jus­tice abus­es the Trump admin­is­tra­tion man­aged to actu­al­ly pull off, or the schemes they tried to pull off but were just too insane for com­plete? It’s a ques­tion raised by the recent string of DOJ abuse sto­ries. Poten­tial­ly seri­ous abus­es. We had the sto­ry of Trump order­ing the DOJ to spy on Democ­rats and their fam­i­lies as some sort of leak probe in 2017 and 2018 (which rais­es all sort of inter­est­ing ques­tions about spy­ing out­side the DOJ). At the same time, we got reports that Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Mead­ows, was pres­sur­ing the DOJ to seri­ous­ly inves­ti­gate the ‘Italy­Gate’ claims being pushed by Trump sup­port­ers fol­low­ing his 2020 elec­tion loss. The claim cen­ters around the idea that an Ital­ian defense con­trac­tor teamed up with the US embassy in Rome to use satel­lites to switch the vote counts from Trump to Biden. Two sto­ries about Trump DOJ abus­es. The lat­ter attempt­ed and the for­mer actu­al­ly exe­cut­ed.

    It’s the kind of news theme that show raise all sorts of ques­tions about not just how many oth­er yet-to-be dis­cov­ered DOJ cor­rup­tion attempts took place, but also ques­tions about just how deep this rot goes with­in the US legal estab­lish­ment. Because as the fol­low­ing arti­cle should make clear, these sto­ries aren’t just sto­ries about the pro­found cor­rup­tion of the Trump admin­is­tra­tion because the Trump admin­is­tra­tion itself is just a sub-chap­ter in the much broad­er sto­ry of the pro­found cor­rup­tion of the con­tem­po­rary US con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment. The orga­nized bil­lion­aire-financed con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment that took over the GOP years ago, built a giant dis­in­fo­tain­ment media com­plex, and foment­ed the bulk of the far right con­spir­a­to­r­i­al world­view detached enough from real­i­ty to pave the way for a fig­ure like Trump.

    As TPM just report­ed, it turns out the Italy­Gate sto­ry has a deeply ‘estab­lish­ment’ ori­gin. And it’s exact­ly the estab­lish­ment ties we should have expect­ed: The group that appears to be one of the ear­li­est push­ers of Italy­Gate is Flori­da non-prof­it called Nations in Action. And sit­ting on the board of Nations in Action is none oth­er than Hans von Spakovksy, the GOP’s long-stand­ing pur­vey­or of mass vot­er-fraud claims. Recall how Spakovsky was hold­ing Repub­li­can-only meet­ings with state elec­tion admin­is­tra­tors fol­low­ing Trump’s vic­to­ry in 2016, where he would pro­mote a broad array of exact­ly the kind of mass vot­er-fraud claims that that GOP has been push­ing through the 2020 elec­tion cycle and beyond. Also recall how Spakovksy is con­sid­ered to be so lack­ing in cred­i­bil­i­ty that his work for Repub­li­cans on legal cas­es in recent years has been done in secret due to fears his involve­ment will dam­age the cred­i­bil­i­ty of their case in the eye of the courts.

    That’s the guy sit­ting on the board Nations in Action. The group is run by Maria Zack, who was one of the first peo­ple known to push the Italy­Gate the­o­ry back in Decem­ber of 2020. Nations in action was incor­po­rat­ed in 2017 by long­time con­ser­v­a­tive elec­tion law firm, Holtz­man Vogel Jose­fi­ak Torchin­sky. Recall how that law firm is at the heart of the right-wing dark mon­ey com­plex. It’s an indi­ca­tion of the group’s con­nec­tions to the bil­lion­aire-fund­ed con­ser­v­a­tive estab­lish­ment.

    While it’s not known exact­ly when the Trump White House became inter­est­ed in the Italy­Gate the­o­ry, Zack claims she told Don­ald Trump per­son­al­ly about the the­o­ry dur­ing a Christ­mas Eve event at Mar-a-Lago. Mead­ows end­ed up send­ing the DOJ the now-infa­mous let­ter ask­ing them to inves­ti­gate Italy­Gate on Decem­ber 30.

    Dur­ing the Jan 6 Capi­tol insur­rec­tion, Zack was broad­cast­ing live dur­ing an inter­view done in the back of a DC area car, where Zack described the events as “a rev­o­lu­tion­ary moment”. The inter­view was con­duct­ed between 4–5 PM, while the build­ing was still occu­pied by insur­rec­tion­ists.

    There’s anoth­er group involved in all this: Zack thanks an orga­ni­za­tion called the Insti­tute for Good Gov­er­nance for part­ner­ing with their vot­er fraud inves­ti­ga­tion. Vir­ginia cor­po­rate records show the group is reg­is­tered to a woman named Michele Roo­sevelt Edwards. Edwards runs anoth­er firm called USAero­space Part­ners. And it turns out the let­ter for­ward­ed by Mark Mead­ows to the DOJ encour­ag­ing the inves­ti­ga­tion of Italy­Gate was writ­ten by a Car­lo Gorio, who claimed to be an employ­ee of USAero­space Part­ners.

    Tak­en togeth­er, it sure looks like Nations in Action and the Insti­tute for Good Gov­er­nance were the source of the Italy­Gate sto­ry, mak­ing this just the lat­est exam­ple of Hans von Spakovksy push­ing bogus vot­er fraud claims. Although Spakovksy now asserts that he resigned from the group two days after the insur­rec­tion and noth­ing to do with its claims. We’re pre­sum­ably expect­ed to believe that:

    Talk­ing Points Memo

    Italy­Gate Is The Crown Jew­el Of Big Lie Con­spir­a­cies. And It Just Got A Lot Wilder.

    By Josh Koven­sky
    June 19, 2021 8:00 a.m.

    For those ready to believe that Pres­i­dent Trump real­ly won re-elec­tion, there’s one par­tic­u­lar­ly fan­tas­ti­cal con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry to hang your hat on.

    It’s called Italy­Gate, and it offers a sim­ple, direct, and espe­cial­ly implau­si­ble claim: An Ital­ian defense con­trac­tor teamed up with the U.S. Embassy in Rome to use satel­lite trans­mis­sions to switch mil­lions of Trump votes to Biden votes, thus steal­ing the elec­tion.

    What makes this con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry espe­cial­ly handy among the many whack­adoo­dle Big Lie claims is that it serves to explain why, as the for­mer pres­i­dent has argued, mil­lions of vote batch­es came in in the mid­dle of the night as over­whelm­ing­ly for Biden: they were the prod­uct of a “data switch” by Ital­ian oper­a­tives with access to advanced satel­lite tech­nol­o­gy.

    As it turns out, the Italy­Gate con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry wasn’t mere­ly float­ing in the MAGA ether — anoth­er hare­brained expla­na­tion for fringy Trump diehards to cling to. Rev­e­la­tions this week and addi­tion­al report­ing by TPM offer new insights into how Italy­Gate sprang into exis­tence and made it all the way to inner sanc­tums of the Jus­tice Depart­ment, the White House, and per­haps to Trump him­self.

    Much of the sto­ry still remains a mys­tery that’s been lost in the haze of the right-wing fever swamps, but TPM was able to iden­ti­fy sev­er­al peo­ple and com­pa­nies that played key roles in pro­mot­ing the the­o­ry.

    Among them is a Flori­da non-prof­it called Nations in Action, on whose board con­ser­v­a­tive lawyer and not­ed vot­er fraud alarmist Hans von Spakovsky served. Von Spakovsky told TPM that he resigned from the group two days after the Capi­tol insur­rec­tion, and did not reply to a fur­ther inquiry about what he did for Nations in Action. Two com­pa­nies con­trolled by a Vir­ginia real­tor and one­time Soma­li hostage nego­tia­tor named Michele Bal­lar­in also played key roles in pro­mot­ing the the­o­ry.

    It remains unclear how the the­o­ry went from Bal­lar­in and Nations in Action to the White House, though the Nations in Action chief said in an emailed state­ment to TPM that she told Trump about the alle­ga­tions at Mar-a-Lago on Christ­mas Eve. Emails released by Con­gress this week show then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Mead­ows push­ing senior DOJ offi­cials to inves­ti­gate the the­o­ry, send­ing along a YouTube video that elab­o­rat­ed on it as well as an Ital­ian-lan­guage let­ter with a trans­lat­ed copy pur­port­ing to back up the alle­ga­tions.

    ‘A rev­o­lu­tion­ary moment’

    What came to be called Italy­Gate blew up online in Decem­ber 2020, weeks after Biden had been declared the win­ner but as Trump was con­tin­u­ing to con­test the results. It quick­ly metas­ta­sized. By ear­ly Jan­u­ary, a for­mer Air Force lieu­tenant gen­er­al-turned-Fox News ana­lyst-turned-Trump cam­paign advis­er was repeat­ing the alle­ga­tions.

    What wasn’t pub­licly known until this week was that on Dec. 30 Mead­ows sent an email to top DOJ offi­cials urg­ing them to look into the Italy­Gate alle­ga­tions. They scoffed among them­selves at the sug­ges­tion. “Can you believe this?” then-act­ing Attor­ney Gen­er­al Jef­frey Rosen emailed anoth­er top DOJ offi­cial, for­ward­ing a long email thread of sim­i­lar Mead­ows’ mis­chief.

    It’s not clear where the bogus alle­ga­tions orig­i­nat­ed. But one of the ear­li­est exam­ples of them spread­ing, Reuters report­ed, was in a Decem­ber 2020 record­ing of a Flori­da woman named Maria Zack.

    Zack runs Nations in Action, a non-prof­it that describes itself as devot­ed to address­ing “the col­lapse of the civ­il soci­ety with fam­i­lies strug­gling to main­tain faith, val­ues and virtues.” A long­time con­ser­v­a­tive elec­tion law firm, Holtz­man Vogel Jose­fi­ak Torchin­sky, incor­po­rat­ed the com­pa­ny.

    It has not been pre­vi­ous­ly report­ed that long­time Her­itage Foun­da­tion fel­low Hans von Spakovsky, a lead­ing vot­er fraud alarmist, served on the board of Nations in Action. More on von Spakovsky in a moment.

    Nations in Action became one of ItalyGate’s main pro­po­nents.

    The the­o­ry even made it to Mar-a-Lago, where Zack said that on Christ­mas Eve she gave Trump a note about an affi­davit that sup­pos­ed­ly sup­port­ed the alle­ga­tions.

    Zack denied giv­ing the affi­davit itself to Mead­ows or Trump, but did claim to an inter­view­er that she told the then-pres­i­dent: “‘This is gonna be the best Christ­mas you’ve ever had, and the best Christ­mas gift, because the whistle­blow­er who switched the data for the vote counts across Amer­i­ca is going to be pro­vid­ing an affi­davit.’”

    “And he swung around and looked at me,” she recalled.

    On Jan. 6, the day of the Capi­tol attack, Zack trav­eled to Wash­ing­ton, D.C. to give Con­gress the affi­davit in time to avert Biden’s cer­ti­fi­ca­tion as win­ner of the Elec­toral Col­lege vote. The group issued a press release say­ing that it had enough proof “for each state to recall their slate of elec­tors imme­di­ate­ly.”

    “It is a rev­o­lu­tion­ary moment,” Zack said in an inter­view shot from the back­seat of a car in D.C. on Jan. 6. It’s not clear how far Zack was from the Capi­tol dur­ing the inter­view, though it was broad­cast live between 4 and 5 p.m., when the build­ing was still occu­pied. At one point, she refers to the ques­tion of “if they regain con­trol of the Capi­tol.”

    In the inter­view, with the inter­net show “Amer­i­ca Can We Talk?” Zack jovial­ly recounts the rev­e­la­tions about Italy, peer­ing into a cam­era that appears to be perched between the driver’s seat and the front passenger’s seat. Why she is speak­ing in a car is left unex­plained, and unre­marked upon.

    “And I believe you’re gonna see — and we are see­ing right here in down­town D.C. what’s hap­pen­ing when Amer­i­cans are awake,” she added.

    What was von Spakovsky up to?

    A lead­ing archi­tect of the vot­ing restric­tions Repub­li­cans have pushed around the coun­try over the past 15 years, von Spakovsky served in the George W. Bush DOJ and on the Fed­er­al Elec­tion Com­mis­sion in the mid-2000s.

    TPM dis­cov­ered von Spakovsky’s name in an annu­al report filed by Nations in Action with the Flori­da sec­re­tary of state. It lists his title as “offi­cer.” Nations in Action told TPM that von Spakovsky had served on its board since the group’s 2017 incep­tion.

    Von Spakovsky told TPM in an email exchange that he had resigned from the group on Jan. 8, two days after the insur­rec­tion attempt that cost five lives.

    “I resigned from the board many months ago and have had noth­ing to with the organ­i­sa­tion or its alle­ga­tions,” he wrote.

    When asked why a May 2021 Flori­da cor­po­rate fil­ing names him as an offi­cer, von Spakovsky wrote: “That is their mis­take.”

    Nations in Action con­firmed that von Spakovsky resigned on Jan. 8 and told TPM in a state­ment that it was “look­ing into the error in our cor­po­rate fil­ings.”

    Von Spakovsky did not reply to requests about what work he per­formed for Nations in Action. But von Spakovsky was appar­ent­ly on the board of the group as Zack spent Decem­ber and ear­ly Jan­u­ary prop­a­gat­ing the idea that Ital­ian oper­a­tives used satel­lites to steal the elec­tion, and as the the­o­ry spread like wild­fire on the inter­net.

    Von Spakovsky’s pres­ence on Nations in Action’s board appears to have bridged main­stream GOP vot­er sup­pres­sion efforts with wild pre-insur­rec­tion alle­ga­tions that, as Zack put it, Ital­ian oper­a­tives used a “mil­i­tary satel­lite uplink to load the soft­ware and trans­fer it over to change the votes from Trump to Biden.”

    Rome to West Vir­ginia, by way of Soma­lia

    Nations in Action’s involve­ment, and von Spakovsky’s role with the group, don’t ful­ly account for where this the­o­ry came from, or how it may have end­ed up on the desk of Mark Mead­ows.

    But both Nations in Action’s activism and the let­ter that Mead­ows for­ward­ed to Act­ing Attor­ney Gen­er­al Jef­fery Rosen offer a pos­si­ble clue that leads down anoth­er rab­bit hole, to a Vir­ginia real­tor with a back­ground that’s about as fan­tas­tic as the Italy­Gate the­o­ry itself.

    In a Jan. 6 press release call­ing for Con­gress to reject the states’ elec­tors, Nations in Action thanked anoth­er group called the Insti­tute for Good Gov­er­nance for part­ner­ing on its inves­ti­ga­tion, which “yield­ed the long-await­ed proof that a flaw­less plot to take down Amer­i­ca was exe­cut­ed with extra­or­di­nary resources and glob­al involve­ment.”

    TPM obtained Vir­ginia cor­po­rate records show­ing that the Insti­tute for Good Gov­er­nance is reg­is­tered to a woman named Michele Roo­sevelt Edwards, who runs anoth­er firm called USAero­space Part­ners that pur­chased some of the assets of an Ice­landic air­line in 2019.

    It gets stranger.

    The let­ter that Mead­ows for­ward­ed to Rosen was writ­ten by a man named Car­lo Goria, who claimed to be an employ­ee of, yes, USAero­space Part­ners. The let­ter was writ­ten on what appears to be com­pa­ny let­ter­head, and Goria had issued press releas­es on the company’s behalf in the past.

    TPM tried to reach both Goria and Roo­sevelt Edwards to gain clar­i­ty on why these com­pa­nies were pro­mot­ing alle­ga­tions that Italy changed the result of the 2020 elec­tion.

    Some­one at a num­ber list­ed for Goria picked up the phone but hung up after a TPM reporter iden­ti­fied him­self, and refused to take fur­ther calls.

    There was more on Edwards Roo­sevelt, how­ev­er. The USAero­space chair also goes by oth­er names: Michele Bal­lar­in, Michele Gold­en, and Ami­ra Bal­lar­in.

    She ran for Con­gress in 1986 in her native West Vir­ginia under the name Michele Gold­en on the GOP tick­et. For­eign Pol­i­cy report­ed in 2013 that dur­ing the race, she debat­ed a card­board cut-out of her oppo­nent with his face past­ed on after he didn’t attend a debate.

    In a brief phone inter­view this week, she denied any knowl­edge of the doc­u­ment that Mead­ows had for­ward­ed, telling TPM that USAero­space Part­ners was an Amer­i­can com­pa­ny. When pressed on why a com­pa­ny employ­ee appeared to have writ­ten the let­ter on offi­cial let­ter­head, Bal­lar­in hung up. She did not return emails and calls to mul­ti­ple address­es, or mes­sages left with her com­pa­nies.

    Zack told TPM in a state­ment that “we know Michele, we col­lab­o­rate with her on dif­fer­ent projects, but we don’t dis­close how we came into pos­ses­sion of evi­dence or infor­ma­tion.”

    Bal­lar­in made head­lines in 2008 for insert­ing her­self into nego­ti­a­tions with Soma­li pirates who, at the time, were hold­ing var­i­ous ships and their crews as hostage. Ballarin’s work incensed the Ukrain­ian gov­ern­ment at one point, accord­ing to a 2009 Wik­ileaks cable, after she became involved in nego­ti­at­ing the release of a ship full of Sovi­et-made tanks that was being held hostage.

    Ukraine’s for­eign min­is­ter accused Bal­lar­in in a cable to then-Sec­re­tary of State Hillary Clin­ton of “becom[ing] an inter­me­di­ary of the sea cor­sairs” and of “incit[ing] the pirates to the ground­less increase of the ran­som sum.”

    More recent­ly, Bal­lar­in has begun to work on poten­tial air­line acqui­si­tions. WOW, the Ice­landic air­line that USAero­space pur­chased, has now ceased oper­a­tions. USAero­space report­ed­ly expressed inter­est in 2020 in pur­chas­ing Ali­talia, Italy’s state-owned air­line.

    It remains unclear how, why, and to what extent Ballarin’s com­pa­nies got involved in the Italy­Gate the­o­ry, or whether her busi­ness involve­ment in Italy is at all relat­ed to the cre­ation of the the­o­ry.

    ...

    ———–

    “Italy­Gate Is The Crown Jew­el Of Big Lie Con­spir­a­cies. And It Just Got A Lot Wilder.” by Josh Koven­sky; Talk­ing Points Memo; 06/19/2021

    What came to be called Italy­Gate blew up online in Decem­ber 2020, weeks after Biden had been declared the win­ner but as Trump was con­tin­u­ing to con­test the results. It quick­ly metas­ta­sized. By ear­ly Jan­u­ary, a for­mer Air Force lieu­tenant gen­er­al-turned-Fox News ana­lyst-turned-Trump cam­paign advis­er was repeat­ing the alle­ga­tions.”

    As 2020 was com­ing to a close, Italy­Gate became a thing. Talk of vote-switch­ing plots ema­nat­ing from Italy were sud­den­ly mak­ing their way into main­stream out­lets like Fox News. And we’re now get­ting a much bet­ter idea of where this came from and how it made its way into the DOJ: Maria Zack was one of the first peo­ple report­ed­ly push­ing the idea. Her group, of Nations in Action, was incor­po­rat­ed by key con­ser­v­a­tive polit­i­cal dark mon­ey law firm Holtz­man Vogel Jose­fi­ak Torchin­sky. Start­ed in 2017, the group has had Hans Spakovksy sit­ting on its board from the very begin­ning. So while we don’t know who exact­ly is financ­ing this group, we can be pret­ty con­fi­dent that Nations in Action is work­ing on behalf of the anony­mous right-wing oli­garchs who are fund­ing it:

    ...
    It’s not clear where the bogus alle­ga­tions orig­i­nat­ed. But one of the ear­li­est exam­ples of them spread­ing, Reuters report­ed, was in a Decem­ber 2020 record­ing of a Flori­da woman named Maria Zack.

    Zack runs Nations in Action, a non-prof­it that describes itself as devot­ed to address­ing “the col­lapse of the civ­il soci­ety with fam­i­lies strug­gling to main­tain faith, val­ues and virtues.” A long­time con­ser­v­a­tive elec­tion law firm, Holtz­man Vogel Jose­fi­ak Torchin­sky, incor­po­rat­ed the com­pa­ny.

    It has not been pre­vi­ous­ly report­ed that long­time Her­itage Foun­da­tion fel­low Hans von Spakovsky, a lead­ing vot­er fraud alarmist, served on the board of Nations in Action. More on von Spakovsky in a moment.

    ...

    TPM dis­cov­ered von Spakovsky’s name in an annu­al report filed by Nations in Action with the Flori­da sec­re­tary of state. It lists his title as “offi­cer.” Nations in Action told TPM that von Spakovsky had served on its board since the group’s 2017 incep­tion.
    ...

    And while Zack denies her group wrote the let­ter that Mead­ows passed on the DOJ push­ing Italy­Gate, she does claim to have told Trump per­son­al­ly about Italy­Gate just days before Mead­ows passed that note:

    ...
    The the­o­ry even made it to Mar-a-Lago, where Zack said that on Christ­mas Eve she gave Trump a note about an affi­davit that sup­pos­ed­ly sup­port­ed the alle­ga­tions.

    Zack denied giv­ing the affi­davit itself to Mead­ows or Trump, but did claim to an inter­view­er that she told the then-pres­i­dent: “‘This is gonna be the best Christ­mas you’ve ever had, and the best Christ­mas gift, because the whistle­blow­er who switched the data for the vote counts across Amer­i­ca is going to be pro­vid­ing an affi­davit.’”

    “And he swung around and looked at me,” she recalled.
    ...

    And Zack was clear­ly quite sup­port­ive of the insur­rec­tion while it was hap­pen­ing. She was lit­er­al­ly giv­ing a live inter­view in sup­port of it:

    ...
    On Jan. 6, the day of the Capi­tol attack, Zack trav­eled to Wash­ing­ton, D.C. to give Con­gress the affi­davit in time to avert Biden’s cer­ti­fi­ca­tion as win­ner of the Elec­toral Col­lege vote. The group issued a press release say­ing that it had enough proof “for each state to recall their slate of elec­tors imme­di­ate­ly.”

    “It is a rev­o­lu­tion­ary moment,” Zack said in an inter­view shot from the back­seat of a car in D.C. on Jan. 6. It’s not clear how far Zack was from the Capi­tol dur­ing the inter­view, though it was broad­cast live between 4 and 5 p.m., when the build­ing was still occu­pied. At one point, she refers to the ques­tion of “if they regain con­trol of the Capi­tol.”

    In the inter­view, with the inter­net show “Amer­i­ca Can We Talk?” Zack jovial­ly recounts the rev­e­la­tions about Italy, peer­ing into a cam­era that appears to be perched between the driver’s seat and the front passenger’s seat. Why she is speak­ing in a car is left unex­plained, and unre­marked upon.

    “And I believe you’re gonna see — and we are see­ing right here in down­town D.C. what’s hap­pen­ing when Amer­i­cans are awake,” she added.
    ...

    So who wrote the Italy­Gate mem­o­ran­dum that Mead­ows passed along to the DOJ? Zack­’s group issued a Jan 6 press release that gives us a clue: the group thanks the Insti­tute for Good Gov­er­nance for part­ner­ing on its inves­ti­ga­tion. Insti­tute for Good Gov­er­nance is reg­is­tered to Michele Roo­sevelt Edwards, who runs USAero­space Part­ners. And it just so hap­pens that an employ­ee for USAero­space Part­ners is the per­son who wrote that let­ter:

    ...
    In a Jan. 6 press release call­ing for Con­gress to reject the states’ elec­tors, Nations in Action thanked anoth­er group called the Insti­tute for Good Gov­er­nance for part­ner­ing on its inves­ti­ga­tion, which “yield­ed the long-await­ed proof that a flaw­less plot to take down Amer­i­ca was exe­cut­ed with extra­or­di­nary resources and glob­al involve­ment.”

    TPM obtained Vir­ginia cor­po­rate records show­ing that the Insti­tute for Good Gov­er­nance is reg­is­tered to a woman named Michele Roo­sevelt Edwards, who runs anoth­er firm called USAero­space Part­ners that pur­chased some of the assets of an Ice­landic air­line in 2019.

    It gets stranger.

    The let­ter that Mead­ows for­ward­ed to Rosen was writ­ten by a man named Car­lo Goria, who claimed to be an employ­ee of, yes, USAero­space Part­ners. The let­ter was writ­ten on what appears to be com­pa­ny let­ter­head, and Goria had issued press releas­es on the company’s behalf in the past.
    ...

    So the Nations in Action chair tells Trump per­son­al­ly about Italy­Gate on Christ­mas eve and days lat­er Mead­ows for­wards a let­ter to the DOJ writ­ten by an employ­ee of USAero­space Part­ners. The dots kind of con­nect them­selves at this point.

    And note how Spakovksy is back­ing away from cul­pa­bil­i­ty in push­ing the Italy­Gate sto­ry by point­ing out that he resigned from the group two days after the insur­rec­tion. As if that’s an ali­bi:

    ...
    Von Spakovsky told TPM in an email exchange that he had resigned from the group on Jan. 8, two days after the insur­rec­tion attempt that cost five lives.

    “I resigned from the board many months ago and have had noth­ing to with the organ­i­sa­tion or its alle­ga­tions,” he wrote.

    When asked why a May 2021 Flori­da cor­po­rate fil­ing names him as an offi­cer, von Spakovsky wrote: “That is their mis­take.”

    Nations in Action con­firmed that von Spakovsky resigned on Jan. 8 and told TPM in a state­ment that it was “look­ing into the error in our cor­po­rate fil­ings.”

    ...

    But it’s exact­ly the kind of denial we should expect from Spakovksy and all of the oth­er peo­ple involved with this oper­a­tion. Because as Spakovksy’s per­son­al career should make clear, the peo­ple financ­ing the work of fig­ures like Spakovksy don’t want to be known. He’s built a career shilling for the bil­lion­aires intent on dis­man­tling and cap­tur­ing democ­ra­cy, which is the kind of career that involves a lot of secret meet­ings, hid­den goals, and obscured rela­tion­ships. And few goals call for more secre­cy than the foment­ing of an insur­rec­tion fueled by a big lie of your own cre­ation.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | June 19, 2021, 4:55 pm
  8. He did it! Steve Ban­non went to jail over his refusal to sub­mit to a con­gres­sion­al sub­poe­na. Kid­ding. Actu­al­ly, he just went to court then he was released pre-tri­al and will not be detained after sur­ren­der­ing his pass­port. Whether or not he ulti­mate­ly goes to prison will be a sig­nif­i­cant sto­ry to watch going for­ward giv­en the pro­found role Ban­non is open­ly play­ing in orga­niz­ing the upcom­ing 2024 planned insurrection/coup/whatever scheme. A scheme that appears to include a nation­al intim­i­da­tion cam­paign tar­get­ing elec­tion work­ers for the pur­pose of plant­i­ng an army of thou­sands Ban­non fol­low­ers in all lev­els of state and local elec­tion oper­a­tions.

    And yet, as we’ve seen, Steve Ban­non is real­ly just one play­er in a much broad­er move­ment that tru­ly has cap­ture the hearts and minds of con­ser­v­a­tive Amer­i­ca. A move­ment focused on the idea that elec­tions can’t be trust­ed because they are being sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly rigged by a lib­er­al glob­al­ist social­ist Marx­ist Satan­ic cabal. The same lib­er­al glob­al­ist social­ist Marx­ist Satan­ic cabal that’s, you know, run­ning the entire world. This moment is the last stand against that cabal and this last stand will not hap­pen at the bal­lot box because the cabal has already cor­rupt­ed all the bal­lot box­es. And yet the stand must hap­pen. Steve Ban­non has been a vocal cham­pi­on of that gen­er­al ‘Q’-ish meme ani­mat­ing the mod­ern GOP, but he’s real­ly just one com­po­nent of that. If Ban­non was hit by bus tomor­row it’s not like the GOP push to sub­vert elec­tions in the US would sud­den­ly end. Same with Trump, who will like­ly be long out­lived by the ‘stop the steal’ move­ment.

    The move­ment to under­mine the pub­lic’s belief in the abil­i­ty of elec­tions to be admin­is­tered fair­ly in the US is now big­ger than any one per­son. The whole con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment has embraced this idea, cre­at­ing a con­di­tion that con­sti­tu­tion law pro­fes­sor Ned Foley describes as unique in Amer­i­can his­to­ry. Unique, but with a num­ber of par­al­lels to the ‘red scare’ of the 1950s whipped up by Joe McCarthy. As Foley puts it, “What’s unique about Trump and about what he’s try­ing to do in 2024 is that he’s apply­ing McCarthy-like tac­tics to vot­ing, and that’s nev­er hap­pened before.” A McCarthyite fer­vor applied to the very idea that elec­tions can be con­duct­ed fair­ly. This is new in the Unit­ed States.

    But, again, it’s not just Trump. It’s the whole enter­prise. From fig­ures like Trump and Ban­non, to Repub­li­can con­gres­sion­al lead­ers like Kevin McCarthy or the con­ser­v­a­tive mem­bers of the Supreme Court. Across insti­tu­tions we’re see­ing signs of an eager will­ing­ness to play along with this elec­toral McCarthy­ism. And as the arti­cle reminds us, Kevin McCarthy is extreme­ly well-posi­tioned to become the Speak­er of the House fol­low­ing the 2022 thanks to ger­ry­man­der­ing, almost guar­an­tee­ing a con­sti­tu­tion­al cri­sis in the 2024 elec­tion that could end up get­ting tossed to the Supreme Court. It grim­ly points to how bad the sit­u­a­tion tru­ly is for the US democ­ra­cy: The con­tem­po­rary McCarthy­ism stran­gling the US democ­ra­cy has such a strong grip on pow­er that it’s almost guar­an­teed a guy named McCarthy is going to end up becom­ing Speak­er of the House in 2022 based large­ly on GOP elec­toral cheat­ing via ger­ry­man­der­ing and trig­ger a 2024 con­si­tu­tion­al cri­sis. All of that is more or less baked into the elec­toral cake at this point. When will the post-shame GOP final­ly expe­ri­ence its “Have you no shame?” moment and step back from the brink? It’s increas­ing­ly becom­ing the ques­tion at the cen­ter of the US democ­ra­cy. And there’s not rea­son to assume the US will still be a democ­ra­cy when we final­ly get our answer:

    The Guardian

    ‘Ter­ri­fy­ing for Amer­i­can democ­ra­cy’: is Trump plan­ning for a 2024 coup?

    Repub­li­cans are vying for crit­i­cal posi­tions in many states – from which they could launch a far more effec­tive pow­er-grab than Trump’s 2020 effort

    by Ed Pilk­ing­ton
    Sun 14 Nov 2021 01.00 EST

    Last mod­i­fied on Sun 14 Nov 2021 17.55 EST

    At 1.35pm on 6 Jan­u­ary, the top Repub­li­can in the US Sen­ate, Mitch McConnell, stood before his par­ty and deliv­ered a dire warn­ing.

    If they over­ruled the will of 81 mil­lion vot­ers by block­ing Joe Biden’s cer­ti­fi­ca­tion as pres­i­dent in a bid to snatch re-elec­tion for the defeat­ed can­di­date, Don­ald Trump, “it would dam­age our Repub­lic for­ev­er”.

    Five min­utes before he start­ed speak­ing, hun­dreds of Trump sup­port­ers incit­ed by the then president’s false claim that the 2020 elec­tion had been stolen broke through Capi­tol police lines and were storm­ing the build­ing. McConnell’s next remark has been for­got­ten in the cat­a­stro­phe that fol­lowed – the inner sanc­tums of America’s democ­ra­cy defiled, five peo­ple dead, and 138 police offi­cers injured.

    He said: “If this elec­tion were over­turned by mere alle­ga­tions from the los­ing side, our democ­ra­cy would enter a death spi­ral. We’d nev­er see the whole nation accept an elec­tion again. Every four years would be a scram­ble for pow­er at any cost.”

    Eleven months on, McConnell’s words sound eeri­ly por­ten­tous. What could be con­strued as an anti-demo­c­ra­t­ic scram­ble for pow­er at any cost is tak­ing place right now in juris­dic­tions across the coun­try.

    Repub­li­can lead­ers loy­al to Trump are vying to con­trol elec­tion admin­is­tra­tions in key states in ways that could dras­ti­cal­ly dis­tort the out­come of the pres­i­den­tial race in 2024. With the for­mer pres­i­dent hint­ing strong­ly that he may stand again, his fol­low­ers are busi­ly manoeu­vring them­selves into crit­i­cal posi­tions of con­trol across the US – from which they could launch a far more sophis­ti­cat­ed attempt at an elec­toral coup than Trump’s effort to hang on to pow­er in 2020.

    The machi­na­tions are unfold­ing right across the US at all lev­els of gov­ern­ment, from the local precinct, through coun­ties and states, to the nation­al stage of Con­gress. The stage is being set for a spec­ta­cle that could, in 2024, make last year’s unprece­dent­ed assault on Amer­i­can democ­ra­cy look like a dress rehearsal.

    The Guardian has spo­ken to lead­ing Repub­li­can elec­tion experts, spe­cial­ists in vot­ing prac­tices, democ­ra­cy advo­cates and elec­tion offi­cials in swing states, all of whom fear that McConnell’s warn­ing is com­ing true.

    “In 2020 Don­ald Trump put a huge strain on the fab­ric of this democ­ra­cy, on the coun­try,” said Ben Gins­berg, a lead­ing elec­tion lawyer who rep­re­sent­ed four of the last six Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial nom­i­nees. “In 2024 the strain on the fab­ric could turn into a tear.”

    Since Joe Biden was inau­gu­rat­ed on 20 Jan­u­ary, Trump has dug him­self deep­er into his big lie about the “rigged elec­tion” that was stolen from him. Far from cool­ing on the sub­ject, he has con­tin­ued to ampli­fy the false claim in ever more brazen terms.

    Ini­tial­ly he con­demned the vio­lence at the US Capi­tol on 6 Jan­u­ary. But in recent months Trump has emerged as an unashamed cham­pi­on of the insur­rec­tion­ists, call­ing them “great peo­ple” and a “lov­ing crowd”, and lament­ing that they are now being “per­se­cut­ed so unfair­ly”.

    Trump record­ed a video last month prais­ing Ash­li Bab­bitt, the woman shot dead by a police offi­cer as she tried to break into the speaker’s lob­by, where Con­gress mem­bers were hid­ing in fear of their lives. Bab­bitt was a “tru­ly incred­i­ble per­son”, he said.

    Michael Wald­man, who as pres­i­dent of the Bren­nan Cen­ter is one of the country’s author­i­ties on US elec­tions, told the Guardian that Trump was nor­mal­iz­ing the anti-demo­c­ra­t­ic fury that erupt­ed that day.

    “He has gone from being embar­rassed to treat­ing 6 Jan­u­ary as one of the high points of his pres­i­den­cy. Ash­li Bab­bitt is now being lion­ized as this noble mar­tyr as opposed to a vio­lent insur­rec­tion­ist try­ing to break into the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives cham­ber.”

    Over the past year Trump has spread the stolen elec­tion lie far and wide, telling sup­port­ers at his reg­u­lar pres­i­den­tial cam­paign-style ral­lies that 2020 was “the most cor­rupt elec­tion in the his­to­ry of our coun­try”. He has used his iron grip over the Repub­li­can par­ty to cajole offi­cials in Ari­zona, Penn­syl­va­nia, Texas, Wis­con­sin and oth­er states to con­duct “audits” of the 2020 elec­tion count in fur­ther vain search­es for fraud.

    One of the most eccen­tric of these “audits” (or “frau­dits”, as they have been called) was car­ried out in Ari­zona by a com­pa­ny called Cyber Nin­jas, which had vir­tu­al­ly no expe­ri­ence in elec­tions and whose own­er sup­port­ed the “Stop the Steal” move­ment. Para­dox­i­cal­ly, even this effort con­clud­ed that Biden had indeed won the state, record­ing an even big­ger mar­gin for the Demo­c­ra­t­ic can­di­date than the offi­cial count.

    The idea of the stolen elec­tion con­tin­ues to spread like an air­borne con­ta­gion.

    A poll released this week by the Pub­lic Reli­gion Research Insti­tute found that two-thirds of Repub­li­cans still believe the myth that Trump won. More chill­ing still, almost a third of Repub­li­cans agree with the con­tention that Amer­i­can patri­ots may have to resort to vio­lence “in order to save our coun­try”.

    Wald­man said the big lie is now ubiq­ui­tous. “The loud­er Trump yelled the more his sup­port­ers thought he was telling the truth. Increas­ing­ly the insti­tu­tion­al machin­ery of the Repub­li­can par­ty is orga­nized around feal­ty to the big lie and the will­ing­ness to steal the next elec­tion, and that is ter­ri­fy­ing for the future of Amer­i­can democ­ra­cy.”

    Ned Foley, a con­sti­tu­tion­al law pro­fes­sor at Ohio State Uni­ver­si­ty, said the cur­rent moment is “unique in Amer­i­can his­to­ry”. He called it “elec­toral McCarthy­ism”.

    Foley sees par­al­lels between Trump and the anti­com­mu­nist pan­ic or “red scare” whipped up by sen­a­tor from Wis­con­sin Joe McCarthy in the 1950s. “What’s unique about Trump and about what he’s try­ing to do in 2024 is that he’s apply­ing McCarthy-like tac­tics to vot­ing, and that’s nev­er hap­pened before.”

    Elec­toral McCarthy­ism is being felt most acute­ly at state lev­el. In sev­er­al of the bat­tle­grounds where the 2024 con­test large­ly will be fought and won, a clear pat­tern is emerg­ing.

    Trump has endorsed a num­ber of Repub­li­can can­di­dates for key state elec­tion posi­tions who share a com­mon fea­ture: they all avid­ly embrace the myth of the stolen elec­tion and the lie that Biden is an impos­tor in the White House.

    The can­di­dates are being aggres­sive­ly pro­mot­ed for sec­re­tary of state posi­tions – the top offi­cial that over­sees elec­tions in US states. Should any one of them suc­ceed, they would hold enor­mous sway over the run­ning of the 2024 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion in their state, includ­ing how the votes would be count­ed.

    To get into these posi­tions of pow­er, the can­di­dates are chal­leng­ing incum­bent elec­tion offi­cials who were sem­i­nal in thwart­ing Trump’s bid to over­turn the 2020 elec­tion result. This is most evi­dent in the crit­i­cal state of Geor­gia. Brad Raf­fensperg­er, the sec­re­tary of state, resist­ed the sit­ting president’s demand, made dur­ing a phone call, that he “find 11,780 votes” for Trump – one more vote than Biden’s mar­gin of vic­to­ry.

    Raf­fensperg­er is now fac­ing a tough fight against Jody Hice, a US Con­gress mem­ber boost­ed by Trump’s back­ing. Hice was among the 147 Repub­li­cans in Con­gress who vot­ed on 6 Jan­u­ary (hours after the insur­rec­tion) to over­turn elec­tion results, false­ly claim­ing wide­spread irreg­u­lar­i­ties.

    In Ari­zona, anoth­er crit­i­cal swing state, many Trump allies are run­ning for sec­re­tary of state, includ­ing Shaw­na Bol­ick.

    She was the archi­tect of a bill intro­duced to the Ari­zona state leg­is­la­ture that would have giv­en law­mak­ers the abil­i­ty to over­turn the will of vot­ers and impose their own choice for pres­i­dent. Under Bolick’s bill, leg­is­la­tors would be able to over­rule the offi­cial count and put for­ward an alter­nate slate of elec­tors in the name of the los­er by dint of a sim­ple major­i­ty vote, no expla­na­tion need­ed.

    Had that pro­vi­sion been in place in 2020 it would have allowed the legislature’s 47 Repub­li­cans to over­ride 1.7 mil­lion Ari­zo­nans who had vot­ed for Biden and send their own alter­nate slate of Trump elec­tors to Con­gress instead.

    Bolick’s bill did not pass. But it gave a clear indi­ca­tion of Trump acolytes’ think­ing as they inject them­selves into the elec­tion process.

    Com­pet­ing against Bol­ick to be the next sec­re­tary of state of Ari­zona is Mark Finchem, who Trump has also endorsed. Finchem was at the Stop the Steal ral­ly in Wash­ing­ton on 6 Jan­u­ary that turned into the Capi­tol insur­rec­tion.

    Finchem, a for­mer police offi­cer, has links to the far-right extrem­ist group the Oath Keep­ers, which fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tors allege was involved in plan­ning the vio­lence. On 6 Jan­u­ary he post­ed a pho­to­graph of the ran­sacked Capi­tol build­ing with the com­ment: “What hap­pens when the Peo­ple feel they have been ignored, and Con­gress refus­es to acknowl­edge ram­pant fraud.”

    If Finchem were to become sec­re­tary of state he would have a cen­tral role over cer­ti­fy­ing – or not – the results in Ari­zona.

    In Michi­gan, anoth­er bat­tle­ground state which Biden won by 154,000 votes in 2020, Trump has endorsed Kristi­na Karamo for sec­re­tary of state. A self-styled “whistle­blow­er” and Fox News favourite, Karamo filed law­suits in 2020 seek­ing to block Biden’s cer­ti­fi­ca­tion on spu­ri­ous grounds of mass fraud.

    The list goes on. Reuters analysed the records of 15 Repub­li­can can­di­dates run­ning for sec­re­tary of state in five bat­tle­ground states, find­ing that 10 of them are avid “stop the steal­ers”.

    The pat­tern of Trump loy­al­ists agi­tat­ing to take con­trol of elec­tions can be seen even at the hyper-local lev­el. Steve Ban­non, Trump’s for­mer White House senior advis­er, has used his War Room pod­cast mega­phone to call on sup­port­ers to take over the reins of elec­tion admin­is­tra­tion “precinct by precinct”.

    Boards of can­vassers, nor­mal­ly unsung pan­els of local admin­is­tra­tors oper­at­ing at coun­ty lev­el, are also being tar­get­ed. In Michi­gan, Repub­li­can stop the steal­ers are mov­ing to oust sea­soned elec­tion offi­cials from the boards in many of the state’s largest coun­ties, with pos­si­ble ram­i­fi­ca­tions for how future elec­tion results are cer­ti­fied.

    Lead­ing author­i­ties on US elec­tions watch these rapid­ly shift­ing tec­ton­ic plates with mount­ing alarm. Rick Hasen, a legal schol­ar who writes the Elec­tion Law Blog, told the Guardian that he is wor­ried about what might hap­pen should Raf­fensperg­er and oth­er offi­cials who stood firm against Trump’s elec­toral coup attempt in 2020 be cast aside.

    “It took the courage of Repub­li­can elect­ed offi­cials who refused to do Trump’s bid­ding and over­turn the elec­tion result to save us from a polit­i­cal and con­sti­tu­tion­al cri­sis. With those peo­ple removed from office, it’s hard­er to have con­fi­dence that the next pres­i­den­tial elec­tion is going to be run fair­ly.”

    Chris Krebs led the fed­er­al cyber­se­cu­ri­ty agency Cisa in charge of pro­tect­ing the integri­ty of the 2020 elec­tion until he was fired by Trump. He fears that the con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry of the stolen elec­tion has spread so rapid­ly that it is now beyond con­trol.

    “There’s a part of me that thinks per­haps we’re too far gone,” he said. “The stop the steal move­ment has metas­ta­sized into a broad base that is more pow­er­ful than any indi­vid­ual, even Trump.”

    Democ­ra­cy experts have focused their ener­gies in recent years on the resur­gence of vot­er sup­pres­sion, the form of anti-demo­c­ra­t­ic pol­i­tics that arose out of the Jim Crow era of the 20th cen­tu­ry. Those tech­niques have been on ample dis­play this past year. The Bren­nan Cen­ter record­ed that in the first six months of this year alone at least 30 new laws were enact­ed in 18 states mak­ing it hard­er for Amer­i­cans to vote.

    But now vot­er sup­pres­sion has been joined by a new, and pos­si­bly even more sin­is­ter, anti­de­mo­c­ra­t­ic threat: elec­tion sub­ver­sion. The trust­ed out­come of a pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, which every four years Amer­i­cans took for grant­ed as the bedrock of their demo­c­ra­t­ic way of life, appears at risk of being will­ful­ly dis­tort­ed or even over­turned.

    “The largest con­cern I have right now is the poten­tial for elec­tion sub­ver­sion,” Hasen said. “That’s some­thing I nev­er expect­ed to wor­ry about in the Unit­ed States.”

    The non­par­ti­san group Pro­tect Democ­ra­cy and its part­ner organ­i­sa­tion States Unit­ed Democ­ra­cy Cen­ter have record­ed 216 bills intro­duced this year in 41 states that politi­cize, crim­i­nal­ize or inter­fere with elec­tion admin­is­tra­tion. Many of the bills seek to increase the pow­er of Repub­li­can-con­trolled state leg­is­la­tures over the elec­tion process, strip­ping pow­ers from impar­tial elec­tion offi­cials and hand­ing them to rad­i­cal­ly par­ti­san law­mak­ers.

    The largest con­cen­tra­tion of bills fall in exact­ly those states that were most close­ly con­test­ed in 2020 and where the out­come of the 2024 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion is like­ly to be decid­ed – Ari­zona, Geor­gia, Michi­gan, Wis­con­sin and the increas­ing­ly com­pet­i­tive state of Texas.

    “We know that some of these bills have been part of a coor­di­nat­ed effort,” Jes­si­ca Mars­den, a lawyer with Pro­tect Democ­ra­cy, said. “We see sim­i­lar mea­sures pop up in a num­ber of dif­fer­ent states, so there is sig­nif­i­cant evi­dence that there is at least the begin­nings of some sort of plan.”

    So far 24 of the bills have been passed into law. They include a new vot­ing law in Geor­gia that came into effect in August which the New York Times described as “a breath­tak­ing asser­tion of par­ti­san pow­er in elec­tions”.

    The law tight­ens the grip of Repub­li­can law­mak­ers over the elec­tion board that over­sees the vote count. It removes Raf­fensperg­er from his seat as chair of the board, which means that even if he sur­vives next year’s chal­lenge by Hice he will still have his wings clipped.

    Under the law, the new­ly Repub­li­can-dom­i­nat­ed elec­tion board gains the pow­er to sus­pend coun­ty elec­tion offi­cials. That is being seen as a thin­ly dis­guised pow­er grab over the elec­tion process­es of Ful­ton coun­ty, an area cov­er­ing the heav­i­ly Demo­c­ra­t­ic and major­i­ty-Black city of Atlanta.

    Ful­ton coun­ty was sem­i­nal in hand­ing vic­to­ry to Biden. It also gave the edge to Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, in sen­a­to­r­i­al races that swung con­trol of the US Sen­ate to the Demo­c­ra­t­ic par­ty.

    “Late at night dur­ing the pass­ing of the vot­er bill in Geor­gia, Repub­li­cans snuck in a pro­vi­sion that could have the most dev­as­tat­ing impact,” Wald­man said. “It changes the rules of who gets to count the votes, tak­ing away the pow­er of the sec­re­tary of state and tak­ing over coun­ty elec­tion process­es on very flim­sy grounds.”

    For the past year Katie Hobbs, Arizona’s Demo­c­ra­t­ic sec­re­tary of state, has been at the cen­tre of the storm unleashed by Trump’s big lie. Attacks on Hobbs and her staff began straight after the Novem­ber 2020 elec­tion and have con­tin­ued unabat­ed ever since.

    Biden’s nar­row vic­to­ry in Ari­zona – by few­er than 11,000 votes – was vital in secur­ing him the pres­i­den­cy. The con­tro­ver­sial deci­sion by Fox News to call the state for Biden as ear­ly as 11.20pm on elec­tion night pro­voked fury from Trump and his devo­tees that still rever­ber­ates in Ari­zona to this day.

    Hobbs was one of those to feel their wrath. “We have been the tar­get of a bar­rage of con­stant attacks. There have been threats, harass­ment and vit­ri­ol, not just against our elec­tion staff but to every depart­ment where peo­ple can find a phone exten­sion to call,” she said.

    Days after the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, armed stop the steal­ers gath­ered out­side Hobbs’ home. In May she and her fam­i­ly were assigned a secu­ri­ty detail after she received three sep­a­rate death threats in a sin­gle day and was chased out­side her office by a man work­ing for the con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry web­site Gate­way Pun­dit.

    “Secu­ri­ty is cer­tain­ly not some­thing I expect­ed as part of this job,” she said. Asked why she thought she was such a hate fig­ure for Trump sup­port­ers, she said: “These folks think I’m going to be arrest­ed, that I belong in Git­mo and deserve to be tried for trea­son – and they are remind­ing me of this every sin­gle day, with­out any evi­dence.”

    Threats of vio­lence are not the only chal­lenge Hobbs has faced. In June, Repub­li­can law­mak­ers in the state leg­is­la­ture stripped her of pow­ers to defend elec­tion laws in court, hand­ing the crit­i­cal func­tion to the state attor­ney gen­er­al, a Repub­li­can.

    The move was lat­er blocked by a judge on con­sti­tu­tion­al grounds. But Repub­li­can law­mak­ers have suc­cess­ful­ly weak­ened her role by bar­ring her access to legal coun­sel, which severe­ly cur­tails her abil­i­ty to car­ry out her duties as the pro­tec­tor of Ari­zona democ­ra­cy.

    “They’ve tied my hands, and that’s been par for the course in terms of par­ti­san retal­i­a­tion through­out my term in office,” Hobbs said.

    The Bren­nan Cen­ter report­ed in the sum­mer that one in three elec­tion offi­cials in the US felt unsafe in their jobs. One in six had received threats.

    David Beck­er, exec­u­tive direc­tor of the non­par­ti­san Cen­ter for Elec­tion Inno­va­tion and Research in Wash­ing­ton, said that pro­fes­sion­al elec­tion offi­cials were increas­ing­ly step­ping down, or prepar­ing to do so, in the face of unbear­able hos­til­i­ty.

    “I have talked to elec­tion offi­cials who have received threats con­tain­ing the names of their chil­dren and schools they go to. These peo­ple are true pub­lic ser­vants who are ask­ing them­selves is it worth it, because they are suf­fer­ing. I’m talk­ing about hun­dreds to thou­sands of elec­tion offi­cials around the coun­try who wor­ry every night that they might be attacked as they go home.”

    For every impar­tial elec­tion offi­cial who departs, there is a Trump loy­al­ist wait­ing in the wings. “And they appar­ent­ly view their oath not to the US con­sti­tu­tion, but to a sin­gle indi­vid­ual,” Beck­er said.

    And it doesn’t end there. Were the Repub­li­cans to regain con­trol of the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives in 2024, Kevin McCarthy, the minor­i­ty Repub­li­can leader, would have con­sid­er­able sway as Speak­er over how the out­come of the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion would be cer­ti­fied.

    If a state leg­is­la­ture were to send an alter­nate slate of elec­tors to Con­gress in an attempt to over­turn the will of vot­ers then McCarthy would be a piv­otal play­er. His word would car­ry weight in deter­min­ing whether to allow those alter­nate elec­tors, poten­tial­ly turn­ing the result of the elec­tion on its head.

    McCarthy was one of the 147 Repub­li­can rebels who on 6 Jan­u­ary – hours after the storm­ing of the Capi­tol – object­ed to the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of Biden.

    “Here’s one of my big con­cerns,” Hasen said. “The House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives head­ed by Kevin McCarthy accepts alter­nate slates of elec­tors and over­comes the will of the peo­ple, mak­ing the los­er the win­ner.”

    Such a move would undoubt­ed­ly trig­ger a con­sti­tu­tion­al cri­sis, which in turn would inevitably end up before the US supreme court. Here, too, there are rea­sons to be appre­hen­sive.

    In the runup to the 2020 elec­tion, four of the nine jus­tices expressed some degree of sup­port for the the­o­ry that state leg­is­la­tures have the pow­er to put for­ward their own alter­nate elec­tors should they decide the offi­cial count some­how had failed. Trump nom­i­nat­ed three new con­ser­v­a­tive jus­tices dur­ing his time in the White House, tip­ping the bal­ance on the court sharply to the right and increas­ing the like­li­hood that the con­ser­v­a­tive major­i­ty looks favourably on this high­ly ques­tion­able legal ruse.

    “There could be five or six jus­tices who could go along with it, giv­en the right case,” Hasen said.

    ...

    Wald­man looks to Wash­ing­ton for signs that the per­il has been recog­nised, and that appro­pri­ate action is in train. He sees nei­ther.

    “The lead­er­ship of the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment doesn’t appear to be treat­ing this as the emer­gency it is. This is one of the great clash­es in Amer­i­can polit­i­cal his­to­ry. Where is the alarm?”

    ———–


    ‘Ter­ri­fy­ing for Amer­i­can democ­ra­cy’: is Trump plan­ning for a 2024 coup?” by Ed Pilk­ing­ton; The Guardian; 11/14/2021

    “Ned Foley, a con­sti­tu­tion­al law pro­fes­sor at Ohio State Uni­ver­si­ty, said the cur­rent moment is “unique in Amer­i­can his­to­ry”. He called it “elec­toral McCarthy­ism”.”

    A new form of per­il unique in Amer­i­can his­to­ry: the active pro­pa­gan­da cam­paign design to demo­nize not just one’s polit­i­cal oppo­nents but demo­nize the entire demo­c­ra­t­ic fran­chise as hav­ing been poi­soned by these dia­bol­i­cal ene­mies from with­in. Elec­toral McCarthy­ism. The US has expe­ri­ence McCarthy­ism before, and it’s no stranger to elec­tions that don’t actu­al­ly fol­low demo­c­ra­t­ic prin­ci­ples. But this par­tic­u­lar form of attack on the US’s demo­c­ra­t­ic insti­tu­tion is new. New in part because of the breadth of the attack. From right-wing media, to main­stream con­ser­v­a­tive think-tanks and mega-donors, the entire US con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment is large­ly on board with the project. With no real oppo­si­tion. Mitch McConnell him­self warned of exact­ly of this kind of demo­c­ra­t­ic night­mare sce­nario emerg­ing back in Jan­u­ary as the Capi­tol insur­rec­tion was get­ting under­way. 11 months lat­er, the sce­nario he warned about is the ani­mat­ing issue dri­ving the GOP. An issue built on a bed of lies almost all of the major pro­po­nents rec­og­nize as lies but feel no moral com­pul­sion to con­test. That’s part of what’s so McCarthy­ist about this sit­u­a­tion: the vast array of actors from across dif­fer­ent lev­els of pow­er and soci­ety know they are engaged in wild fan­ta­sy but con­tin­ue down this path because that’s how pro­found­ly cor­rupt­ed the move­ment tru­ly is. A ‘red scare’ designed to break the required social con­sen­sus nec­es­sary for democ­ra­cy to func­tion is ful­ly under­way with the eager and enthu­si­as­tic sup­port of the vast major­i­ty of con­tem­po­rary con­ser­v­a­tive voic­es and offi­cials. It’s not a move­ment cap­ture by Don­ald Trump. It’s a move­ment cap­tured by the cor­rupt ghost of Joe McCarthy. The fact that Don­ald Trump’s men­tor, Roy Cohn, was Joe McCarthy’s chief coun­sel dur­ing the Red Scare is his­toric icing the cake:

    ...
    Five min­utes before he start­ed speak­ing, hun­dreds of Trump sup­port­ers incit­ed by the then president’s false claim that the 2020 elec­tion had been stolen broke through Capi­tol police lines and were storm­ing the build­ing. McConnell’s next remark has been for­got­ten in the cat­a­stro­phe that fol­lowed – the inner sanc­tums of America’s democ­ra­cy defiled, five peo­ple dead, and 138 police offi­cers injured.

    He said: “If this elec­tion were over­turned by mere alle­ga­tions from the los­ing side, our democ­ra­cy would enter a death spi­ral. We’d nev­er see the whole nation accept an elec­tion again. Every four years would be a scram­ble for pow­er at any cost.”

    Eleven months on, McConnell’s words sound eeri­ly por­ten­tous. What could be con­strued as an anti-demo­c­ra­t­ic scram­ble for pow­er at any cost is tak­ing place right now in juris­dic­tions across the coun­try.

    ...

    The machi­na­tions are unfold­ing right across the US at all lev­els of gov­ern­ment, from the local precinct, through coun­ties and states, to the nation­al stage of Con­gress. The stage is being set for a spec­ta­cle that could, in 2024, make last year’s unprece­dent­ed assault on Amer­i­can democ­ra­cy look like a dress rehearsal.

    ...

    Foley sees par­al­lels between Trump and the anti­com­mu­nist pan­ic or “red scare” whipped up by sen­a­tor from Wis­con­sin Joe McCarthy in the 1950s. “What’s unique about Trump and about what he’s try­ing to do in 2024 is that he’s apply­ing McCarthy-like tac­tics to vot­ing, and that’s nev­er hap­pened before.”

    Elec­toral McCarthy­ism is being felt most acute­ly at state lev­el. In sev­er­al of the bat­tle­grounds where the 2024 con­test large­ly will be fought and won, a clear pat­tern is emerg­ing.

    Trump has endorsed a num­ber of Repub­li­can can­di­dates for key state elec­tion posi­tions who share a com­mon fea­ture: they all avid­ly embrace the myth of the stolen elec­tion and the lie that Biden is an impos­tor in the White House.

    ...

    Democ­ra­cy experts have focused their ener­gies in recent years on the resur­gence of vot­er sup­pres­sion, the form of anti-demo­c­ra­t­ic pol­i­tics that arose out of the Jim Crow era of the 20th cen­tu­ry. Those tech­niques have been on ample dis­play this past year. The Bren­nan Cen­ter record­ed that in the first six months of this year alone at least 30 new laws were enact­ed in 18 states mak­ing it hard­er for Amer­i­cans to vote.

    But now vot­er sup­pres­sion has been joined by a new, and pos­si­bly even more sin­is­ter, anti­de­mo­c­ra­t­ic threat: elec­tion sub­ver­sion. The trust­ed out­come of a pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, which every four years Amer­i­cans took for grant­ed as the bedrock of their demo­c­ra­t­ic way of life, appears at risk of being will­ful­ly dis­tort­ed or even over­turned.

    “The largest con­cern I have right now is the poten­tial for elec­tion sub­ver­sion,” Hasen said. “That’s some­thing I nev­er expect­ed to wor­ry about in the Unit­ed States.”
    ...

    And a core part of this McCarthy­ist plot involves Steve Ban­non rais­ing an army of acolytes who will flood the US elec­tion sys­tems with cor­rupt­ed elec­tion work­ers ide­o­log­i­cal­ly com­mit­ted to this project. Some of these acolytes might share in Ban­non’s cyn­i­cism and rec­og­nize they’re oper­at­ing on a bed of lies. Oth­ers might be true believ­er suck­ers. Either way, the result is a fun­da­men­tal cor­rup­tion of the abil­i­ty of the US democ­ra­cy to func­tion at a basic lev­el. Mis­sion accom­plished:

    ...
    The pat­tern of Trump loy­al­ists agi­tat­ing to take con­trol of elec­tions can be seen even at the hyper-local lev­el. Steve Ban­non, Trump’s for­mer White House senior advis­er, has used his War Room pod­cast mega­phone to call on sup­port­ers to take over the reins of elec­tion admin­is­tra­tion “precinct by precinct”.

    Boards of can­vassers, nor­mal­ly unsung pan­els of local admin­is­tra­tors oper­at­ing at coun­ty lev­el, are also being tar­get­ed. In Michi­gan, Repub­li­can stop the steal­ers are mov­ing to oust sea­soned elec­tion offi­cials from the boards in many of the state’s largest coun­ties, with pos­si­ble ram­i­fi­ca­tions for how future elec­tion results are cer­ti­fied.
    ...

    Final­ly, it’s worth not­ing the oth­er loom­ing threat of ‘McCarthy­ism’ here: the real­i­ty that Kevin McCarthy is almost cer­tain­ly guar­an­teed to become Speak­er of the House fol­low­ing the 2022 mid-terms elec­tions — the first round of elec­tions that will be sub­ject to the new­ly hyper-ger­ry­man­dered con­gres­sion­al dis­tricts — thus ensur­ing the 2024 elec­tion will become a con­sti­tu­tion­al cri­sis should the Demo­c­rat end up win­ning. And who will decide the out­come of that cri­sis? Like­ly the cor­rupt­ed far right Supreme Court. A Supreme Court that’s been so thor­ough­ly rigged through Repub­li­can cheat­ing that jus­tices have tak­en the unusu­al step of pub­licly com­ing out and explain­ing that they aren’t just a bunch of par­ti­san hacks. Which, of course, were utter­ly disin­gen­u­ous bad faith state­ments made from peo­ple who are unam­bigu­ous par­ti­san hacks:

    ...
    And it doesn’t end there. Were the Repub­li­cans to regain con­trol of the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives in 2024, Kevin McCarthy, the minor­i­ty Repub­li­can leader, would have con­sid­er­able sway as Speak­er over how the out­come of the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion would be cer­ti­fied.

    If a state leg­is­la­ture were to send an alter­nate slate of elec­tors to Con­gress in an attempt to over­turn the will of vot­ers then McCarthy would be a piv­otal play­er. His word would car­ry weight in deter­min­ing whether to allow those alter­nate elec­tors, poten­tial­ly turn­ing the result of the elec­tion on its head.

    McCarthy was one of the 147 Repub­li­can rebels who on 6 Jan­u­ary – hours after the storm­ing of the Capi­tol – object­ed to the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of Biden.

    “Here’s one of my big con­cerns,” Hasen said. “The House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives head­ed by Kevin McCarthy accepts alter­nate slates of elec­tors and over­comes the will of the peo­ple, mak­ing the los­er the win­ner.”

    Such a move would undoubt­ed­ly trig­ger a con­sti­tu­tion­al cri­sis, which in turn would inevitably end up before the US supreme court. Here, too, there are rea­sons to be appre­hen­sive.

    In the runup to the 2020 elec­tion, four of the nine jus­tices expressed some degree of sup­port for the the­o­ry that state leg­is­la­tures have the pow­er to put for­ward their own alter­nate elec­tors should they decide the offi­cial count some­how had failed. Trump nom­i­nat­ed three new con­ser­v­a­tive jus­tices dur­ing his time in the White House, tip­ping the bal­ance on the court sharply to the right and increas­ing the like­li­hood that the con­ser­v­a­tive major­i­ty looks favourably on this high­ly ques­tion­able legal ruse.

    “There could be five or six jus­tices who could go along with it, giv­en the right case,” Hasen said.
    ...

    It’s that full spec­trum of insti­tu­tion­al bad faith that makes this peri­od of elec­toral McCarthy­ism so dire. The spir­it of Amer­i­can’s con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment real­ly has been over­tak­en with some sort of foul bad faith core that is dri­ving the ful­ly array of its lead­ing actors across soci­ety. High­ly orga­nized full spec­trum insti­tu­tion­al bad faith car­ried out by a par­ty that con­scious­ly knows it crossed a pro­found moral line and can’t stop itself from con­tin­u­ing down that path. A post-shame GOP.

    Is Kevin McCarthy more or less a lock on becom­ing the ‘ulti­mate McCarthyite’ politi­cian in 2023? A McCarthy fueled by the spir­it of Joe McCarthy? Prob­a­bly, but it’s worth recall­ing that Trump him­self can be made Speak­er of the House in 2023 even if he’s not a mem­ber of con­gress. So if the GOP does retake con­trol of the House that’s going to be a real option. A real option that the most ‘MAGA’ mem­bers of the House are report­ed­ly already seri­ous­ly look­ing into. So, no, Kevin McCarthy does­n’t have a lock on that speak­er­ship posi­tion in 2023. Although the broad­er move­ment both McCarthy and Trump are mem­bers of ded­i­cat­ed to destroy­ing faith in the very abil­i­ty of democ­ra­cy to func­tion does indeed have a lock on that spot. And not a hint of shame or decen­cy to hold it back this time around.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | November 15, 2021, 5:59 pm

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