Brad Blog

Syndicate content
Because it's not about Right or Left, it's about Right and Wrong!
URL: http://www.bradblog.com
Updated: 6 hours 10 min ago

'Landslide' for Sanford Declared by 100% Unverifiable Touch-Screens in SC's 'Toss-Up' U.S. House Special Election

Tue, 05/07/2013 - 20:54

Just after the March primaries for the U.S. House Special Election in South Carolina's 1st Congressional District, the race between Democratic candidate Elizabeth Colbert Busch (Stephen Colbert's sister) and disgraced former Republican Gov. Mark Sanford was said to be "a toss-up", according to surveys by Public Policy Polling (PPP), one of the most accurate polling firms across the entire country during the 2012 President Election cycle. They had Colbert Busch up by 2 points over Sanford in that early pre-election poll.

Just over two weeks ago, as news broke that Sanford was due to appear in court after his ex-wife claimed he had been caught trespassing at her home, PPP found that Colbert Busch's lead had expanded to 9 points in the race.

Over the weekend, in their final polling, PPP found the gap had closed, and Sanford was leading by 1 point in a race they described, one again, as "a toss-up".

Tonight, South Carolina's same 100% unverifiable touch-screen voting systems that declared the unknown, unemployed, never-once-campaigned-anywhere Alvin Green to have somehow defeated four-term state legislator and circuit court judge Vic Rawl to win the 2010 Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate, declared Mark Sanford the winner over Elizabeth Colbert Busch by a 9 point landslide...

The unverified and unverifiable computer-reported results tonight led PPP's Tom Jensen to tweet: "I feel bad about our SC-1 polling, I'd feel worse if there had been any indication from any other polling that Sanford landslide was coming".

Neither Jensen nor PPP should feel bad. There was no more indication that a "landslide was coming", than there is proof tonight that it actually came.

We explained last month, in detail, why the votes cast in this race on SC's oft-failed, easily-manipulated ES&S iVotronic touch-screen voting system would be 100% unverifiable. As Vic Rawl, a Colbert Busch supporter and the man who inexplicably "lost" to Alvin Green told us at the time, no matter what the results would be tonight, no matter how inexplicable they might be, "the fact is, there's not a darn thing that anybody can do about it."

While it's completely possible that PPP's pre-election numbers were entirely wrong, or that the disgraced Sanford legitimately, somehow, achieved an 18 point turnaround in just two weeks, the voters of SC will never know one way or another if he did or didn't. Once again, we have another 100% unverifiable faith-based election in the world's once-greatest democracy.

* * *Please support The BRAD BLOG's fiercely independent, award-winning coverage of your electoral system, as available from no other media outlet in the nation --- now in our TENTH YEAR! --- with a donation to help us keep going (Snail mail, more options here). If you like, we'll send you some great, award-winning election integrity documentary films in return! Details right here...


Categories: Brad Blog

'Green News Report' - May 7, 2013

Tue, 05/07/2013 - 17:40


 

IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Amid early wildfires, CA Governor Brown warns climate change is getting expensive and deadly; Record fine in natural gas pipeline explosion; JPMorgan accused of Enron-style energy market manipulation; It's official: 2012 the 9th hottest year on record; PLUS: Rightwingers buy money-saving lightbulbs - unless it helps the environment... All that and plenty of Fox 'News' bashing in today's Green News Report!

Listen online here, or Download MP3 (6 mins)...

Link: Embed:

Got comments, tips, love letters, hate mail? Drop us a line at GreenNews@BradBlog.com or right here at the comments link below. All GNRs are always archived at GreenNews.BradBlog.com.

IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): Arctic Ocean acidifying faster than previously thought; Sequester cuts hurting EPA's ability to catch pollution criminals; Wind turbine innovation: batteries; Discovery utilizes low-grade silicon for cheaper solar PV; MI nuclear plant shutdown due to leak; Markey asks Exxon to account for AR pipeline spill; Canada: Harper Admin muzzling scientists; Running up against energy limits in a finite world ... PLUS: VIDEO: Adorable teen asks why wind turbine “noise” is no biggie for Germans ... and much, MUCH more! ...

STORIES DISCUSSED IN TODAY'S 'GREEN NEWS REPORT'...

'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (Stuff we didn't have time for in today's audio report)...

  • New Research: World on Track for Climate Disaster:
  • Essential Climate Science Background:

    • Categories: Brad Blog

    Reminder About SC's 100% Unverifiable Colbert Busch/Sanford U.S. House Special Election

    Mon, 05/06/2013 - 17:32

    At the beginning of last month, The BRAD BLOG explained in detail why it was that, no matter who South Carolina's 100% unverifiable touch-screen voting systems declare to be the winner of tomorrow's special election for the U.S. House, there is virtually nothing that either supporters of Elizabeth Colbert Busch (D) or of former Gov. Mark Sanford (R), can do about it.

    If there are questions about the results, too bad. The state of SC doesn't care. They don't want citizens to be able to oversee their own elections. The results will be 100% unverifiable as determined in secret by computers --- at least for those votes cast on election day at the polls, versus those cast on paper via absentee ballots.

    The voting systems in use on Tuesday, as we noted in our previous article, will be the same ones which inexplicably declared the unknown, unemployed, non-campaigning Alvin Greene to be the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate over the veteran state legislator and former circuit court judge Vic Rawl back in 2010. That race shouldn't have even been close. It was thought to be Rawl's in a rout, prior to the results being announced by the computer voting systems, which had a different idea.

    Tomorrow's election, however, despite the 1st Congressional District having gone for Romney over Obama in a big way in 2012, is believed to be very close, according to pre-election polls.

    When we wrote our April article, Colbert Busch (Stephen Colbert's sister) was seen to be barely leading the disgraced Sanford, in what was described by Public Policy Polling (PPP) as "a toss up" at the time...

    Since that time, Sanford has found himself embroiled in yet another scandal, as his former wife accused him of trespassing at her house (as opposed to "hiking the Appalachian Trail.") He is scheduled to face those charges in court hearing this coming Thursday. In the wake of that news, Colbert Busch's poll numbers, according to PPP (a Democratic-leaning outfit, but one with among the best recent track records in the business), bumped up to a 9-point lead over Sanford.

    And now, on the eve of the race, PPP says Sanford has closed the gap, and leads Colbert Busch by just 1 point in what they describe as "a toss-up" again.

    In other words, it's anybody's guess how voters may vote tomorrow. Unfortunately, even after tomorrow, it'll still be anybody's guess as to how the voters actually voted, thanks to the oft-failed, easily-manipulated, 100% unverifiable ES& iVotronic touch-screen electronic voting systems in use that will either record voters' intent accurately tomorrow...or not. Nobody can ever know.

    And, as Vic Rawl, who inexplicably "lost" to Alvin Greene in 2010 told us last month after we published our article on all of this, whatever the 100% unverifiable voting machines say tomorrow, and whether they are in line with pre-election polling or the will of the voters, "the fact is, there's not a darn thing that anybody can do about it."

    The BRAD BLOG wishes both candidates, and the voters of South Carolina's 1st Congressional District, good luck in deciphering whatever truthiness the voting systems decide to offer to us all after the close of polls tomorrow.

    • Here's our detailed report from last month...

    * * *

    UPDATE 5/7/2013: Despite Colbert Busch's 9pt lead in the polls two weeks ago, and the race declared a "toss-up" by pollsters over the weekend, Sanford has now been declared the "winner" by a landslide tonight by SC's 100% unverifiable touch-screen voting system. Details now here...

    * * *Please support The BRAD BLOG's fiercely independent, award-winning coverage of your electoral system, as available from no other media outlet in the nation --- now in our TENTH YEAR! --- with a donation to help us keep going (Snail mail, more options here). If you like, we'll send you some great, award-winning election integrity documentary films in return! Details right here...


    Categories: Brad Blog

    Reuters: U.N. Investigators Say Syrian Rebels, Not Syrian Regime, Used Chemical Weapons

    Sun, 05/05/2013 - 21:33

    [This article now cross-published by Salon...]

    So, wait. It wasn't the Syrian regime, but rather the Syrian rebels who used sarin nerve gas recently? That's the story being reported tonight by Reuters, from actually named sources among U.N. investigators. But will anybody notice? Or, with Israeli airstrikes already under way, and the neo-cons already demanding another new war, is the news too little, too late...again?

    The week before last, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, reading from a letter sent by the White House to Congress, announced that the Administration believes that the Syrian government recently used chemical weapons against its own people. If true, it would be a move which President Obama had previously described as a "red line" and a "game changer" in the Administration's policy on the two-year old civil war still raging in that country.

    Hagel's statement was somewhat measured [emphasis added]: "Our intelligence community does assess, with varying degrees of confidence, that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons on a small scale in Syria, specifically, the chemical agent sarin."

    A few days later, during a Presidential press conference, Obama himself was also measured, even back-tracking somewhat on the claim that it was "the Syrian regime" which used the chemical weapon, as Hagel had initially announced, setting off "Breaking News!" tweets around the globe.

    "What we now have is evidence that chemical weapons have been used inside of Syria, but we don't know how they were used, when they were used, who used them. We don't have a chain of custody that establishes what exactly happened," the President said, seemingly responsibly. "And when I am making decisions about America’s national security and the potential for taking additional action in response to chemical weapon use, I've got to make sure I've got the facts."

    He went on to decry "rushing to judgement without hard, effective evidence," that he planned to work with "neighboring countries to...establish a clear baseline of facts", and that he had "called on the United Nations to investigate."

    But the war genie was already out of the bottle. At least for many in both the corporate media and the neo-con Right...

    Sen. John McCain, for example, as is his wont, rushed to whatever TV cameras he could find to announce that the intel, as is, was "a compelling argument for the president to take the measures that a lot of us have been arguing for all along."

    Syrian rebels, McCain ominously warned on CNN, need to be given "a safe zone, we need to supply them with weapons going to the right people, and we need to be prepared to secure these caches of chemical weapons in the event that [Syrian leader Bashar al Assad] uses them."

    And then, with the war hawks squawking over the last several days, it is now being reported that Israel has launched a series of airstrikes against Syria, on the outskirts of its capital, Damascus.

    To date, there has been very little pushback against Israel for having unilaterally done so. In fact, the response from the usual quarters has been just the opposite.

    "Now THAT's a red line," CNN's paid contributor and former George W. Bush Press Secretary (and current apologist) Ari Fleischer tweeted in response to news of the first Israeli attack inside of Syria on Friday.

    "Next time Pres O says he's drawn a red line, ask if he used invisible ink," tweeted Fleischer the week before, after the Administration's initial announcement of the use of sarin in Syria.

    Today, the same man who fought so hard to push the nation towards war over invisible weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, kept up his courageous war of words in celebration of the second reported Israeli strike. "The power of a red line: it's bright &easy 2see. Message - don't cross it. They don't come in shades & aren't meant 2b erased," CNN's Fleischer bravely chest-thumped from behind the safety of his home office keyboard.

    It seems hard to believe that there would be as much of a celebration, or even collective "oh, well, guess we saw that coming," had Syria, for example, flown warplanes over Tel Aviv or Jerusalem to drop bombs inside of that sovereign nation. But, after all, we've been told Assad is very bad guy who is not only said to have killed some 70,000 of his own people in the two year old civil war there (a fact which few seem to dispute), but now we know he's even crossed a "red line" with the "game changing" use of chemical weapons! Who can blame Israel for taking action where, to hear McCain and Fleischer and friends tell it, Obama is just too weak to do so!

    Of course, it's far from clear that Israel's attacks had anything whatsoever to do with taking out chemical weapons facilities or stockpiles in Syria. From the various anonymous U.S. and Israeli officials cited by news agencies, Israel was striking "a shipment of missiles destined for Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement ... a consignment of advanced, long-range, ground-to-ground missiles destined for Hezbollah"

    "The shipment did not contain chemical weapons, but the missiles were potentially 'game-changing,' one official told the Associated Press," Washington Post is reporting.

    (Without citing evidence, the fully-discredited-yet-still-well-paid Fleischer described the missiles as "delivery systems for chemical weapons".)

    So, the use of chemical weapons (by whom, we still do not know) is a "game changer". The President failed to act (as the neo-cons tell us), by asking the U.N. to investigate and gather more information before the U.S. goes to war. In the meantime, Israel strikes against "game-changing" weapons in Syria, according to anonymous sources for unproven reasons. And few, if any, rush to cameras to condemn Israel for doing so. Most, including CNN's paid contributors like Fleischer, celebrate their having done so.

    But what of those "game changing" chemical weapons? Lo and behold, a report out tonight, based on information from U.N. investigators, seems to indicate that it's the Syrian rebels --- the one that McCain et al are calling for Obama to support immediately --- who may have used the sarin nerve gas which kicked off this entire sequence of events.

    From Reuters tonight:

    U.N. human rights investigators have gathered testimony from casualties of Syria's civil war and medical staff indicating that rebel forces have used the nerve agent sarin, one of the lead investigators said on Sunday.

    The United Nations independent commission of inquiry on Syria has not yet seen evidence of government forces having used chemical weapons, which are banned under international law, said commission member Carla Del Ponte.

    "Our investigators have been in neighboring countries interviewing victims, doctors and field hospitals and, according to their report of last week which I have seen, there are strong, concrete suspicions but not yet incontrovertible proof of the use of sarin gas, from the way the victims were treated," Del Ponte said in an interview with Swiss-Italian television.

    "This was use on the part of the opposition, the rebels, not by the government authorities," she added, speaking in Italian.

    So, it was the rebels, according to actual named sources, not the Syrian regime which may have used the sarin gas that set off the chain of events described above over the past week and a half?

    Will anybody bother to notice that report? So far, the courageous Fleischer's Twitter feed has remained silent tonight and Grampa McCain is probably already asleep for the night.

    Will McCain and Fleischer and the other war hawks soon retract their chest thumping and sabre rattling in light of the U.N. reports? Will they call for the U.S. to take action against the rebels in Syria who may have used chemical weapons?

    Will there be an investigation, any investigation at all, into Israel's aggressive --- some might say, unprovoked --- military actions over the past three days?

    Or, as is far more likely, will we all largely ignore the Reuters report on the U.N. investigators' findings entirely and carry on, as is, with our previously scheduled war-mongering and our continuing failure to hold war criminals responsible ... so long as they may potentially include those from either the U.S. or Israel?

    * * *

    UPDATE 5/6/2013: This statement was released by the U.N.'s commission this morning, in response to last night's news report:

    The Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic wishes to clarify that it has not reached conclusive findings as to the use of chemical weapons in Syria by any parties to the conflict. As a result, the Commission is not in a position to further comment on the allegations at this time.

    The Chair of the Commission of Inquiry, Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, reminds all parties to the conflict that the use of chemical weapons is prohibited in all circumstances under customary international humanitarian law.

    In line with its mandate, the Commission is currently investigating all allegations of violations of international law in the Syrian Arab Republic and will issue its findings to the Human Rights Council on 3 June 2013, as mandated by resolution 22/24

    More details on the work of the commission can be found here.

    At the same time, the Jerusalem Post is reporting today that at least 40 Syrian soldiers were killed, and another 100 are still missing, after air strikes by Israel over the weekend, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

    The paper also notes that, according to Kuwait's daily Alrai, Syrian President Assad has "threatened retaliation without warning to any further attack on his country." Assad is said to have notified both Washington and Moscow "that orders had been given to allow deployed ground-to-ground and ground-to-air missile batteries to be used against Israel without advance notice in the event of another attack."

    ALSO very much worth noting today... FAIR has issued a report this morning on the lack of skepticism by U.S. media about the government's claims about the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government. It also notes that both the New York Times' Bill Keller and ABC's Cokie Roberts over the weekend, expressed the view that wariness by the U.S. public over the claims, in light of similar claims about Iraq which turned out to be bogus, is a "problem" for those who feel "we need to have every single option available in a very dangerous world."

    * * *

    UPDATE 5/6/2013 12:42pm PT: Despite the U.N. commission's call for caution in light of last night's report, investigator Carla Del Ponte --- "a former Swiss attorney general who also served as prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia" --- is standing by her initial assertions today, according to this Reuter's update:

    In comments posted in English on Monday, she repeated the assertion, saying that witness testimony made it appear that some chemical wepaons had been used.

    "What appears to our investigation is that it was used by the opponents, by the rebels," she said. "We have no indication at all that the Syrian government has used chemical weapons."

    Categories: Brad Blog

    May the 4th NOT Be With You! (An Important Message from The Empire)

    Sat, 05/04/2013 - 13:55

    These guys recently called me "a gatekeeper". That's not fair. I run these messages because they are important, not because The Empire tells me to. That part is just incidental.


    Categories: Brad Blog

    'Fraud' Controversy Over Sweeping CO Election Reform Bill Misses Mark by a Vote-by-Mail Mile

    Fri, 05/03/2013 - 18:41

    An ambitious election reform bill supported by state Democrats and the Colorado County Clerks Association, which is largely made up of Republicans, will soon land on the desk of Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper, despite the objections of Republican lawmakers and the state's extraordinarily partisan Republican Sec. of State.

    The bill has now been approved by both chambers of the Colorado legislature --- along party lines in each --- but must be approved again in the House due to "technical" amendments from the Senate. But while it may be too late, partisans and lawmakers would have been wise to look carefully before leaping in support of this bill which offers both excellent reforms and reasons to be very concerned about one of its central provisions.

    John Tomasic of the Colorado Independent offered a detailed report earlier this week on the major concerns and somewhat confusing partisan divides on both sides of this particular piece of legislation.

    There's a lot of good, long-overdue provisions in the sweeping, 126-page bill [PDF] (mercifully summarized on pages 2 through 4). The key provisions --- and main points of contention --- are summarized this way by Tomasic:

    House Bill 1303 seeks to expand voter participation mainly by establishing a system that includes same-day registration up to Election Day and that mails ballots to all eligible voters in the state. Under the proposed law, voters would choose whether to mail their ballots back to the clerks, drop them off at early voting centers or fill them out at the polls on Election Day.

    Tomasic goes on to explain that the bill, dubbed "The Voter Access and Modernized Elections Act", is sponsored by Democrats in both the CO House and Senate, but it's "based on a plan approved by a large bipartisan majority of clerks who run the state’s elections county to county. The Colorado County Clerks Association reports that 75 percent of the 64 clerks in the state support the bill. The Association is anything but a left-wing cabal: At least 44 of the clerks, some 70 percent, are Republican officeholders."

    The politics on this one may be understandably confusing to some --- particularly with a former Republican Sec. of State favoring the bill, and the current Republican Sec. of State ardently opposing it --- but the professed concerns of the latter (that the expanded registration provisions will lead to "voter fraud") are largely nonsense. While the advocacy of the former (pushing broad expansion of vote-by-mail ballots to every voter in the state) ignores very real fraud concerns...

    SoS v. SoS

    One of the supporters of the election reform bill is the Clerk's Association Executive Director Donetta Davidson, a former Republican Sec. of State in Colorado, as well as a former George W. Bush-appointed Commissioner and Chairwoman of the U.S. Elections Assistance Commission (EAC).

    The BRAD BLOG has detailed Davidson's embarrassing failures as EAC Chair many times over the years during the course of our investigative reports based on public records requests and much more. Those reports have detailed, among other things, Davidson's inappropriately cozy relationship with voting machine manufacturers and representatives, both as CO SoS and in her position at the EAC, and her willingness to overlook massive failures by the supposedly independent testing labs tasked with (poorly) testing and certifying virtually all of the electronic voting systems now in place around the country.

    She also played a central role in one of our investigative reports, published exclusively as a chapter in Mark Crispin Miller's 2008 book, Loser Take All: Election Fraud and The Subversion of Democracy, 2000 - 2008, about how 100% unverifiable touch-screen voting systems with so-called "paper trail printers" were illegally certified by the state of Nevada's then Sec. of State (now-Senator) Dean Heller, for first-time use during the contentious 2004 Presidential Election, after being inappropriately approved for use by the EAC, in direct contravention of their own long-standing requirements. Suffice to say, during an hour-long conference call with Davidson and others at the EAC, as requested by the federal agency prior to publication of our report, we were absolutely floored by her astounding apparent lack of knowledge of the very voting systems and the testing processes she was tasked, at the time, with overseeing on behalf of the federal government.

    Davidson favors the new CO election reform bill, but don't hold that alone against it.

    In the meantime, CO's current Republican Sec. of State, Scott Gessler, who has proven to be an absolute embarrassment to the state since taking office in 2010, strongly opposes it.

    Gessler has also made his share of ignominious appearances at The BRAD BLOG over recent years. For example, last year he attempted, then aborted, a shameful last-minute voter purge initiative of what he described as thousands of suspected non-citizen voters on the rolls. The effort to remove as many as 11,000 voters from the rolls, the number he cited during the first year he took office, was called off when it was found that almost every single of them were, indeed, citizens.

    "In the end," Tomasic notes, citing an AP report finding just 12% of those on his hit-list were registered as Republicans, "Gessler offered an unconfirmed shriveled list of 35 non-citizens who may have cast votes in past elections." Emphasis there should be on "unconfirmed" and "maybe". That, out of millions of legal votes cast in the period even since Gessler has taken office.

    That's not all, of course. His extraordinarily partisan behavior in advance of last year's Presidential Election in the pivotal swing-state is just one of many reasons that both the Democrats and the Clerks Association reportedly shut Gessler completely out of the process as they were crafting their bill. Another example was on display in the days before last year's election, as actual GOP voter registration fraud cases began appearing across the country, including in Colorado, allegedly carried out by workers for a firm hired by the Republican National Committee. As the scandal was quickly spreading, Gessler was busy joining Tea Party wingnut conspiracy theory conferences to speak on panels where he offered unsupported falderal about "organized" Democratic voter fraud schemes, even while ignoring real fraud schemes happening in his own state, by employees of his own political party.

    One more point worth noting here on Gessler, before explaining how he's correct to worry about fraud because of this bill, but not for the main reasons he and Republican state legislators have so far offered. Here's Tomasic again:

    When Secretary Gessler issued an elections rule in 2011 that sought to prevent clerks from sending mail ballots to "inactive voters" — registered voters who failed to cast a ballot in the previous election — Democrats called foul. The preceding election had been the Tea Party/Republican-wave election in which GOP turnout was high. That meant that an unusually large percentage of the state’s "active voters" — the only ones entitled to mail ballots in 2011, under Gessler’s rule — would be Republican voters. Clerks overseeing the state’s large, mostly Democratic-leaning, urban constituencies — citizens who tend to vote less regularly but who nevertheless depend on receiving their ballots for general elections — had made it policy to send ballots in all elections to inactive as well as active voters. Gessler’s rule would have barred those clerks from doing that. In the court case that followed, a judge ultimately ruled that Gessler’s interpretation went against the spirit of the law.

    So, suffice to say that Gessler is a hard Rightwing partisan who attempts, over and over again, to couch his efforts at restricting perfectly legal Democratic-leaning voters from being able to cast their vote, behind repeatedly discredited claims of "voter fraud" being carried out by, or on behalf of, the Democratic Party.

    His wolf-crying routine has largely, and deservedly, earned him utter irrelevance in the state's election reform lawmaking process in the bargain.

    This time, with the possibility of massive (gasp!) voter enfranchisement likely to occur, thanks to expanded voter registration, right up to Election Day, and convenient Vote-by-Mail ballots arriving in the mailbox of every Colorado voter, Gessler is scrambling to find something, anything, with which to discredit the bill.

    Too bad he seems to be missing the most obvious reason to do so.

    Opening Pandora's Ballot Box

    Gessler, and other opponents of the bill, have decided to focus largely on the expanded voter registration deadline as reason to oppose it. They say that it will either lead to fraudulent registrations, or that it can't be safely implemented in time for the 2013 elections, as currently set in the bill, because, as a Denver Post editorial misleadingly describes, the system for doing so "relies on technology that hasn't been tested."

    Tomasic's article quotes Boulder’s Democratic Clerk Hillary Hall thoroughly undermining that argument, which she says she finds "baffling"....

    She said the bill doesn’t propose using any untested technology. She said that for this November’s election, clerks would continue to use SCORE, the state’s electronic voter registration and election management system, which has been in place since 2008.

    "We already have statewide connectivity for early voting," she said. "We use it right now and have for years in the weeks before Election Day. We’re simply extending that registration period by 29 days."
    ...
    "If the concern is tied to same-day registration and voting, well, this bill doesn’t just put in same-day registration. That piece joins with a larger system that, again, draws on functions and practices already in place," Hall said.

    While close attention, and independent testing by world-class computer science and security experts, needs to be a part of any online voter registration system, the technology for such a system is not that difficult, and is not, in and of itself, a recipe for fraud, if properly executed. So Gessler's, and other opponents, charges on those grounds seem to be baseless.

    Gessler has also offered the ridiculous argument that there is no need to increase participation in Colorado's elections, because the state's voter turnout is, apparently, already good enough. (He reportedly told lawmakers that the state was number one in the country, according to Tomasic. In fact, it's number three, according to a recent study. Still, while that's a very good turnout, it's hardly reason to not expand participation as secure options may allow.)

    So Gessler, it seems, has got nothing. Too bad. Because, even with everything that is good about this bill, there is every reason to be very concerned about the door it really will open for fraud via Vote-by-Mail ballot.

    The BRAD BLOG has --- along with many others in the Election Integrity community --- long decried the broad use of VBM for a number of reasons. Many of those reasons are quickly bullet-pointed in our short article from some years ago, entitled "Why 'Vote-By-Mail' Elections Are a Terrible Idea for Democracy".

    In short, while the type of voter fraud that Republicans disingenuously claim to be rampant (voter impersonation at the polling place, with restrictive Photo ID laws that disproportionately disenfranchise Democratic-leaning voters needed to combat it, as they argue) is virtually non-existent, where ballot fraud by voters actually does occur in American elections is almost entirely via absentee/Vote-by-Mail. Whether its voter intimidation, vote buying and selling, filling out mail ballots by someone other than the voter who it belongs to, Vote-by-Mail should be a very serious concern for those worried about fraud in U.S. elections.

    Unfortunately for Republicans, whose polling place Photo ID restriction laws have absolutely nothing to do with absentee voting, their arguments against the CO bill almost completely miss the mark on the real concerns about fraud from this bill. Their pretend fixation on "voter fraud" at the polls (little more than a pretend scam meant to keep legal, if Democratic-leaning voters from voting), means that few of them seem to notice how this legislation really may open up the door to fraud.

    Expanding Vote-by-Mail it to every voter in the state, whether they've requested a VBM ballot or not, would seem to be a recipe for disaster.

    We are quoted and cited a couple of times in Tomasic's article. Here is one of those cites...

    For some critics who otherwise support the election-reform bill, it’s the provision allowing clerks to send ballots to all registered voters in the state that raises concerns.

    Friedman, the elections analyst at the influential BradBlog, has long cautioned against the growing movement in the U.S. toward mail elections. He has argued that mailing ballots extends the chain of custody, presenting greater opportunity for election fraud — the kind committed by overzealous campaign staffers, incompetent poll workers and corrupt special interest groups.
    ...
    Mary Eberle, a longtime volunteer Colorado poll watcher, testified against the election-reform bill this month for the same reasons she has protested other recent changes to election administration in the state. She sees home mail boxes, post offices, ballot-sorting-and-reading machines and the rooms where they’re housed as democratic dark areas that invite abuse, places where citizens like herself can’t properly measure ballot integrity.

    So, where Gessler is absolutely wrong to oppose this bill for the reasons he is putting forward, his predecessor Davidson, and the Democratic lawmakers who often seem to support increased turnout at any cost (we hope to have more on that in the near future) are similarly wrong in supporting it without paying careful attention to the Pandora's Ballot Box of fraud that they could be opening by expanding Vote-by-Mail to all...even to voters who don't want it, and haven't requested it. There are about to be a whole lot of blank ballots just floating around the state of Colorado. That is not a very good idea at all.

    There is much more in Tomasic's piece at Colorado Independent worth checking out, in order to appreciate the broad election reforms likely to hit the Centennial State very soon. Many of those reforms are already in place elsewhere in the country, and many are likely to spread to your state as well. So understanding the lay of the land on these reforms --- both political and factual --- makes sense. Coloradans are lucky to have a smart, detail-oriented reporter like Tomasic there to help them do so.

    * * *Please support The BRAD BLOG's fiercely independent, award-winning coverage of your electoral system, as available from no other media outlet in the nation --- now in our TENTH YEAR! --- with a donation to help us keep going (Snail mail, more options here). If you like, we'll send you some great, award-winning election integrity documentary films in return! Details right here...


    Categories: Brad Blog

    R.I. Governor Signs Marriage Equality Into Law

    Thu, 05/02/2013 - 18:55

    As we noted last week was likely to be the case, when the entire Republican state Senate GOP caucus came on board in support, today marriage equality became the law of the land in Rhode Island.

    We'll let Fox "News" tell you about it, since it surely pains them to do so.

    RI becomes the 10th state in the union to allow gay couples to enjoy the same constitutionally-protected equal rights to marriage as everyone else.

    Our condolences to all of the straight couples in those states who have had their marriages destroyed because of it.


    Categories: Brad Blog

    'Green News Report' - May 2, 2013

    Thu, 05/02/2013 - 17:48


     

    IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Weather Whiplash: record May snowstorm in Minnesota, early May wildfires in California; Who paid for last year's billion-dollar record crop disaster? YOU did; Myth-busting: 40th anniversary of Newsweek's "coming ice age" blunder; PLUS: Surprise! Fox 'News' lies about the term 'climate change' ... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

    Listen online here, or Download MP3 (6 mins)...

    Link: Embed:

    Got comments, tips, love letters, hate mail? Drop us a line at GreenNews@BradBlog.com or right here at the comments link below. All GNRs are always archived at GreenNews.BradBlog.com.

    IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): What would 'wartime mobilization' to fight climate change look like?; You Won't Believe What's in Your Turkey Burger; Most Americans clueless about global scientific consensus on climate change;
    Billionaire Koch Bros attack renewable energy standards in the states & launch new front group; Oslo runs out of garbage, imports it from rest of the world; Climate Change: Top Investors Will Feel Heat of New Epoch ... PLUS: Unburnable Fuel: Either governments are not serious about climate change or fossil-fuel firms are overvalued ... and much, MUCH more! ...

    STORIES DISCUSSED IN TODAY'S 'GREEN NEWS REPORT'...

    'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (Stuff we didn't have time for in today's audio report)...

    • Unburnable fuel: Either governments are not serious about climate change or fossil-fuel firms are overvalued (The Economist) [emphasis added]:
      Markets can misprice risk, as investors in subprime mortgages discovered in 2008. Several recent reports suggest that markets are now overlooking the risk of "unburnable carbon". The share prices of oil, gas and coal companies depend in part on their reserves. The more fossil fuels a firm has underground, the more valuable its shares. But what if some of those reserves can never be dug up and burned? ... If governments were determined to implement their climate policies, a lot of that carbon would have to be left in the ground...
    • What would 'wartime mobilization' to fight climate change look like? (David Roberts, Grist):
      [The] scale and speed seem to demand something like wartime mobilization. That metaphor gets used a lot. I've used it many times myself. But is it apt? And what would it mean to take it seriously? There's been lots of academic attention to the technology side of rapid, large-scale mitigation, but little attention to the governance side. How could a country engineer such a transition? What powers and institutions would be necessary?
    • You Won't Believe What's in Your Turkey Burger: Yes, there's fecal bacteria in your ground turkey (Mother Jones)
    • Closing the Consensus Gap on Climate Change (John Cook, Weather Underground):
      On average, the general public think less than half of climate scientists agree that humans are causing global warming. The reality is 97%. There is a huge gap between public perception of the scientific consensus on human-caused global warming and reality.
    • Why Two Rich Men from Kansas Want to Dismantle Maine's Renewable Energy Policy...And Why
      YOU Should Care       [PDF[ (Maine Conservation Alliance): Are We Debating Renewable Energy or the Koch Brothers' Profits?
    • Kochs Form New Dark Money Group To Hide Political Activities From Public: Koch's new "Business League" will keep political spending in the shadows. (Alternet)
    • Oslo runs out of garbage, imports it from rest of the world (Treehugger)
    • Oil drilling technology leaps, clean energy lags (AP) [emphasis added]:
      Technology created an energy revolution over the past decade - just not the one we expected.... Fossil fuels? They were going to be expensive and scarce, relics of an earlier, dirtier age. But in the race to conquer energy technology, Old Energy is winning.
    • Climate Change: Top Investors Will Feel Heat of New Epoch (Bloomberg) [emphasis added]:
      Just how great are today's great investors? We might not know, not yet, because they've become great in a great time for investing.
      ...
      "What if there is a future that demands that an investor --- a seemingly great investor --- change course or at least learn new tricks? Ah, now, that would be a test of greatness: the ability to adapt to a new epoch," [Pimco co-founder Bill] Gross wrote. The interesting thing about Gross's choice of words is that in the time he has been an investor, there has been a change of epoch --- a geological epoch --- that might itself prove to be the ultimate test for elite investors.
    • Government Study Cites Mix of Factors in Death of Honeybees (NY Times):
      officials in the United States Department of Agriculture, the Environmental Protection Agency and others involved in the bee study said that there was not enough evidence to support a ban on one group of pesticides, and that the costs of such action might exceed the benefits.
    • A Key Experiment to Probe the Future of Our Acidifying Oceans (Yale 360): In a Swedish fjord, European researchers are conducting an ambitious experiment aimed at better understanding how ocean acidification will affect marine life. Ultimately, these scientists hope to determine which species might win and which might lose in a more acidic ocean.
    • General Motors urges Obama and Congress to unite on climate change (Guardian UK): Auto giant adds signature to Climate Declaration, which calls on government to pass climate laws that would help economy.
    • San Onofre nuclear power plant held together with masking tape, broomsticks (UPI) [emphasis added]:
      An inside source snapped a photo inside the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) in San Diego showing plastic bags, masking tape and broom sticks used to stem a massive leaky pipe.
      ...
      Records show SONGS staff reported "hundreds of corrosion notifications" and "degraded equipment." Staff sent a letter to management saying SONGS "clearly has a serious corrosion problem" throughout the plant.
    • French Town Has Too Much Money To Spend Thanks To Wind Turbines, Mayor Says (Huffington Post Green) [emphasis added]:
      According to Couzinié, the town's budget has increased more than fivefold in the past three years --- from 400,000 euros (about $523,000) to 2.3 million euros (more than $3 million) --- as a result of the 11 wind turbines that were installed in 2009. For a town with a population of less than 200 people, the available funds are much more than Arfons needs to thrive."It's as if a rain of gold fell on the village," Couzinié told TV station France 3.
    • U.S.-born kids have more allergies, asthma (Reuters):
      Kids and teens who are born abroad and immigrate to the United States are about half as likely to have asthma and allergies as those who are born in the U.S., according to a new study.
    • How Far Can Climate Change Go?: (Scientific American) [emphasis added]:
      How far can we push the planet?

  • New Research: World on Track for Climate Disaster:
  • Essential Climate Science Background:

    • Categories: Brad Blog

    KPFK 'BradCast': Obama's Gitmo Deception and Much More...

    Wed, 05/01/2013 - 21:54

    Yesterday, during his morning press conference, President Obama was asked by CBS' Bill Plante about the ongoing hunger strike by prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

    Obama's response: "Well, I think it is critical for us to understand that Guantanamo is not necessary to keep America safe. It is expensive. It is inefficient. It hurts us in terms of our international standing. It lessens cooperation with our allies on counterterrorism efforts. It is a recruitment tool for extremists. It needs to be closed."

    He added that he was planning "to go back at" his effort to close the prison which was blocked back in 2009 by Congress.

    But did he really mean any of it? I spoke with Truthout.org's investigative journalist Jason Leopold on the KPFK/Pacifica Radio BradCast about that very question today. Leopold has been covering Gitmo for a decade now, recently returned from a visit there and plans to be heading back soon.

    The conversation was both enlightening and enraging, particularly given that, despite his suggestion to the contrary, Obama already has the ability to immediately free about half of the prisoners there who were cleared of all charges at least three years ago, if not longer. He could do it today...if he wanted to...or had the political courage to do it.

    Also on this week's show, a bit of a rant on "blaming Bush"; the one woman who could have kept Dubya's disastrous reign from ever happening in the first place; a heads-up on the upcoming 100% unverifiable Special Election for the U.S. House in SC; some Green News with Desi Doyen; and, maybe, I decide to come out as both black and gay...But you'll have to tune in to find out if I do!

    Download MP3 or listen online below...
    [See post to listen to audio]


    Categories: Brad Blog

    'Green News Report' - April 30, 2013

    Tue, 04/30/2013 - 17:20


     

    IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Obama smacks down attempts to politicize science research; EPA smacks down Alaska's proposed Pebble Mine; Europe smacks down bee-killing pesticides; PLUS: Dr. James Hansen smacks back at Canada's "Neanderthal" government ... All those smack downs and more in today's Green News Report!

    Listen online here, or Download MP3 (6 mins)...

    Link: Embed:

    Got comments, tips, love letters, hate mail? Drop us a line at GreenNews@BradBlog.com or right here at the comments link below. All GNRs are always archived at GreenNews.BradBlog.com.

    IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): Portable solar cell sticks to your window; Shocking new numbers on bottled water; French town has too much money, thanks to wind turbines; Tests show pervasive chemicals in Chicago's air; Al Jazeera special report: Fueling geopolitics - the oil saga; China becoming global climate change leader; TN lawmaker says animal-rights activists are like 'rapists'; The 'dark side' of energy independence; Haiti's RE-forestation plan; Obama nominates Charlotte, NC mayor for Transportation; Massive Sacramento Delta water project moves forward; Why do US-born kids have more allergies, asthma?...PLUS: Conservative shoppers like eco-friendly lightbulbs - just don't say it's 'eco-friendly' ... and much, MUCH more! ...

    STORIES DISCUSSED IN TODAY'S 'GREEN NEWS REPORT'...

    'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (Stuff we didn't have time for in today's audio report)...

    • Just stick this portable outlet to your window to start using solar power: It’s a portable socket that gets its power from the sun rather than the grid. You plug into a window instead of into the wall. It’s easy. (Grist)
    • VIDEO: Fuelling geopolitics: The oil saga (Al Jazeera English):
      As the global competition for energy heats up, we examine how new players are rewriting the rules of the great oil game.
    • Chemicals on federal radar pervasive in Chicago air (Environmental Health News):
      On the brink of federal regulatory review, chemicals in deodorants, lotions and conditioners are showing up in Chicago’s air at levels that scientists call alarming. The airborne compounds – cyclic siloxanes – are traveling to places as far as the Arctic, and can be toxic to aquatic life. “These chemicals are just everywhere,” said Keri Hornbuckle, an engineering professor at the University of Iowa.
    • China becoming global climate change leader: study (AFP) [emphasis added]:
      China is rapidly assuming a global leadership role on climate change alongside the United States, a new study said Monday, but it warned greenhouse gas emissions worldwide continue to rise strongly. The report by the independent Australian-based Climate Commission, "The Critical Decade: International Action on Climate Change" presents an overview of action in the last nine months.
    • French Town Has Too Much Money To Spend Thanks To Wind Turbines, Mayor Says (Huffington Post Green) [emphasis added]:
      According to Couzinié, the town's budget has increased more than fivefold in the past three years --- from 400,000 euros (about $523,000) to 2.3 million euros (more than $3 million) --- as a result of the 11 wind turbines that were installed in 2009. For a town with a population of less than 200 people, the available funds are much more than Arfons needs to thrive."It's as if a rain of gold fell on the village," Couzinié told TV station France 3.
    • Slaughterhouse-Profiteering State Lawmaker Suggests Animal Rights Activists Are Like Rapists (Think Progress) [emphasis added]:
      The representative in question, Andy Holt (R-Dresden), owns and operates a facility that raises pigs, cows, and goats for slaughter.... Humane Society Public Policy Coordinator Kayci McCloud.. asked Holt to reconsider his support for Tennessee’s recently passed “ag-gag” law. Ag-gag laws contain a variety of provisions (varying from law to law) designed to make it impossible for undercover investigators to document animal cruelty or unsafe farming conditions on farms like Holt’s.
    • Bottled Water Sales: The Shocking Reality (Significant Figures by Peter Gleick:
      Thirty-six years ago, this industry didn’t exist.
      ...
      Despite having one of the best municipal tap water systems in the world, American consumers are flocking to commercial bottled water, which costs thousands of times more per gallon. Why?
    • The Dark Side of Energy Independence (NY Times) [emphasis added]:
      [E]nergy independence will not spell the end of American engagement in that region. On the contrary, lower energy prices will undermine the stability of the Persian Gulf monarchies, whose hefty oil revenues have allowed them to win their populations’ loyalties through patronage and a lack of taxation. These countries do not always share American values or help advance American interests, but anything that destabilizes them would create problems that Washington could not afford to ignore.
    • Haiti aiming to plant 1.2 million trees in a single day: The big dig is planned for May 1. It's part of an ambitious government effort to reforest the country after suffering from landslides and desertification. (CS Monitor)
    • Wild Weather Swings May Be a Sign of Climate Change (Climate Central)
    • Obama touts Mayor Foxx’s transit leadership for Transportation Secretary:
      Smooth confirmation expected (Charlotte Observer) [emphasis added]:

      "[I]f you ask Anthony how that happened, he’ll tell you that one of the reasons is that Charlotte made one of the largest investments in transportation in the city’s history.” Obama touted Foxx’s leadership on a new streetcar project, expanding the city’s international airport and extending Charlotte’s light rail system. The president said Foxx had demonstrated how investments in infrastructure could create jobs and spur economic growth during tough times.
    • The consensus seems to be: Let somebody else fix the Delta (LA Times):
      When it comes to fixing the hub of California’s water system, most parties would prefer it if someone else made the sacrifices.
    • BP Posts $4.2 Billion In Q1 Profits As Its Chemical Dispersants Continue To Harm The Gulf (Climate Progress)
    • The limits of climate adaptation are social, not physical or economic (David Roberts, Grist):
      Lots of people are averse to large-scale suffering. But lots of people are also averse to substantial mitigation measures. This leaves them placing a great deal of faith in adaptation.
      ...
      Now, on the merits, this is crazy. Our best understanding is that preventing (mitigating) a degree of global temperature rise is much, much cheaper than adapting to it. Compared to adaptation, mitigation is a huge bargain, whether you’re measuring by money, time, disruption, ecosystem integrity, whatever.
    • George Will, Anti-Climate-Science Loon, Strikes Again (New York Magazine):
      Any remotely honest person would look at that data and recognize that the trend has been rising.
    • U.S.-born kids have more allergies, asthma (Reuters):
      Kids and teens who are born abroad and immigrate to the United States are about half as likely to have asthma and allergies as those who are born in the U.S., according to a new study.
    • What If We Never Run Out of Oil? (The Atlantic): New technology and a little-known energy source suggest that fossil fuels may not be finite. This would be a miracle --- and a nightmare.
    • None of the world's top industries would be profitable if they paid for the natural capital they use (Grist)
    • How Far Can Climate Change Go?: (Scientific American) [emphasis added]:
      How far can we push the planet?

  • New Research: World on Track for Climate Disaster:
  • Essential Climate Science Background:

    • Categories: Brad Blog

    Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor: 'Maybe' Bush v. Gore Was a Mistake

    Mon, 04/29/2013 - 15:22

    "Maybe"? Ya think?! From Chicago Tribune, on their recent interview with former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor about 2000's infamous Bush v. Gore case...

    Looking back, O'Connor said, she isn't sure the high court should have taken the case.

    "It took the case and decided it at a time when it was still a big election issue," O'Connor said during a talk Friday with the Tribune editorial board. "Maybe the court should have said, 'We're not going to take it, goodbye.'"

    The case, she said, "stirred up the public" and "gave the court a less-than-perfect reputation."

    "Obviously the court did reach a decision and thought it had to reach a decision," she said. "It turned out the election authorities in Florida hadn't done a real good job there and kind of messed it up. And probably the Supreme Court added to the problem at the end of the day."

    "Probably"?! Ya think?! The paper goes on to explain that O'Connor's "vote in the 5-4 Bush v. Gore decision effectively gave Republican George W. Bush a victory over his Democratic opponent, then-Vice President Al Gore." That, after the U.S. Supreme Court had stopped the public hand-counting of the votes cast by the people of Florida.

    Had O'Connor and friends not stopped the state-wide hand count, they would have found, as a consortium of media and academics did afterwards, that Gore defeated Bush by every conceivable counting standard in the state of Florida.

    Contrast O'Connor's thoughtful, if ridiculously-too-late response to the question of the controversial Bush v. Gore, with that of the still-serving U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who was seen over the weekend yucking it up with Bill O'Reilly of Fox "News" at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. When asked, in 2007, about the case which allowed five Supreme Court justices to install a U.S. President over the will of the people, he responded that it was "water over the deck", and Americans just need to "get over it."

    Four years after Bush v. Gore, in 2004, Democrats vowed not to let that happen again, of course. Their Presidential nominee that time, then Senator John Kerry, promised he would not concede until every vote was counted. Despite massive reports of fraud, particularly in Ohio, and Exit Polls finding he had won in swingstate-after-swingstate, countering the still-unverified electronic results reporting that he had lost in many of those same states, Kerry flip-flopped and conceded the day after the election.

    Remarkably, now that an unverified and unverifiable election in Venezuela has recently resulted in the U.S. Government's favored candidate being announced the loser, Kerry, now serving as Sec. of State, is calling for a full hand-count of "paper receipts" in that country because he claims to be concerned about the "confidence of the Venezuelan people in the quality of the vote," as our own Ernie Canning detailed earlier today. Yes, that's what Kerry really said.

    Do you suppose he, like O'Connor, may someday realize that "maybe" he made a mistake too?

    * * *Please support The BRAD BLOG's fiercely independent, award-winning coverage of your electoral system, as available from no other media outlet in the nation --- now in our TENTH YEAR! --- with a donation to help us keep going (Snail mail, more options here). If you like, we'll send you some great, award-winning election integrity documentary films in return! Details right here...


    Categories: Brad Blog

    U.S. Government Demands Hand-Count of 'Paper Ballots' in Venezuelan Election, But Not Our Own

    Mon, 04/29/2013 - 08:35

    Over the past decade, The BRAD BLOG, has become one of the nation's largest repositories of articles documenting the folly of e-voting. Thousands of articles at this site, written over the years by multiple journalists, computer experts, scientists, whistle-blowers and election integrity advocates, have pointed to academic and government studies, electoral train wrecks in election-after-election and out-and-out system crashes resulting in long lines, lost votes and denial of both service and democracy on Election Day.

    We've even documented instances in which the official results were not merely absurd, but in some cases, virtually impossible --- from the negative 16,022 votes registered for Al Gore by a Volusia County, Florida optical-scan system during the contested 2000 Presidential Election to the thousands of electronic votes which simply disappeared after election night in Monroe County, Arkansas' 2010 state primary, just to mention a couple.

    With rare exception, these very real, scientifically-based and independently verifiable concerns about the threat to democracy posed by a lack of transparency in how, if at all, votes are counted within the confines of computer vote tabulators, have, at best, been all but ignored by the mainstream corporate media, or, worse, scoffed at by the likes of "journalists" like Chuck Todd, NBC News' supposed election expert, as little more than "conspiracy garbage." With rare exception (e.g. last year in Palm Beach County, FL where, as a result of a 100% hand-count of paper ballots, several "losing" candidates, as initially determined by the Sequoia optical-scan tabulators, were actually found to be the winners) election-after-election has been decided in this nation without so much as a single ballot having been counted by a human being before results, right or wrong, are announced to the public.

    The extent to which the U.S. government has ignored these scientific concerns was encapsulated by the fact that, last Fall, the President of the United States saw fit to cast his early vote on the oft-failed, incredibly-vulnerable, easily-hacked and 100% unverifiable Sequoia AVC Edge Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) touch-screen voting system in Chicago --- a system manufactured by the same voting machine company which, according to its former employees, deliberately sabotaged the punch card paper stock that was bound for use in Miami-Dade, Florida during the 2000 Presidential Election. That same tabulation system, relied upon by the President in Chicago, was also the one which declared the wrong "winners" in three different races in the Palm Beach County elections held earlier last year.

    President Obama, in an apparent reference to the secrecy of the vote, said "I can't tell you who I voted for." He either didn't realize or didn't care how ironic that statement was given that it is scientifically impossible to ever know if his vote, or anyone else who cast a vote on that same 100% unverifiable e-voting system, was recorded accurately, or at all. It disappeared into the electronic black hole on equipment now ostensibly owned by Dominion Voting Systems, the Canadian corporation which purchased Sequoia in 2010. The Sequoia-manufactured, Dominion-owned e-voting machine Obama used to cast his vote last year was the trade secret Intellectual Property of yet another company: Smartmatic Voting Systems, a Venezuela-based, international e-voting systems manufacturer and supplier which had long ago been tied to the late President Hugo Chávez.

    But a funny thing happened after the results of Venezuela's recent Presidential election were announced by the country's National Electoral Council (CNE). According to the electronic central tabulators of the country's 100% unverifiable Smartmatic DRE e-voting systems, Chávez protégé, Nicolas Maduro, had narrowly defeated the U.S.-backed Henrique Capriles.

    At that moment --- and only for Venezuela's election, clearly --- both the U.S. government and U.S. mainstream corporate media suddenly became election integrity converts.

    They insist on a 100% hand-count of the DRE-produced paper receipts because, as observed by ABC News, the CNE results are based upon "information that is sent electronically from each voting machine to the central vote counting hub," and not "from a manual count of the voting receipts deposited in ballot boxes." That, of course, is almost the exact same way that President Obama's vote in Chicago was tallied, either accurately or not, last year.

    When asked by the AP's Matthew Lee whether the U.S. would recognize the Maduro government now that the election had been certified by the CNE, the State Department's Patrick Ventrell said earlier this month: "We're not there yet." His sentiment would be echoed by Secretary of State John Kerry, ironically enough, in an appearance before Congress. Both Ventrell and Kerry claimed to be concerned about the "confidence of the Venezuelan people in the quality of the vote."

    Setting aside the fact that there is no way to know whether any computer-printed paper receipt accurately reflects the will of any voter in any election, the event underscores, once again, the striking duplicity of both the U.S. government and the corporate-owned mainstream media on the subject of democracy...

    Unverifiable count

    It is not altogether clear whether those calling for a hand-count in Venezuela understand that there are no actual paper ballots known to have been verified by any voter, to be hand-counted. As observed by the Chief Justice of the Venezuela Supreme Court Luisa Estella Morales, "the electoral process is absolutely automated in a way that manual counting does not exist." In fact, the Chief Justice observed, under a provision in that nation's constitution, adopted in 1999, manual counts were "eliminated."

    The paper trail referred to by the ABC News report are simply printouts produced by the Smartmatic DREs, aka, a so-called "Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail" (VVPAT), similar to the ones produced by many of the DRE machines still shamefully used in U.S. elections. Unlike hand-marked paper ballots, VVPATs do not provide a reliable source for determining the accuracy of the vote count. As revealed by an MIT/Caltech study of the Sequoia DRE system, the vast majority of voters don't even bother to check their VVPATs at the end of the voting process. Another study, performed as part of a doctoral thesis by Rice University's Sarah P. Everett, found that, during a mock election, nearly two-thirds of voters who did review the final confirmation of their vote on the computer, failed to notice when their votes had been flipped by the system.

    Everett observed, "it is highly unlikely that voters will detect changes to their ballots on the VVPAT, that prints out on a roll of paper next to the machine, if they are not even noticing them on a screen presented directly in front of them."

    In September 2008, the Computer Security Group at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) released a short video demonstrating how a single person can hack an election on a touch-screen voting system --- even one with a VVPAT --- in such a way that it is highly unlikely that the manipulation would ever be detected by either the public or by election officials.

    In the UCSB video, posted again below, the hack of a Sequoia voting system being prepared for use in an entire county is done in approximately 3 seconds, by a single person with simple insider access and a $10 USB thumb drive. Every machine used in the county, in such a case, would be affected by the manipulation. Moreover, the hack would not be discovered by pre-election "Logic and Accuracy" testing --- in cases where election officials actually bother to perform such tests prior to elections --- nor would it likely be discovered even in the event of a complete, 100% post-election audit of the touch-screen "paper-trail" records. That is the same sort of 100% post-election hand-count that U.S. officials are now calling for, for some reason, in Venezuela.

    Here's the demonstration of the UCSB Sequoia hack...


    PART 1
    PART 2

    The UCSB video was made as part of the "Top to Bottom Review" carried out by CA Secretary of State Debra Bowen (D). As a result of that review, in 2008, the same Sequoia DRE on which the President of the United States cast an early vote in October 2012 was decertified for use within the Golden State, with limited exceptions for disabled voters who choose to use them, as per federal law. Indeed, during the 2012 general election in U.S., despite the findings of the world-class computer security experts who worked on Bowen's study, the Sequoia AVC Edge touch-screen was used in 234 jurisdictions across all or part of some 13 states.

    Why conceal Smartmatic/Sequoia/Dominion connection?

    A critical feature of the U.S. corporate media's response to studies like the ones cited above is not simply that it has chosen to ignore the documented vulnerabilities of our e-voting systems, but has also largely ignored Brad Friedman's in-depth reporting about the confirmed link between Smartmatic, Sequoia and Dominion, as well as the remarkable lengths to which Sequoia and Dominion have gone to downplay, or all together conceal, their connections to the Venezuela-based e-voting system vendor.

    In May 2008, Friedman not only exposed the fact that Smartmatic retained the proprietary, trade secret protected IP rights in the Sequoia DREs, but documented that the connection was fraudulently concealed by Sequoia's then CEO Jack Blaine during testimony to Chicago Alderman Edward M. Burke and the Chair of Chicago's Board of Election Commissioners Langdon D. Neal.

    Subsequently, in 2010, Friedman exclusively reported that Dominion lied about the company's Intellectual Property being owned by the Chávez-tied company when the Canadian firm initially announced their takeover of Sequoia's assets that year, becoming this country's second largest voting machine provider.

    While the deception is, of itself, disturbing, the question naturally arises --- why?

    The answer may have at least been hinted at in a civil complaint filed late last year by Smartmatic in the Delaware Chancery Court. The complaint alleges that Dominion breached a 2009 License Agreement in which Dominion allegedly granted Smartmatic "a worldwide license to market, make, use, and sell precinct count optical scan voting systems (PCOS) utilizing Dominion's optical scan voting system technology."

    The legal dispute arose when Dominion began competing directly over PCOS international sales. The dispute gave rise to a concern, expressed by The Manila Times, that Smartmatic's ability "to correct errors" in PCOS machines it had sold to the Philippines would be compromised if Smartmatic lacked access to the Dominion software source code.

    The flip-side of The Manila Times' concern could arise in Dominion's inability to correct "errors" in the Sequoia AVC Edge DREs because of Smartmatic's trade secret, proprietary control over that touch screen's source code.

    Long time readers of The BRAD BLOG, who are familiar with the Clint Curtis story, however, realize that just one outrageous aspect, when it comes to issues of election integrity in this country, is that any private e-voting system vendor retains trade secret proprietary control over our public elections, even as they also conceal actual vote-counting from the public.

    In a sworn affidavit, first published by The BRAD BLOG in 2004, and again in subsequent sworn Congressional testimony, Curtis, a computer programmer and former Republican, alleged that, in October 2000, former Congressman Tom Feeney (R-FL) asked the firm Curtis was then working for, to design a prototype for e-voting software capable of flipping the vote in South Florida. Feeney, according to Curtis, wanted the vote-flipping routines to remain undetectable even if someone gained access to the source codes. Curtis told him that was "virtually impossible," according to his affidavit and testimony, but that as long as the source code was not revealed, "any vote fraud would remain invisible."

    The real problem is not whether private e-voting system vendors can conceal the source codes from one another, but why we the people permit any private e-voting vendor to conceal the source of an otherwise invisible electronic count. But even revealing the source code would not reveal if machines tabulate votes correctly, as there is no way to know if the source code examined on the Monday before an election is the same code used during the election on Tuesday.

    We the people have permitted all of this even in the face of patently absurd results, such as the one which occurred when the 100% unverifiable ES&S iVotronic DREs in South Carolina produced inexplicable results claiming that the unemployed and virtually unknown Alvin Greene had somehow defeated the respected, well-known Circuit Judge Vic Rawl to win the nomination for the U.S. Senate in that state's 2010 Democratic primary election.

    Those same 100% unverifiable ES&S iVotronics are still in use in South Carolina and elsewhere. They will, next week, determine the outcome of this year's special election for a U.S. Congressional seat in the much-watched race between Elizabeth Colbert Bush (D) (Stephen Colbert's sister) and former Governor and disgraced philanderer Mark Sanford (R). And, if it runs true to form, the MSM will report on who "wins" that election just after the close of polls next Tuesday night without noting that almost every single vote cast in the race --- save for those cast on paper-based absentee ballots --- can never be verified by any human being as having been recorded or tabulated accurately.

    'Democracy' as pretense

    Whether one turns to the insider account provided by John Perkins in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man or any of hundreds of available academic works, the one salient feature is that, for more than 60 years, U.S. foreign policy has been grounded upon the financial interests of a U.S. based, multinational corporate empire. The reality is that our government has had no qualms about aligning itself with harsh, right-wing dictatorships, so long as those dictatorships act in the interest of what Perkins dubbed "the corporatocracy."

    Instead of supporting democracy abroad, our government has, time-and-again, used subversive means to overthrow democratically elected governments --- e.g., the CIA-supported coup d’états, which deposed the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, Iran 1953, the democratically elected government of President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, Guatamala, 1954, and the democratically elected socialist President Salvador Allende, Chile Sept. 11, 1973. Although Iraq, in 2003, was under control of a dictator, only the deceived and the naive still actually believe the unprovoked 2003 invasion of that oil-rich nation had anything to do with either WMDs or the democratic aspirations of the Iraqi people.

    And, as documented by Professors Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent, for more than half a century, the corporate-owned U.S. media has played the role of a propaganda outlet for the corporatocracy, slandering the integrity of foreign governments who do not hew to the corporate line while minimizing the anti-democratic and often brutal features of U.S. supported dictators who have sold out their own people for a slice of the corporate pie.

    This pattern continued throughout the years of the Hugo Chávez Presidency, where the U.S. MSM, led by its paper-of-record, The New York Times, sought to portray the aborted attempt to topple the Chávez government by a U.S.-supported coup d’état as a "pro-democracy move."

    Consistency in duplicity

    Perhaps the best that can be said is that, when it comes to the gap between election integrity concerns at home and abroad, the U.S. government and the corporate MSM have been consistent in their selective outrage.

    For example, as observed by Steven F. Freeman, Ph.D. and Joel Bleifuss in Was the 2004 Election Stolen? Exit Polls, Election Fraud and the Official Count, the U.S. and the corporate MSM will routinely cite significant variances between Exit Polls and official election results as evidence of election fraud --- but only as applied to foreign elections. When those variances occur in domestic elections, as was the case in the 2004 Presidential election in the U.S., the government and the media not only presume that the error is to be found in the Exit Polls, not the election results, but the pollsters actually "adjust" (corrupt?) their Exit Poll results to conform to the official count. That is not "conspiracy theory". That is simply a fact, which Exit Pollsters themselves will confirm.

    The fact that John "can't concede fast enough" Kerry would ask for a Venezuelan hand-count in 2013, out of a supposed concern about the "confidence of the Venezuelan people in the quality of the vote", is particularly ironic --- and galling. Where was the concern for the confidence of the American people in the quality of the vote in the face of significant evidence of GOP election fraud in the Ohio 2004 Presidential Election, including what some have described as a classic man-in-the-middle manipulation of the computer-reported results?

    So, if nothing else, U.S. government/media duplicity in the variance between their recognition of a need for hand-counts of paper ballots for foreign elections, while the need is all but ignored in the U.S., is, at least, consistent with past duplicity.

    Who are we to judge?

    It has been a consistent theme at The BRAD BLOG that election integrity is "not a matter of Right and Left but of right and wrong." The ideal would be for all nations, including our own, to adopt Democracy's Gold Standard --- hand-marked paper ballots, publicly hand-counted at each precinct on Election Night, with results posted decentrally at the precincts before ballots are moved anywhere.

    But one can best lead by example. As long as the U.S. refuses to adopt election integrity for its own domestic elections, it is hardly in a position to criticize a foreign government for a lack thereof. To the contrary, its duplicity has opened the door to the charge leveled by Bolivian President Evo Morales that the U.S. demand for a recount in Venezuela amounts to an "open meddling, which looks to create unrest, leading to further interference with a coup d’état."

    So who are we to argue with him?

    * * *Ernest A. Canning has been an active member of the California state bar since 1977. Mr. Canning has received both undergraduate and graduate degrees in political science as well as a juris doctor. He is also a Vietnam vet (4th Infantry, Central Highlands 1968). Follow him on Twitter: @Cann4ing.

    * * *Please support The BRAD BLOG's fiercely independent, award-winning coverage of your electoral system, as available from no other media outlet in the nation --- now in our TENTH YEAR! --- with a donation to help us keep going (Snail mail, more options here). If you like, we'll send you some great, award-winning election integrity documentary films in return! Details right here...


    Categories: Brad Blog

    Bill O'Reilly and his Date Antonin Scalia at Last Night's White House Correspondents' Dinner

    Sun, 04/28/2013 - 13:11

    Good pals...

    We'll caption this one: "Tide goes in, tide goes out. Never a miscommunication."


    Categories: Brad Blog

    Explosive News...

    Fri, 04/26/2013 - 16:25

    Huh. Looking back over the logo photos for our last three Green News Reports in a row (April 18, 23 and 25 of 2013), there seems to be a common thread developing. And it's not a good one.

    And, with all of that, none of them even have anything to do with last week's bombing in Boston.


    Categories: Brad Blog

    A Penis on Mars

    Thu, 04/25/2013 - 19:09

    USA! 'Nuff said...


    Categories: Brad Blog

    'Green News Report' - April 25, 2013

    Thu, 04/25/2013 - 17:30


     

    IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: As the nation mourns the horrific West Fertilizer explosion in TX, the chemical industry pushes for more fertilizer plants and less regulation; Yet another fossil fuel explosion on the Gulf Coast; California now has more solar workers than actors; PLUS: East London's Chief Flusher is turning fat into electricity ... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

    Listen online here, or Download MP3 (6 mins)...

    Link: Embed:

    Got comments, tips, love letters, hate mail? Drop us a line at GreenNews@BradBlog.com or right here at the comments link below. All GNRs are always archived at GreenNews.BradBlog.com.

    IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): New fossil fuel frontiers pose 'catastrophic' threat to global recovery; A master class on the state of clean-energy investment (video); State of the Air 2013: where does your city rank?; SF votes to divest from fossil fuels; Shale mining controversy under Great Barrier Reef; Fox News concocts conspiracy for the phrase 'climate change'; UN climate chief hopeful on climate treaty; US military faulted for 'burn pits' in Afghanistan... PLUS: VIDEO: Fox "News" concocts conspiracy for the phrase "Climate Change" ... and much, MUCH more! ...

    STORIES DISCUSSED IN TODAY'S 'GREEN NEWS REPORT'...

    'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (Stuff we didn't have time for in today's audio report)...

  • New Research: World on Track for Climate Disaster:
  • Essential Climate Science Background:

    • Categories: Brad Blog

    KPFK 'BradCast': Live Report from West, TX Fertilizer Plant Explosion and Other Overlooked Stories From Last Week's News Week from Hell

    Wed, 04/24/2013 - 22:25

    On today's BradCast on KPFK/Pacifica Radio, we had a tremendous report from on the ground in West, TX, by RT America producer and reporter Ramon Galindo. He's been there since last Wednesday, having arrived on the scene just hours after the huge explosion at the West Fertilizer Company plant.

    To date, 15 have been killed by the blast, including 12 first responders, with nearly 200 others injured. The explosion covered some 37 blocks and left a crater nearly 100 feet wide and 10 feet deep at the plant itself. Galindo offers the latest on how the tiny town of 2,600 is holding up, how they are dealing with concerns about governmental oversight of the plant (or lack thereof), and the continuing investigation into the mystery of what may have caused the disaster.

    In an attempt to shed some light on the several other huge news events which received far less coverage than they would have otherwise, during last week's News Week from Hell, I also covered the new bi-partisan report on torture by the Bush Admin after 9/11 and the latest in the investigation of the attempted ricin attack on President Obama, Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) and a judge in Lee County, Mississippi.

    All of that, a few listener phone calls, and Desi Doyen with the latest Green News Report and more, on today's KPFK BradCast...

    Download MP3 or listen online below...
    [See post to listen to audio]

    P.S. The BradCast is now also heard on the Progressive Voices channel on TuneIn, Saturdays at 6p ET and Sundays at 4p ET.


    Categories: Brad Blog

    Exclusive: L.A. County Registrar Says 'No' to Internet Voting, But 'Yes' to Unverifiable Touch-Screen Voting for New Election System

    Wed, 04/24/2013 - 09:05

    The good news: When the largest voting jurisdiction in the nation gets its new voting system, perhaps as early as 2015, it will not including Internet Voting, according to Dean Logan, Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk of Los Angeles. The bad news: It will very likely include touch-screen computers and, with them, 100% unverifiable voting.

    I interviewed Logan last week on my KPFK/Pacifica Radio show [full audio interview is at the bottom of this article], and we had a very informative discussion about what voters in Los Angeles may have to look forward to in the coming years, as well as many of you in the rest of the country, since the new system is being designed with an eye towards selling it to other counties in California as well as in the rest of the country.

    So this is not just a local L.A. story. It's likely to affect the way that votes are cast and tallied in much of the nation. It's well worth paying attention to, even if, unlike me, you don't live here.

    Los Angeles County alone "has more voters than 42 of the 50 states," according to Logan's office. It features nearly 5,000 precincts. Well over 3 million votes were cast in this one county alone during the November 6, 2012 Presidential Election. When Logan took over the job of Registrar after our previous one resigned, suddenly, just months before the 2008 President Election, he had a monster of a job to take over. It's still a monster. And it may soon get even more gargantuan as he attempts to re-work, re-design and, indeed, re-think how voters vote here, and as we move from our current publicly-owned voting system to our next publicly-owned voting system. (L.A. is one of the very few jurisdictions in the nation which owns, maintains and designs its own system. Most similar systems in the rest of the state and nation are proprietary, owned by the private companies which make them, and don't allow even the election officials in those jurisdictions access to their "trade-secret" software and source code.)

    While, happily, Logan offered me some assurance that we won't be casting votes over the Internet with his new system --- an assurance that should bring some measure of relief to both Election Integrity advocates as well as the consensus of computer science and security experts who are also experts in voting systems --- there is still much cause for concern, as this still-unknown voting system begins to take shape...

    OUT WITH THE OLD?

    Logan began the process of finding a new voting system back in 2009. At the time he said he was open to any and all types of voting and tabulation systems, and wanted to find out what it was that voters of L.A. wanted from such a system. He formed the Voting System Assessment Project (VSAP) to work with "stakeholders" of all sorts, hold discussion forums, survey voters, establish focus groups, review various ideas and even open up the process to design ideas submitted from the Internet.

    I was invited to participate in some of the early meetings of the VSAP, but I asked him during our conversation on last week's show why he felt our current system --- known as InkaVote Plus, a variation of the old punchcard system, now modified to use inked bubbles instead of punched chads, producing ballots which are then optically-scanned by a computer tabulator --- needed to be replaced. He described the system and its software as "outdated."

    "Similar to the parts on the physical equipment, it's hard to find people with the skill level or the background to make modifications to that software if and when it's necessary," he explained. "So, we end up being in a situation where we're really one regulatory or legislative change away from being obsolete."

    "We came close to that when California switched to a 'top-two' primary system," he told me, referring to the 2010 state-wide ballot initiative which did away with our partisan primaries. All party candidates run in the same race now in our primaries, and the "top-two" vote-getters of any party end up going on to compete head-to-head in the general election. (The new system, sometimes referred to as a "Cajun Primary", has a number of undemocratic features that can adversely affect Democrats, Republicans and third-parties to boot, as The BRAD BLOG has detailed in past articles. None of those failings, however, are Logan's fault, of course.)

    That change, he said, "required some modification to the system in order for the votes to be tabulated correctly. We almost were unable to accommodate that on the current voting system."

    Nonetheless, the county was able to modify the source code on the system in order to accommodate the mandated change after all, because L.A. owns its own hardware and software. "It's one of the unique things about L.A. County," he said. "It's one of the things that important to us."

    If a bill proposed by state Senator Alex Padilla (SB 360) now pending in the state Senate is adopted this year, it would remove California's long-time restriction against contracting and testing new voting systems before they are federally tested and certified. That would allow L.A. County to create its own system again. No federal testing would be required for it at all. But more on that in a moment.

    'TRANSPARENCY, SECURITY, ACCURACY, VERIFIABILITY'

    Logan explained that the principles for his new system were developed after focus groups, surveys and stake-holders described what was most important to them in a voting system. He says it has been a "user-driven project."

    "We wanted to know what voters thought, rather than just what we thought," he said, explaining that they have now hired a design firm, IDEO, to help implement the ideas. He describes the firm as "a human-centered design firm which has done some incredible work in both the public and private sector."

    IDEO will work to build a system based on the input received via the VSAP to date. That input includes the main principles Logan says voters, and his own office, were most concerned about: "Transparency, security, accuracy, verifiability. All of the things that those of who care about the integrity of elections value highly."

    In a recent piece by KPCC on Logan's new system, the idea of voting with smartphones was said to be a popular idea among those submitting ideas to an open "design challenge" process that was part of the VSAP.

    The idea may send shudders down the spines of those who understand the inherent insecurities of casting votes by the Internet, as well as Election Integrity advocates who understand the necessity of all citizens being able to oversee and authenticate the recording and tabulation of ballots.

    So what is Logan beginning to see as the basis for this new voting system? I asked if it will involve computers and/or cellphones. Mostly, I wanted to know if we were talking about a computer-based system of some sort, since, depending on how such systems are designed, it can be very difficult and frequently impossible to verify if even a single vote has been cast and tabulated as per any voter's intent on such systems.

    "I think there certainly will be computer-based or electronic-based components of the system," he told me. "Now what that looks like and where that plays into the final output of the ballot and how the ballot is tabulated, I think, remains to be seen."

    "When it comes time to build the machine," he said, "it's gonna have to meet those standards" of "transparency, security, accuracy and verifiability".

    Well, that sounds good, at least.

    NO INTERNET VOTING FOR L.A.

    We have long detailed the madness of Internet Voting. Among our coverage, we've documented a number of disastrous attempts at Internet Voting systems and the many dangers they pose to security and oversight, as well as the warnings against them by computer science and security experts, and Election Integrity experts.

    One need only look back to Washington D.C.'s disastrous experiment in Internet Voting, which almost went live in 2010 for overseas and military voters. The plans to use the system were scrapped at the last minute after it was hacked and completely taken over by "white hat hackers" (University of Michigan computer students and their professor), who had gained such total command of the system in mere hours that they were not only able to change every vote already cast on it during a mock election, but inserted a script into the system to change all future votes invisibly as well. They even modified all of the system's main passwords to thwart similar attempts to hack the system that they discovered to be ongoing by computers from both Iran and China.

    There have been many other disasters in Internet Voting --- from a 2012 online Canadian election attacked by some 10,000 computers, to a 2012 CA State University student body election that was hacked by one of the candidates in order to gain control of an annual salary and the student government's $300,000 budget, to this year's embarrassment by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences which attempted to use Internet Voting for the first time this year, to disturbing and questionable effect.

    The non-partisan election integrity group, VerifiedVoting.org posted a "Statement on the Dangers of Internet Voting in Public Elections," signed by nearly a dozen top computer science and security experts with backgrounds in electronic voting systems. The letter explains that "Cyber security experts at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Department of Homeland Security have warned that current Internet voting technologies should not be deployed in public elections," as they "cannot be properly protected and may be subject to undetectable alteration."

    "We conclude that the evidence does not exist to support casting ballots online in public elections," the scientists note. "There are too many unsolved security challenges that have yet to be overcome. In fact securing networks from cyber attack is a major national security concern that is as yet unresolved. Financial institutions, the FBI, the White House, the Department of Defense have all been breached. Major corporations like Lockheed Martin, Sony, Google, Adobe, Microsoft, and Northrop Grumman have also been breached. It is unreasonable to assume that any Internet voting system vendor today can repel a well funded partisan operative or nation state determined to manipulate, disrupt, or violate voter privacy in an online public election."

    After the infamous Washington D.C. hack, the scientists who testified about it to a D.C. Elections Committee unanimously agreed that the technology simply doesn't exist at this time --- and likely will not for a decade or more --- to even consider voting over the Internet.

    J. Alex Halderman, the University of Michigan computer scientist who led the team that took over the D.C. Internet Voting systems (not long after her also hacked a touch-screen voting system, replacing its voting software with Pac-Man), testified that "the scientific consensus is that Internet Voting is just too dangerous today based on the limits of today's security technology," adding: "Indeed, it will probably be decades, if ever, before the technology is at a level where we can perform voting safely, purely over the Internet."

    Verified Voting's Jeremy Epstein testified similarly at the same D.C. hearing: "What we found in forty years of experience is you can penetrate and patch, and then you penetrate again and you patch again, and you penetrate again and you patch again and you penetrate again and you patch again and it never ends. If it ended, Microsoft would have succeeded. We wouldn't all be having to reboot our computer and install patches once a month for the past ten years. ... This isn't a solvable problem that way."

    From an Election Integrity standpoint, it's even larger than an issue of mere security. The fact is that even if such a system were 100% secure, it is impossible for citizens to know that it was 100% secure and that all votes were both recorded and tabulated as per the voters' intent.

    Despite all of that, many elected officials, including, disturbingly enough, a number of misinformed Democrats in California, continue to call for Internet Voting in the state.

    With all of that, I was very pleased with Logan's unambiguous answer to my direct question as to whether he has ruled out Internet Voting for L.A. County's new system, given the long-documented dangers and concerns.

    "Yeah. I would say that Internet Voting, as it has been attempted and discussed in this country and outside of this country, would not fall within --- would not meet the standards that we've adopted for this project," he said.

    "The principles that we've adopted, like paper-based ballots that are available for auditing and verifiability, and the security standards that are embedded in our principles, and the value of a secret ballot that allows for independence in voting, are outside the scope of any Internet Voting project that's been attempted at this point."

    So that, at least, seems to be very encouraging news.

    From there, however, our discussion became a bit more troubling...

    UH, OH --- TOUCH-SCREENS AND COMPUTER-PRINTED BALLOTS

    Long time readers of The BRAD BLOG will recall my own disastrous experience in L.A. County some years ago when I attempted to use the disabled-accessible part of the InkaVote Plus system to cast my vote in the June 2008 state primary. The system allows blind voters to use audio prompts to select their favored candidates and then the computer allows the voter to confirm the selections before printing out a paper ballot with the voters' selections marked for them on the paper. That ballot is then optically-scanned like all of the other hand-marked paper ballots in the election.

    As I'm not blind, I was able to check to make sure the computer had printed my votes properly before dropping it into the ballot box.

    I discovered --- after some 15 or so minutes studying the printed ballot, attempting to make sure I was reading it correctly --- that the computer system had misprinted 4 out of 12 of my own votes!

    So, it was with that troubling experience in mind --- and Logan's own familiarity with it (his team did a terrific forensic job determining what had gone wrong to cause the error) --- that I asked him if we were looking at the possibility of computer-, rather than hand-marked paper ballots for L.A.'s future voting system (and, perhaps yours too!)

    His answer was not encouraging.

    "I think that it's likely that what we end up with will allow for hand-marked ballots, but that there very well could be some electronic interfaces for marking the ballot. But the key component there is the verifiability. Making sure that the voter has the ability to verify that the mark that they made electronically matches up to their choices."

    A computer that marks the ballot for you, the way the current voting system's computer (mis)marked it for me, back in 2008, would seem to be stretching the idea of a "hand-marked ballot".

    "How would I, as an Election Integrity advocate," I asked him, "how would I look at those ballots and know that the voter had approved them and approved them correctly, since we have studies showing that 80% of the people don't check the paper trails that are printed off by computers? Other studies show that, even when they do check them, they don't notice vote flips. So how would I, after the election, know that I was actually looking at the voter intent on a computer printed ballot?"

    Logan's answer did not offer much me much confidence: "I think that there are a couple of different ways to address that, and that could be a whole show. But I would say that one fundamental thing that I hope we look at in this, is actually separating the front-end from the back-end of that. So, in other words, you might have a [computerized] ballot-marking device that you use some sort of interface, whether it be touch-screen or a keyboard where you make your selections. That prints out a ballot that's human readable, so you can see that I've made my selection for 'Brad Friedman' and for 'Yes on Measure J', and blah, blah, blah and you can actually physically see that. And then you take that and deposit that into a back-end system that does the actual tabulation, that is totally separate and independent from the marking system."

    His answer didn't speak to my point about studies by MIT and Caltech that found most voters do not bother to check their computer printed votes, and that two-thirds of those who do look at the summary at the end of the computer voting process, according to a study by Rice University, don't notice when the computer has flipped one or more of their votes.

    The biggest problem, however, is that even if voters do check their computer-printed ballots (and most don't) and even if they do notice if a vote has been flipped by the computer (and most don't), it is strictly impossible for anybody after the election to know that they did!

    The result: 100% unverifiable voting.

    Hand-marked paper ballots, presuming chain of custody is secure, are known, by their very definition, to be a reflection of the voter's intent. But with computer-marked ballots, it simply can't be known if they reflect the voter's intent or not after the ballot has been cast. A computer Ballot Marking Device (BMD) system would ultimately be equally as unverifiable as any of the touch-screen or similar electronic voting systems already in use --- often to disastrous affect --- across the country.

    Adding to my worries that such a system of computer Ballot Marking Devices is in our future is the fact that Sen. Padilla's bill --- being deceptively sold to the public as a bill to allow L.A. to develop a publicly-owned voting system --- actually encourages the development of touch-screen computer voting systems like the one described by Logan. [NOTE: We requested comment from Padilla's office on this matter, and other concerns about the bill, but they have yet to respond. We hope to cover more about the troubling details in the current version of his bill in a future article.]

    In a follow-up email after our interview, in which I wanted to verify whether Logan meant that all voters would always have the option, somehow, of hand-marking a paper ballot at the polling place, or whether his comment about a system that "will allow for hand-marked ballots" meant that a voter would have to use an absentee ballot, for example, if they wanted to hand-mark their vote, he responded:

    Not to get ahead of the design outcomes and the iterative review and vetting process that will follow, but the focus on flexibility, adaptability and usability as important elements of a voting systems design --- grounded in security and accuracy, of course, would suggest that the voter will have options in the voting experience. I do not foresee hand-marking or other options limited to certain groups of voters or options that are exclusive to either a poll voting experience or a vote by mail voting experience. The full principles document, adopted by consensus with our Voting Systems Assessment Advisory Committee is available at www.lavote.net/Voter/VSAP/

    Your interpretation of his response there is likely as good mine. In truth, I'm not sure if that means all voters will be able to vote by hand-marked paper ballot at the polling place or not. But I suspect we'll be revisiting the issue as his new system begins to take more physical shape.

    NO FEDERAL TESTING?!

    Given that Padilla's bill, if passed and signed as currently written, is set to remove California's requirement that all voting systems be federally certified by the U.S. Elections Assistance Commission (EAC), I asked Logan if he had planned to have the new system follow current state law requiring both independent federal testing and independent state testing before voting systems may be used in the state.

    He made it clear that he would like to avoid federal testing, explaining that dysfunction at the EAC makes federal testing something to be avoided.

    "The federal infrastructure for providing that certification or approval for voting systems is completely broken right now," he explained, somewhat inaccurately. "It's governed by the Election Assistance Commission which has no members right now. It's mired in the partisan political dynamic on Capitol Hill."

    It is true that the EAC is a mess. Currently is has no Commissioners at all, and no Executive Director. (Without going into great detail here, this is thanks to Republicans refusing for several years to nominate any Commissioners for the two seats they control, holding up the confirmation of the nominees named by the Democrats in the process. Yes, we went through the 2012 Presidential election year with no Commissioners on the federal body created to oversee and assist with the nation's election systems.)

    Nonetheless, even without Commissioners and an Executive Director, the EAC's testing and certification regime is still operating as per usual.

    "We continue to test and certify voting systems uninterrupted by our lack of Commissioners," Brian Hancock, the EAC's Director of Testing and Certification confirmed via email after my interview with Logan.

    Jessica Myers, an EAC Certification Program Specialist also confirmed that point as well, when asked if they were still up and running as usual. "Yes, that is correct," she wrote. "We are still testing and certifying voting systems. We post a weekly update of the progress of the test campaigns on the EAC blog."

    Indeed, the EAC's website posts documentation of testing performed in January, February and March of 2013, as well as in recent years prior, and last week's EAC blog update included information on the newly published "Voting System Test Laboratory (VSTL) Program Manual, version 2.0".

    When I followed up with Logan after the interview, explaining that I was confused about his response on this point, given that the EAC was, indeed, still testing new voting systems as normal, he responded as follows:

    You are correct that the EAC testing and certification process is still in place; although with limitations. The current process is expensive and time consuming and is limited to testing and certification under dated (some would argue outdated) standards that cannot be updated without a quorum of EAC Commissioners to adopt them. None of the systems that have recently been certified or that are seeking certification --- all of which come from the limited commercial market --- are scalable to the needs of Los Angeles County. Additionally, the federal standards, as they exist, are voluntary. Several states have adopted state-based systems in lieu of reliance on or to augment the federal process. I believe the agency is similarly limited in contracting with any additional testing laboratories beyond those with which they are currently engaged and that their staffing capacity is depleted as well. The federal testing and certification process, as it exists today, contemplates a voting systems design that is end-to-end --- supported and marketed by a single vendor. We see exclusive reliance on the federal system both as insufficient for a new model of voting systems development and a process that doesn't have the capacity to meet the timelines and demands of the county's voting system needs. The Padilla bill continues to make reference to the federal process and to the EAC (or its successor), but provides for the possibility of a more robust and efficient state-based testing and certification process.

    There are a number of question I have about a number of the details offered by Logan's response. I have asked the EAC to respond to some of those question in kind. If they do, I will update here with that information.

    For now, and for whatever reason, Logan seems interested in avoiding the federal testing and certification process entirely. The provisions in Padilla's current bill, as I read them, appear to grant sole authority to the CA Sec. of State to approve voting systems, even without any testing whatsoever, if he or she so chooses. That makes all of this additionally disturbing.

    UPDATE: The EAC's Hancock responded to my follow-up query via email. He says that "In simple terms, [Logan is] correct that we cannot test to updated Standards until we have a quorum of Commissioners. That said, we have made great progress in the past 2-3 years in the time and cost of testing and certifying voting systems. Please feel free to ask the manufacturers or VSTLs [Voting System Test Laboratories] and I believe they will agree with this statement."

    More to the point, he also goes on to note that there is an "extensions clause" [PDF] to the EAC's current testing standards that Logan refers to as "dated (some would argue outdated)" above. Hancock explained that the clause allows for the testing of non-traditional systems, that do not meet the "end-to-end" design Logan referenced above as a reason why the EAC would not be an appropriate body to test LA's new system.

    Finally, Hancock says he is a member of Logan's VSAP Technical Advisory Committee and, as such, is "continuing to talk at length with Dean regarding how certification might work when we eventually get a system in LA County."

    While we have spent no small number of pixels here at The BRAD BLOG, and even in books, detailing the enormous problems and dysfunctions of the EAC, including in their testing and certification regime, it remains our opinion that more testing, rather than less, by more independent bodies, is a good and necessary thing. Skirting those requirements altogether is troubling, to say the least, and it remains unclear to me why a system of this size, put together over this many years, with an eye to voter confidence, would serve the voters better by not being federally certified in addition to state certified, before being used in an actual election.

    WHY NOT "DEMOCRACY'S GOLD STANDARD" --- HAND-COUNTED PAPER BALLOTS?

    As I explained at the beginning of this article, Logan began his search by stating that he was open to any and all types of voting and tabulation systems. I had asked him, several years ago, if he intended to look into what we regard around here as "Democracy's Gold Standard" --- hand-marked paper ballots, publicly hand-counted at the precinct on Election Night, with all members of the public, political parties and even video cameras watching, with results posted decentrally at the precincts before ballots are moved anywhere.

    Such a system is used (and much beloved), for example, by 40% of the towns in New Hampshire.

    While we ran out of time to go into detail at the end of our interview on my KPFK show last week, Logan stated in the seconds we had left that hand-counting "has been part of the research that we've done."

    I promised to follow up with him for more details on that point afterward. He responded to my post-election email query with the following:

    Hand marked, hand counted ballots was among the existing voting systems included in our assessment documents and data collection. Hand counting was also included among the voting systems referenced in voter surveys and focus groups early on in the project; which are summarized in our July 9, 2010 project report available on the VSAP web page. Additionally, our team has reviewed books and reports on the New Hampshire hand count process and we looked at a 2012 study out of Rice University on various hand-count methods for ballot tabulation. I don't have immediate access to that study, but I am sure you can access it through a search engine.

    The July 9, 2010 report [PDF] Logan references describes telephone and online surveys commissioned by the county to try and determine what sort of voting system voters in L.A. County would most like to use. Most respondents, according to those results, would like to use Direct Recording Electronic (DRE, usually touch-screen) voting systems, despite the fact that they are 100% unverifiable --- a point that was not explained to respondents taking the survey.

    The fewest percentage of respondents wanted a hand-counted paper ballot system, though that number, like those supporting DREs, varied among different demographic groups in the survey. It should also be noted that, of all the voting systems from which respondents were asked to choose, hand-counted paper ballots was likely the one they were least familiar with, as it is the most rarely used among our 50 states. Moreover, when hand-counting is seen by voters, it is usually in the event of post-election recounts, where all of the ballots in a race are counted at once in a central location, versus the type of precinct-based, publicly-overseen counting done in the aforementioned New Hampshire towns and a few other jurisdictions around the country, as described in Nancy Tobi's Hands-On Elections: An Informational Handbook for Running Real Elections, Using Real Paper Ballots, Counted by Real People.

    But that too is a topic I suspect we will be returning to in some detail in the days ahead, as Logan's plans take shape, and as we do our best to keep an eye on it --- and as hopefully the Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk of the world's largest voting jurisdiction will see fit to continue the discussion with us on his progress in the not-too-distant future.

    * * *

    My full interview with Los Angeles County's Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan, from the April 17, 2013 episode of The BradCast on KPFK/Pacfica Radio, follows below...

    Download MP3 or listen online:
    [See post to listen to audio]

    * * *Please support The BRAD BLOG's fiercely independent, award-winning coverage of your electoral system, as available from no other media outlet in the nation --- now in our TENTH YEAR! --- with a donation to help us keep going (Snail mail, more options here). If you like, we'll send you some great, award-winning election integrity documentary films in return! Details right here...


    Categories: Brad Blog

    Hacked AP Twitter Feed Brings NYSE 'Flash Crash'

    Tue, 04/23/2013 - 19:15

    With the U.S. stock market hitting all-time record highs again of late, it'd be understandable for some to think strength and confidence has returned to the stock exchange.

    But if today's mid-day "flash crash" --- which saw the S&P Index lose $136 billion in a matter of four minutes as AP's Twitter feed was hacked to announce, inaccurately, that a bomb had gone off in the White House --- is any indication, that's hardly the case...

    You'll be delighted to know, of course, that the same casino, stock market immediately gained almost all of its losses back in almost the same amount of time it took to lose them, ultimately ending the day at another near-record high. Step right up!


    Categories: Brad Blog

    'Green News Report' - April 23, 2013

    Tue, 04/23/2013 - 18:00


     

    IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: They'd like to get their lives back: 3rd anniversary of BP's Oil Disaster in the Gulf; EPA victory over mountaintop removal coal mining; EPA slams State Dept's Keystone XL report; PLUS: Free at last: environmental activist Tim de Christopher freed - on Earth Day ... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

    Listen online here, or Download MP3 (6 mins)...

    Link: Embed:

    Got comments, tips, love letters, hate mail? Drop us a line at GreenNews@BradBlog.com or right here at the comments link below. All GNRs are always archived at GreenNews.BradBlog.com.

    IN 'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (see links below): America now has more solar energy workers than coal miners; Earth's cooling came to sudden halt in 1900; '800 Love Canals' remain; Jewell: 'One size doesn't fit all' on fracking; Denier myth: ‘Climate Change’ vs. ‘Global Warming’; Denying sea-level rise divides NC; Sichuan earthquake's threat to China's dams; WA: How Boeing killed water quality standards; TX fertilizer blast raises national security questions; EPA powerless over toxic flame retardant chemicals ... PLUS: Reality Gap: Americans clueless about global scientific consensus on human-caused climate change ... and much, MUCH more! ...

    STORIES DISCUSSED IN TODAY'S 'GREEN NEWS REPORT'...

    'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (Stuff we didn't have time for in today's audio report)...

  • New Research: World on Track for Climate Disaster:
  • Essential Climate Science Background:

    • Categories: Brad Blog