What the hell is the matter with Rep. Rush Holt?

In an interview just now with Richard Green on the Clout show on Air America Radio, our congressman tried to defend his now-indefensibly bad electronic-vote protection bill. He kept saying, "Voters can feel safe now with this bill," HR 811.

No, we can't feel safe with this bill. Anyone who thinks we'll feel safe just because Holt keeps parroting that senseless line is wrong!

Holt seems like a brick wall, incapable of listening to anyone on the black box voting issue. He says Rep. Dennis Kucinich supports this bill; the Democratic presidential candidate yanked his support weeks ago because the bill is so bad.

We, the voters, and the nonpartisan experts who've studied this are in virtual unanimous agreement the bill stinks after the meddling amendments. I'd rather see no bill than one that gives false security leading up to the crucial November 2008 presidential election.

Holt's bill is unacceptable. There's no reason to think random recounts of buggered black boxes will produce anything but buggered confirmations.

This bill at the onset was promised to ensure paper ballots. Scrutiny showed Holt didn't understand that printouts of what the machines read are not confirmation from voters that the machine recorded their votes accurately. We all expected that to be corrected in committee, not eroded even further with garbage such as sanctions of DREs.

I urge my readers to really study this, because this is the most essential issue now to our democracy. Our federal government is presently an anarchy, any way you slice it. We must correct that in 2008, once and for all. We can't do that if our votes aren't counted. The tabulating machines can be hacked in any number of ways, including as demonstrated by a monkey in a matter of a minute or so, literally, and by wi-fi diddling from anywhere within a quarter-mile radius of a poll machine.

How can we get through so Holt "can hear us now"? I want to see a piece of paper I must confirm before it goes into a secured paper ballot box that will be counted in any challenge of the count, not random recounts the meaningless bill promises.

I knew it!

As a country girl, I know my rural brethren are far wiser than smug urban/suburbanites think. Conservative, yes, but stupid, no.

So, I'm thrilled to see Michael Collins' report on stats that disprove the urban myth that rural America boosted George W. Bush over the top in 2004.

Bush had 2 million fewer votes from the paper-ballot rural sector in 2004 than 2000. The city turnout -- where votes were counted almost entirely on electronic black boxes and where Democratic precincts were shorted, even after RNC "caging" of minority voters -- rose 66% in 2004 and uncharacteristically increased support for Bush from 26% in 2000 to 39% in 2004.

Anyone who keeps a file on election or vote fraud will want to download this report.

Oh, the obstructions!

As evidence mounts that this White House is obstructing justice to hide a more sinister enterprise than anyone has imagined, this is an important piece to add to the puzzle.

Cannonfire analyzes an obscure detail CREW uncovered in the document dump: a few "internal" emails that slipped into the pile were sent through a server owned by the Republican Party and circumvented automated goverment archiving.

More importantly, that server is owned by one of the main electronic black-box vote companies that has been scamming elections in anti-democratic magnitude since at least 2000.

GWB43 is the name of an internet server owned by the Republican National Committee.

Oddly enough, communications revealed in the course of the Great U.S. Attorney Purge document dump reveal that key figures within the administration used such email addresses as SJennings@gwb43.com.

The White House has its own internal email system, ending in the .gov suffix, as mandated by the Presidential Records Act. As Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington (CREW) notes:

CREW has learned that to fulfill its statutory obligations under the PRA, the White House email system automatically copies all messages created by staff and sends them to the White House Office of Records Management for archiving. It appears that the White House deliberately bypassed the automatic archiving function of its own email system that was designed to ensure compliance with the PRA.

So why are White House personnel using private email addresses to bypass this system?

A not-unrelated question: Did Patrick Fitzgerald know about this bypass when he subpoenaed White House emails pursuant to the Plamegate investigation?

No, Tony Snow pleads, nothing wrong with firing our U.S. attorneys not doing Republican bidding, most normal thing in the world. Nope, nothing to see here folks, move along, move along.

Believe me, Cannonfire's post just gets jucier and jucier from there. It's today's must read.

Rep. Rush Holt's ballot bill

One of my favorite radio shows, Ring of Fire, today hosted Ralph Neas of People for the American Way, who says even though N.J. Rep. Rush Holt's electronic ballot bill is flawed, PFAW is supporting it. Time is of the essense, he says.

Last week, show hosts Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Mike Papantonio had on Brad Friedman of Brad Blog, who thinks the bill is too flawed to support in the form it's in.

The main contention is that Holt seems not to have understood the real problem when he wrote it to require "paper trail" instead of "paper ballots." What needs to happen is that electronic poll machines need to be able to spit out a receipt to verify their vote. After all, the makers of these machines also make bank ATMs. Can you imagine how long those would have lasted in the market if it didn't verify to you as a customer what was going in or coming out of your accounts -- if you had to wait until a final statement each month and then had no recourse if they gave your money to another customer but said it was secrret how that happened? That's what the "black boxes" we vote on do now.

Neas says his position is that it's unrealistic to mandate every county clerk in the nation to replace the machines they already have, and if the bill did that, no part of the bill could be put into action by this November.

Ring of Fire plays again from 4 to 6 p.m. tomorrow, Sunday. You can stream it anytime or listen live online tomorrow, but if you're in Monmouth County your radio may pick it up on New York WWRL 1600 AM (may because the radio signal is reduced on nights and weekends).

Off with me now, because their next guest is Joe Wilson. I'm going to get a cup of coffee and roll my chair up to the radio!

Say it ain't so

Black Box Voting is not supporting Rep. Rush Holt's bill he has said will fix the major problems with electronic voting. BBV is a national nonpartisan electronic voting watchdog group that broke most of the major news of fraud, including the timelines and networks among vote machine ownership.

Here are BBV's reasons:

1. DECEPTIVE LANGUAGE. Calls a paper TRAIL a paper BALLOT.

2. BILLION DOLLAR UNFUNDED MANDATE: Requires text conversion technology in every polling place. At $7000 per machine for 185,000 polling places, you do the math. See this article for documentation on the billion-dollar boondoggle:
http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/1954/46649.html

The bill is not talking about scanner wands, folks. Or if it is, they'd better specify that, and soon! Except that apparently, it's too late to make changes.

Note that only two vendors currently manufacture the needed technology, and one (Populex) has as head of its advisory board Frank Carlucci, the former chairman of the Carlyle Group, former CIA director, who was Donald Rumsfeld's roommate in college. Every polling place in America. Is this really what you want? Isn't it time to read the fine print on this?

3. MAKES THE SCANDAL RIDDEN EAC A PERMANENT FIXTURE AND INCREASES ITS POWER. Alan Dechert, from the Open Voting Consortium says it best: "Holt contemplates the invasion of these United States by the Federal government. If passed, it would BREAK the voting system in the states while establishing a dictatorship to handle things: the Election Assistance Commission ("EAC" or just "the Commission") with its four commissioners appointed by the president of the United States." Bradblog on latest EAC scandal: http://www.bradblog.com/?p=4119

4. ALLOWS LOSS OF SECRET BALLOTS for the Military

5. NO RECOGNITION OF CITIZEN RIGHT TO OVERSIGHT. Audit provisions do not allow either citizens or candidates access to any records for meaningful audits.

6. CONFLICTING REQUIREMENTS -- ie, must have text converters by 2008 and must study how to best do the conversions by 2010.

7. LANGUAGE ON DISCLOSED SOURCE CODE CONTAINS AN ERROR in that it doesn't deal with COTS - meaning, any electronics component with a chip on it would be required to disclose source code. There are literally hundreds of commercial off the shelf components in the system -- printers, video drivers, motherboard components -- that contain firmware, and these are manufactured all over the world. The bill would require Hitachi, Seagate, Fuji, Western Digital to open up their code for their commercial products if used in voting machines. Effectively eliminates the use of electronics while at the same time mandating electronics.

8. MUSH LANGUAGE. (Example: "The manufacturer shall provide the appropriate election official with the information necessary for the official to provide the information...")

9. UNREADABLE: People complain about their legislators not reading the bills -- well the way this is written, it guarantees they won't read it. No Appendix, so sections of the bill require the reader to actually go find a different bill and look up sections in it in order to make sense of the current bill. (example: "Section 301(a)(1) of such Act (42 U.S.C. 15481(a)(1)) is amended (A) in subparagraph (A)(i), by striking "counted" and inserting "counted, in accordance with paragraphs (2) and (3)");

10. AUDIT PROTOCOLS NO ONE AGREES WITH, even fans of audit solutions

11. LOOPHOLE ALLOWING INTERNET CONNECTIONS for central tabulators and ballot definition software

12. LOOPHOLE ALLOWING MANUAL AUDITS TO BE BYPASSED states with computer-only recount protocols

13. LOOPHOLE ALLOWING MACHINE COUNT TO SUPERCEDE VOTER VERIFIED PAPER when fuzzily described circumstances arise. Los Angeles Registrar Conny McCormack already has tried to co-opt this (Feinstein senate hearing yesterday) into meaning when there is a printer jam damaging the paper, the machine count will trump.

14. SUPPORTS DREs (Touch-screens and other on-screen voting techniques that are NOT recommended by NIST)