Barbara Gail Jacobson, the hand count request in the Busby/Bilbray election was on the Thom Hartmann Program this morning, and Thom was kind enough to send us the audio file. She speaks about much of what we discussed in our report earlier today regarding the stonewalling from San Diego County Registrar of Voters Mikel Haas.
As I’ve got to get outta here and down to San Diego for the DemocracyFest! I don’t have time to say much more for now, so please review that article if you have any questions about this.
— Barbara Gail Jacobson on the Thom Hartman Program, 7/13/06 [MP3, about 5 minutes]
As well, a few folks have asked about contact info for Haas. Here it is:
Mikel Haas, Registrar of Voters
5201 Ruffin Road, Suite I
San Diego, CA 92123
P O Box 85656
San Diego, CA 92186-5656
1-800-696-0136 (858) 565-5800
(858) 694-2955 Fax
Hours 8:00am – 5:00pm
E-mail: rovmail@sdcounty.ca.gov
Website: www.sdvote.com
6 or 7 of us should send Mr. Haas some letters, calls, and emails.
The link didn’t “auto-start” for me. I had to copy the link URL and paste it into my MP3 player. Worked fine then.
I think if you right click on the link you can make it download to your computer and it will play through your iTunes or whatever that way.
That works too.
Just sent this to Regisdtrar Haas .
I could have gone on but why waste my thoughts on a politico embedded in not giving Claifornians their rights !!
Mr. Registrar :
The idea which has gone through much convolution with your guidance is that citizen’s vote , the results are accurately counted , the results stand , the voting laws are obeyed .
Reviewing the Bilbray/Busby fiasco , it is evident that you fail to see any wrongs . If people are willing to pay for the recount , why the erection of barriers ,?
Unless, of course , the possibility of a different outcomer might hurt your own political position .
Fred Suzman
This is a bit off the subject but I will share with all of you the response I just e-mailed to a fundraising letter from John Kerry for the Democratic Party.
Dear Senator Kerry,
I certainly have no expectation that you will actually read this. Nonetheless, I will express what I and a large and increasing number of Democrats are feeling. While I have contributed to your campaign in 2004 and to the Democratic Party in the past, I will not contribute another penny until I see that the Democrats are ready to get a spine and to stand up as a group to fight for the issues that count. The Republican Party and most Republican federal and state office holders are cowards in virtually every way that counts but they certainly do not shy away from fighting for what they believe in, no matter how deplorable or corrupt it might be. Such a willingness to truly fight for and stand up for what they say they believe in does not appear to be a trait of the Democratic Party, especially at the federal level.
While there are many issues I could point to, one issue overrides all others because it is at the very core of our democracy. That issue is election integrity. Without that and without certainty that our vote will be counted and counted accurately, we have no democracy and all of the other issues, as important as they may be, are just table talk because we can have no roll in deciding them if we cannot decide on and truly choose representation that will reliably speak for us. Neither you nor any other national level Democrat (other than perhaps John Conyers in regards to voter disenfranchisement) that I am aware of has taken this issue to heart and championed it as the critical issue that it is and deserves to be. These Republicans and their fundamentalist base feel that all means are justified if their ends are met. It is quite evident that, at the highest levels, they have embarked on an effort to control the vote in unprecedented ways. Ohio was the tip of the iceberg and, while voter disenfranchisement has been the most publicized and visible means of election corruption, it will be and maybe already is, voting machine fraud that can corrupt and control literally millions of votes with no way to detect it, short of countable ballots (which there will not be in too many instances and which will not be counted in other instances due to corrupt election officials and politicians). In its promotion of these machines and the billions of dollars it has thrown willy-nilly into a critically flawed (and, possibly intentionally corrupt) act, HAVA has been an absolute disaster for this country.
Here in Southern California, where I live, a so-called “bell-weather” election recently took place to replace the disgraced Randy “Duke” Cunningham in the 50th Congressional District. This was supposed to be an election where Democrats could show they could win in a conservative district (something they will have to do in November to take control of Congress). Polls before the election indicated they just might take that district. They apparently didn’t but, as it currently stands, no one will really know for sure if they legitimately lost that election. At a time when all of these electronic voting machines and counters have been shown to be ridiculously easy to corrupt, resulting in so-called “emergency security measures” that were announced as required to be followed for certification of these voting machines (and esp. the Diebold machines used in this election) in California (and elsewhere) by our appointed and Diebold-owned Republican Secretary of State, thousands of these machines (direct record touchscreen and optical scan) were allowed to be taken home by volunteer poll workers (with minimal background checks) for up to several weeks prior to the election. While that should have effectively and legally decertified all of these machines and required a hand count of all ballots and paper trails, the ignorant or corrupt (or both) Registrar of Voters for the involved election has stonewalled all attempts to get such a hand count or even to allow examination of the results of a legally mandated 1% audit of the vote (if it was even done) or the similarly legally mandated chain of custody documents for the machines and ballots. Apparently, in our banana republic in the making, these officials are no longer answerable to inconvenient rules and laws when they have inept and facilitating (or corrupt) Secretaries of States to “answer to” and when the opposition, i.e.- Democrats, are unwilling to scream and insist that fair and legal procedures be followed.
Whether or not Mr. Bilbray won legitimately no one can answer. Whether or not he will be viewed as legitimate by a significant percentage of his constituents and the American people I can answer with a most certain “NO” and that is a tragedy for our so-called democracy. This is not a matter of whether Democratic candidate, Francine Busby feels she was wronged or not or whether she chooses to not enter into the fight (and she chose not to, stating that she was aware of no elections observers who saw any problems while ignorantly disregarding the fact that a million election observers would not be able to see the undetectable fraud that can be engineered by a single individual with a single machine which can then corrupt the entire election, as confirmed by the most comprehensive and authoritative study to date on the subject of electronic voting machine security, recently released by the Brennan Center). Busby is an insignificant candidate in the greater scheme, with no national political future, but you and a Democratic Party that was worth its salt would have seen this election and its lack of integrity as the harbinger it is of what is to come. You and such a Party would therefore have drawn a line in the sand and fought loud and hard to make election integrity the issue it should be by using this election as an example of what is drastically going wrong in the election process that is the core of our democracy. That you didn’t speaks volumes about your priorities or lack of them.
You can continue to act like it is just politics as usual and ignore this issue, as I suspect you and the Democratic Party will, but I can guarantee that you do so at the peril of yourselves and our democracy and that, if you do, you will all look back at warnings like this one and know that you failed when you had the chance to do something. Please do not reply with any platitudes or platforms that say what you or other Democrats stand for. What you really stand for is what you are really willing to fight for.
Sincerely, a currently former Democrat,
my name
Steve
Thanks for giving to Kerry for us, but, well, he might have read it if it had been a little shorter…? Maybe t-shirts that say something like:
has anyone beside me been saying the F word to the Senators?
Date: Fri, 14 Jul 2006 02:35:36 -0700
From: phil
Reply-To: phil
X-Priority: 3 (Normal)
Message-ID:
To: John Kerry
Subject: A BIG CLUESTICK
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Hello John,
You better get your ass down to http://Bradblog.org and figure out
what the F is up with the electronic voting machines. There is less
than four months to fix this problem, and after that, nothing you
say will matter anymore, well be in WW3.
—
Best regards,
phil mailto:phil@osbtown.com