Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org
I highly recommend that everyone reading this take the time to read Lowell Finley’s “Testimony to Senate Committee on Rules and Administration“ [see below]. It is excellent.
The New York Times editorializes, “It is good news that Ms. Feinstein has called for the federal investigations “” and that she is pushing a bill to require paper trails nationally. As long as there are no paper records, and voting machine manufacturers continue to insist that the software that runs the machines is a ‘trade secret,’ voters cannot be expected to trust that votes are being counted correctly. The leadership in Congress needs to focus on making sure that Ms. Feinstein’s paper-trail bill becomes law, along with a companion House measure from Rush Holt, Democrat of New Jersey.” We need to add that we hope that Senator Feinstein will fix the various problems that are in the Holt bill. We don’t expect that she will ban the use of DREs, though we encourage her to do that, and we cannot support any legislation that does not include that ban. We do hope, however, that she fixes audit language that would allow a county to easily skirt the bill’s requirements; language that squelches the use of alternative, low-tech voting systems amongst other; and the co-opting of “paper ballot” when the legislation uses that term to describe what is really a voter verified paper audit trail. These are only three of a short list of items that must be addressed. …
**”Daily Voting News” is meant as a comprehensive listing of reports each day concerning issues related to election and voting news around the country regardless of quality or political slant. Therefore, items listed in “Daily Voting News” may not reflect the opinions of VotersUnite.Org or BradBlog.Com**
Bush’s uncle tangled in options probe: SEC ESSI
http://today.reuters.com/news/a...c=/ActiveBuddy
Holt’s “voting reform” bill gets a ringing endorsement… from a steadfast DRE apologist:
FL: Editorial – Don’t dump touch-screen machines Link
Why doesn’t anyone say clearly that the entire process of voting and vote counting should be observable by any member of the public that wants to watch? Total transparency is needed. Don’t trust anyone to deliver the votes correctly.
shw
Right on Shannon Williford. NObody can disagree with the statement Lowell Finley ended his written testimony with (he could not appear) which is that the people of the state of california and Debra Bowen’s office all want votes counted and recorded AS INTENDED. (my emphasis) And yet, those who fear the results of this but can not oppose such a sensible democratic rule directly, use complexity and misdirection to accomplish their goals instead.
Thus, as in Donna Frye’s mayoral race when thousands of people’s votes were thrown out even though they wrote down both “Donna” and “Frye” in the write in box and voted for NO other candidate for mayor, an obscure statute saying the oval also had to be filled successfully defeated the rather obvious intent of the voters here AND REVERSED THE RESULT IN A MAJOR CITY MAYORAL ELECTION. It was, in fact, a miracle write in win for Donna Frye, denied by forces opposed to the intent of the voter as the standard.
California needs to triple check to make sure all such anti-intent statutes and regulations are stripped from the election laws there.
Turning to the Holt II bill, we have a lot of complexity being substituted for the rather simple process of voting. Turns out “Ballots” are not really ballots in Holt II because they never get counted on the first count, and rarely on the recount or audit, and never on the recount or audit if you have a state law providing for a machine recount and you’re using DRE’s — they’ll just print out the DREs magic results again…. as state law requires, and Holt itself says its own audits don’t apply if there’s a automatic state recount triggered. (State law will then dictate what gets counted in said recounts and presumably no state law has anticipated the passage of Holt II and already provides for the HOlt “Ballots” to be counted.). Ooops.
Whether these undocumented and unadvertised features of Holt II are intentionally placed there by someone or the process of crafting a bill via compromise with forces who wish to keep DREs and this is just a “hole” in the statute, the bottom line is that here again, legislators have lost track of the INTENT of the voter as the obvious, universal standard by allowing complexity to rule in its stead.
Sacxtra Presents . . . . .
Perceived Diligence – 101 For Dummys
“Look like you care, Publicly, yet fuck em!”
I want to define “perceived diligence” for ya.
(unabashed version)
“It looks like you care to the public, but really you could give a fuck about people, because you know you are in control and you know that the corporate mainstream media will edit their clips or do what’s necessary to present this garbage crap you spew out in a light that appears to be in the public’s interest. Meanwhile you don’t plan to do shit to solve the real problem. The only thing you got going is a fake solution, that probably won’t even become law. Screw the little people.”
Scenario:
Little Timmy says,
“I got to admit, I am sick and tired of Diane Feinstein’s “perceived diligence” to fix the electronic voting problem by making it all work on paper. Yet the reality is a paper trail is not a paper ballot!
And even though I voted for Nancy, All I see is Nancy Pelosi’s “perceived diligence.” I do not believe we are being misunderstood, I believe she just don’t give a crap about what we said about this fucking war. ”
end of the scenario.
Back to Feinstein. PAPER TRAIL?!
There ought to be an flood to her office on that alone.
PAPER BALLOT is what we NEED!
But this is all just a dog and pony show from Feinstein it is simply, “perceived diligence.” (Starting to get it yet?)
I’ll be brief,
Let’s take the holt bull (I mean bill, neat typo, subliminal?) and then Pelosi.
The holt bill is “perceived diligence.” (Do we agree?)
I think “perceived diligence” will MAYBE (not official yet) be the title of the episode of my next show.
I am sick of these lying sacks, “perceived diligence”
If you think about it, it can be applied to just about everything in the Corporate media, the Liby Trial, drug war (anyone noticed how they goin after wee instead of meth lately?) Anyway fuck it.. I’m tired.
stay tuned….
Here’s a simple analogy that explains how the election audit scam, such as proposed in H.R. 811 works:
Pretend that you’re a store clerk and I’m a customer. I buy something for $2.90 and hand you a ten dollar bill. You count out $7.10 in change and hand it to me. I take it from you, recount it, agree that you gave me the correct change, take my receipt, and start to leave the store. The entire exchange is on film because a security camera is placed so that it can clearly film all transactions at the cash register.
But before I can put my money away, the guy standing behind me stops me and says, “Wait. That clerk has cheated people before. You might not have gotten the correct change. I have a super-duper change-counting machine that can verify that you got the correct amount. Here, give me the change you got from the clerk and let me put it in my super-duper machine to make sure you weren’t cheated.”
If I’m a fool, I’ll be intimidated into handing him the money, he puts the $7.10 into his machine, and it spits out $8.10. He now calls the store manager to say that you and I are crooks, we’re in cahoots, and that you gave me a dollar too much in change to cheat the store. You, the clerk, and I, the customer, object, but we’re hauled off to court on charges of cheating the store. We want to use the videotape of the transaction to prove that it was correct exactly as we had agreed that it was. But when we go to court, the machine guy has his own scientific experts who argue that you and I didn’t count the money correctly, the videotape was doctored, and that only his machine count is 100% accurate. When we want to audit his machine, it turns out that only certain experts have the qualifications necessary to audit his machine, and they all agree that his machine is 100% accurate, so there’s no way for us to refute them. You’re just a store clerk, I’m just a customer, and he has a line-up of highly credentialed mathematicians and computer experts testifying that his machine is accurate and that you and I are both liars and crooks.
The judge (and jury if there is one) is now thoroughly confused, and the verdict could come in either way. The matter is out of our hands and all we can do is wait for the verdict. If the court finds that we were correct in the first place, we both breathe a sigh of relief and I vow never to listen to anyone like that again. But juries sometimes are overly impressed with expert testimony and sometimes judges have been known to take bribes. Since there is a huge amount of money to be made, a large bribe to the judge could be considered a good investment. If the court decides that the machine count was correct, and that you and I and the videotape were wrong, you lose your job, we both could go to jail, all the machine experts collect fat fees for their audits and expert testimony, and on the basis of having caught some “crooks cheating the system,” the machine guy goes out and sells his “security system” to a few million stores.
So when somebody tells you that hand counts aren’t reliable and that you need machine audits in order to scientifically verify the accuracy of the hand count, no matter how highly credentialed they are and however slick their sales pitch with power point presentation and complex proofs, please tell them that you have full confidence in your own ability and that of your neighbors to count the votes by hand and that you’re not buying any machines today, thank you. And if the scam is being run by Members of Congress, tell them that if they persist in trying to con you, you’re going to alert every voters’ rights group in the country. This advisory is brought to you by a senior citizen opposed to swindles. Permission to reprint granted.
phil:
Perceived diligence pays a lot better then what you’re getting too. It doesn’t matter that you’re on to their “perceived diligence” because they also have “plausible deniability.”
It’s a beautiful life!
Mark S thank you for nailing “it!”