Go Directly to Jail

Bernard Madoff is going to jail for life. Today he pleaded guilty to 11 counts of fraud, money laundering, perjury and theft.

His Ponzi scheme defrauded the rich of possibly $65 billion, but it has also harmed the very poor.

Madoff was never caught by the SEC despite a damning report by independent financial fraud investigator Harry Markopolos, despite 8 separate investigations over 16 years, despite a French bank spotting the risks. Instead the shady business came to an end when Madoff confessed to his two sons who then turned him in to authorities.

Portfolio.com has all the details on how Madoff plotted the fraud. The account statements he sent to investors were "elaborate works of fiction," and it appears that no securities were ever even purchased for his customers.

It's an understatement to say Bernard Madoff is a despised man. At Thursday's court hearing, before he was handcuffed and led away with applause, the courtroom spectators laughed when Madoff's defense lawyer described the conditions of his client's house arrest and how Madoff had, "at his wife's own expense," paid for private security at their Manhattan home. His wife will have a hard time proving any of her money is untainted.

In fact, the whole idea that Madoff could possibly be the "single bullet" responsible for the complex crime is ridiculous. But Madoff turned down the chance for a plea deal when he wouldn’t agree to plead guilty to conspiracy. He's not cooperating, and so the investigation has only just begun.

Dirty Tricks

"Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do, and they will surprise you with their ingenuity." -- George S. Patton

Ingenuity abounds when it comes to disenfranchising voters. I'm certain that my readers won't fall for any of these tricks, but they would be wise to warn their friends, parents, and grandparents.

Pennsylvania Republicans are disavowing an e-mail sent to Jewish voters that likens a vote for Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama to events that led up to the Holocaust.

A phony flier, purporting to be from the Virginia Board of Elections, is circulating in the African-American-heavy Hampton Roads region of the state, falsely informing people that, because of expected high turnout, Democrats should vote on November 5th. The election is November 4th.

Colorado Democrats accused a Republican county clerk Wednesday of falsely informing Colorado College that students from outside the state could not register to vote if their parents claimed them as a dependent on their tax returns.

Finally, here is a trick I never heard before: Sparks [Nevada] resident Raul Murillo, 50, said he received a cell phone call Oct. 13 asking him to vote for his presidential candidate over the phone, which is not legal.

The accused political party will always disavow the dirty tricks and blame it on a lone crank, but that doesn't explain away the far more consequential crimes of voter purges, rigged voting machines, and more voter purges.

Meanwhile, Republicans will cling to the voter fraud hoax, with some rather funny results. Yes, the New Mexico White Pages really does have a listing for Duran Duran.

Acorns and Wingnuts

ACORN is the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. Though the non-partisan organization was formed in 1970, most people just heard about them and their voter registration drives in the last few weeks.

Wingnut is a not-so-nice term for people who support far-right conspiracy theories.

When wingnuts hold conspiracy theories about acorns, democracy is threatened.

In a recent article, Brad Friedman clearly explains the voter fraud hoax being spread by FOX News and CNN:

Here are the facts. Acorn verifies the legitimacy of every registration its canvassers collect. If they can't authenticate the registration, or it's incomplete or questionable in other ways, they flag that form as problematic ("fraudulent", "incomplete", et cetera). They then hand in all registration forms, even the problematic ones, to elections officials, as they are required to do by law. In almost every case where you've heard about fraud by Acorn, it's because Acorn itself notified officials about the fraud that's been perpetrated on them by rogue canvassers. Most officials who run to the media screaming "Acorn is committing fraud" know all of the above but don't bother to share those facts with the media they've run to. None of this is about voter fraud. None of it. Where any fraud has occurred, it's voter registration fraud and has resulted in exactly zero fraudulent votes.

You'll hear that Donald Duck, Mary Poppins, Dick Tracy, Mickey Mouse and (new this year) the starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys football team have all had fraudulent registrations submitted in their names. That's true. And we know this, why? Because Acorn told officials about it when they followed the law and turned in those registrations, flagged as fraudulent.

What you won't hear is that federal law requires anybody who does not register to vote in person at the county office to show an ID when they go to vote the first time. So, unless Donald Duck shows up with his ID, he won't be voting this November. You needn't worry, no matter how much even John McCain himself cynically and dishonourably tries to mislead you.

I guess that means McCain is a wingnut (who delivered a key speech for ACORN in 2006), but the main point is that the MSM is telling lies. And while they tell these lies, they ignore the very real problem of voter purges. The New York Times investigated how swing states are illegally removing voters from rolls:

States have been trying to follow the Help America Vote Act of 2002 and remove the names of voters who should no longer be listed; but for every voter added to the rolls in the past two months in some states, election officials have removed two, a review of the records shows.

The six swing states seem to be in violation of federal law in two ways. Michigan and Colorado are removing voters from the rolls within 90 days of a federal election, which is not allowed except when voters die, notify the authorities that they have moved out of state, or have been declared unfit to vote.

Indiana, Nevada, North Carolina and Ohio seem to be improperly using Social Security data to verify registration applications for new voters.

In addition to the six swing states, three more states appear to be violating federal law. Alabama and Georgia seem to be improperly using Social Security information to screen registration applications from new voters. And Louisiana appears to have removed thousands of voters after the federal deadline for taking such action.

Undoubtedly, some people will go to their polling place on November 4 and find out they are not registered to vote! That will be the November surprise.

The MSM also largely ignores the many problems with electronic voting. As I commented earlier this month, even Homer Simpson gets it.

So why is the MSM lying and promoting the ACORN myths? For one thing, ACORN's priorities have included better housing and wages for the poor, more community development investment from banks and governments, and better public schools. These are issues that many Republicans don't support.

But there is another glaring reason. Those who would complain about voter registration drives obviously don't give a damn whether every eligible American is able to cast their vote and have their vote counted. Instead, these wingnuts want to cast doubt -- doubt about the legitimacy of the results if Obama wins.

I've said it before, but I'll gladly repeat myself. I think it's time for a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right of every American 18 years or older to vote in federal elections. Until then, people will be at the mercy of every local bureaucracy, every partisan organization, and every wingnut who doesn't believe in democracy.

What's Wrong With Paper Ballots Anyway?

Fifty-eight days remain until the presidential election. If you're like me, then your mind is made up already, but you have a lingering anxiety about the many problems of our voting system.

A few weeks ago Premier Election Solutions (formerly Diebold Election Systems, Inc.) admitted to major security flaws in their electronic voting machines (if video doesn't show, click here):



Let me just make this perfectly clear: Premier Election Solutions has admitted that their software used in at least 34 states does not count votes correctly. I will never trust electronic voting. I've written about the threat of electronic voting before, but it can't be repeated often enough. Casting your vote on a computer is like walking up to a window where a little man opens a curtain and asks "who do you want to vote for?" You answer him, he closes the curtain, and you never know what that little man does with your reply. It's a black box.

And these boxes can be easily hacked as proven in the HBO documentary Hacking Democracy. And these boxes are also proprietary meaning Premier made the inner workings secret so that citizens have no way to scrutinize the hardware or software. There is also no way to authenticate election results which can of course be done if paper ballots were used.

So what was wrong with paper ballots anyway? After all, they've been used since 139 B.C.

Well, the same company, Premier, makes optical-scan machines which tabulate paper ballots, and these machines can also be hacked!

But the biggest complaint with paper ballots has been poor design. For example, the infamous butterfly ballot used in Florida for the 2000 presidential election was blamed for many mis-marked ballots.

Punch card systems have also lost favor due to the high rate of inaccuracy related to the incomplete removal of the perforated chad and the inaccessibility to voters with disabilities.

Sometimes it seems that the MSM is trying to perpetuate the idea of paper ballot "voter fraud" like in the case of Dixville Notch, NH where 17 ballots were cast even though there were only 16 registered voters. Well, those reports were irresponsible and inaccurate as exposed on the Brad Blog.

The simple fact remains that any system that leaves a paper trail can at least be recounted by hand in a location where the process can be viewed by the public. You can't get that transparency with any electronic voting machine!

Therefore I have to conclude that paper ballots aren't perfect, but they are by far the best system available.

Finally, if you're wondering which candidates votes will go missing this year, remember in 2003 Walden O'Dell -- then the chief executive of Diebold Inc. -- told Republicans in a fund-raising letter that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." I don't for one second believe that their machine "glitches" are accidental.

Some other links of interest:

• Standing For Voters
• Black Box Voting
• Velvet Revolution

The Threat of Electronic Voting

Velvet Revolution Interviews Stephen Spoonamore: segment 1, segment 2, segment 3, segment 4, segment 5, segment 6, segment 7, segment 8.

The problems with electronic voting are complex, and if you're even a tiny bit computer-phobic (like John McCain), you might be intimidated by discussions about computer memory, IP addresses, and encryption. But in segment 2, Stephen Spoonamore, one of the world's leading experts in cyber crime, gives us this metaphor:

Here's my finger, and if I were to write on a ballot, that ballot is now a permanent document. What is happening now is when you touch that screen, that screen has circuitry inside it and the circuitry inside talks to a datafield. That datafield below it is basically like you walking up and opening a curtain and there's a little man who says, "hello, what's your vote?" And you say "well I'd like to vote for this person," and he says "thank you," and then he closes the screen and goes to a different screen and tells someone else. That next layer is the operating system. Now you don't really know what the screen is telling the operating system because you can't see it, so unlike a vote that you marked, the screen now takes that information and passes it to a fieldset of the operating system. Who knows who wrote the operating system? Diebold won't tell us.

In another interesting segment, Spoonamore says that he believes that Kerry won in 2004, not Bush... and Spoonamore is a Republican. If you care about the election, if you care about democracy, you'll watch those 8 video segments.

On a related note, do you realize that in the U.S. there is no Constitutional guarantee to the right to vote? I think it's time for an amendment. But what a radical idea that is. Amending our Constitution to affirm basic rights? Our current government only passes legislation to take away rights and freedoms.

Loser Takes All

Loser Takes All is a collection of essays covering the vast election fraud that has been perpetrated by the GOP—with the Democratic Party’s acquiescence—since 2000. The number of topics alone is alarming: the myth of George Bush’s victory in Florida in 2000, and FOX News’s key role in propagating it; Senator Max Cleland’s dubious defeat in Georgia in 2002; Bush’s “re-election” in 2004, including evidence of systematic fraud outside of Ohio; startling evidence of fraud committed in the 2006 midterm elections, which the Democrats appear to have won by a far larger margin than officially reported; and, crucially, evidence that the Republicans will attempt to steal the presidential election in 2008.

The book also includes an essay about Don Siegelman, a story that not many Americans are aware of:



The 60 Minutes interview doesn't cover the whole story though. In a recent Air America interview, Don Siegelman made very specific allegations of election fraud against Karl Rove and the Bush administration:

[Thom Hartmann]: Right. Now, in our conversation you have suggested that the original election that you lost to Bob Riley by a few thousand votes in the middle of the night may have been stolen. That is a part of the story that has been treated as if it was radioactive by the corporate press. It has, to the best of my knowledge, I have never heard that in any of the official corporate news reports. Have you asserted that before, have you been saying this all along, or is this…

[Don Siegelman]: Well yes, we have been saying it, we have been saying it since the night of the election. I mean, we won the election, the votes were counted and were declared and then in one county which is controlled by Republicans the, after midnight when everybody went home, when the poll workers were sent home, when the media was gone, they decided to electronically recount these votes and shifted the votes and certified the vote illegally the next day. The, interestingly, Karl Rove’s client sepped in, the attorney general stepped in and said, ‘if anybody tries to hand count these votes we’re going to put them in jail’. We initially had a green light from the local Republicans in this one area that we could come in and hand count these ballots where the electronic shift occurred.[..]

In true Republican style, Karl Rove seems to be angry that the story is being reported at all. Meanwhile, Rove continues to appear on Fox News as a political analyst without disclosure of his ties to Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) campaign.

2008 might be another loser takes all year.