Vote

Do not let your mild disappointments with President Obama keep you from voting next week.

(YouTube video.)

This Guy is Sharp

Or at least that's his name:

(Babelgum video.)

Buying a Clue

It's time for the Wheel of Fortune host to buy a clue. First let me say I had no idea Pat Sajak had added conservative blogging to his resume. But go read it if you dare. His latest idea is that public employees shouldn't be allowed to vote on the same things as everybody else:

I’m not suggesting that public employees should be denied the right to vote, but that there are certain cases in which their stake in the matter may be too great. Of course we all have a stake in one way or another in most elections, and many of us tend to vote in favor of our own interests. However, if, for example, a ballot initiative appears that might cap the benefits of a certain group of state workers, should those workers be able to vote on the matter?

Yes, Pat, because otherwise you wouldn't have a democracy. And of course, in a democracy, people very often, when given correct information, will vote in their own best interest. Voters have no duty to be impartial.

But let's follow Pat's modest proposal. Let's assume that only people who don't have "great stakes" in an issue can cast a vote. Only young, healthy people could vote on cuts to social security. Only shut-ins could vote on road repairs. Only childless people could vote on education initiatives. Only the unemployed could vote on income tax laws. And certainly nobody related to a politician would be allowed to vote in an election.

Also, we'll have to come up with quite a system of data mining and voter tracking to make sure people only vote on the issues that don't affect them.

Pat, your real problem is that you're a smug, privileged rich man who honestly believes that other smug, privileged rich men are the de-facto standard for freedom and rights. Everybody else is chattel and can be stripped of their rights if it protects your fortune. Buy a clue, Pat.

And while you're at it, get up and turn your own lousy letters.

You Say You Want a Revolution

"I'm sorry, but revolutions start with young people, not 65 year old people talking about literacy tests and people who can't say the word 'vote' in English." — Meghan McCain on The View.

That's my favorite quote this week. For one thing, and I hate to say this, the old people have been getting on my nerves lately.

I was having lunch with my mom last week, and out of the blue she tells me that one of her friends, an author of children's books and a Mormon, gave $10,000 of her own money to support Prop 8 -- that's the California ballot initiative that banned gay marriage. I tried to control myself, but my refrained response was basically "how much do you have to hate somebody to spend that much money to stop them from doing something that doesn't harm you in any way? How spiteful do you have to be to use your freedom to take away somebody else's freedom?"

My mom didn't have much of a reply, because I know darn well she voted for Prop 8 just like all of her gray-haired little-old-lady friends, but she did say that maybe that chunk of money would have been better donated to cancer research or something more helpful to everybody...

See, my mom is not totally dumb or cold-hearted, but she's certainly not versed in the subject of civil rights. I wouldn't be surprised if she supports the idea of a voter literacy test. Rachel Maddow recently did a thorough report on the history of such tests. I recommend you take a look at that video, but the major point is that those tests were only given to minorities and the questions were so ridiculously difficult that I'm not even sure a professor of political science could pass the quiz.

Also, those literacy tests are not our ancient history. They are our recent history. They were still being used when my parents were old enough to vote. Old people should know that these tests were discredited because they were racist tools of disenfranchisement.

About a year ago, I heard my dad espousing Ann Coulter's idiotic idea to take away women's right to vote... if you can even call that an "idea." Coulter's argument goes, "if we took away women’s right to vote, we’d never have to worry about another Democrat president."

And that's the whole idea. Eliminate voters who vote differently than the white landed gentry. Go back to the way it used to be, because things were just so bloody good back then for YOU... as long as YOU weren't black, Hispanic, Asian, Jewish, Muslim, female, gay, or disabled.

It's a resurrection of the intolerant past, and the old people want to call that a revolution.

Sacrificing an Acorn

The attacks on ACORN began last year when Republicans accused the organization of voter fraud. This month, however, the opposition has turned into a full assault after a few low-level ACORN employees were caught on tape giving some really stupid advice to a guy in a badass pimp costume.

Well, tally another win for Fox's Glenn Beck. Apparently he can set the agenda for the entire country and swiftly take down a community organization whose mission is to advocate for affordable housing, affordable healthcare, higher minimum wages, and better schools. ACORN was also against predatory lending before it was cool.

In other words, ACORN's mission was staunchly against the interests of big business, and that's why nobody wants to be friends with them now. The media hates them and Congress hates them too.

So last week, while Congress was busy defunding ACORN for their transgressions, I stewed over all the other corrupt government contractors who have defrauded tax payers and are accused of rape and murder. Why can't we defund them?

Oh wait... We are?!

When our government shoots fish in a barrel, they like to use a bazooka:

The congressional legislation intended to defund ACORN, passed with broad bipartisan support, is written so broadly that it applies to "any organization" that has been charged with breaking federal or state election laws, lobbying disclosure laws, campaign finance laws or filing fraudulent paperwork with any federal or state agency. It also applies to any of the employees, contractors or other folks affiliated with a group charged with any of those things.

In other words, the bill could plausibly defund the entire military-industrial complex. Whoops.

Hysterical! I don't mind sacrificing an ACORN if it means we also defund the likes of Blackwater and KBR.

In a sane country, the Defund ACORN ACT would be declared unconstitutional as it is clearly a bill of attainder. But these days, the insanity doesn't end at Fox.

Vote!

Everybody should get out and vote! Even underachievers and dyslexic cake decorators!

(Image via Cake Wrecks.)

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.

Homer Gets It

If Homer Simpson can understand the threat of electronic voting, then what's wrong with the rest of us?

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.