9-7-2016 WED Election Updates – 13 New Links – CA, WI, TX, NC updates – FBI warns of election hacking to State Officials
National Updates
9-2-2016 – techdirt – DHS’s New Election Cybersecurity Committee Has No Cybersecurity Experts – from the prepare-to-be-memoed-at,-hackers dept – There’s not much to be said about Georgia’s Brian Kemp and California’s Alex Padilla — in terms of cybersecurity. However, there’s plenty to be said about safeguarding elections. Padilla has been sued twice over alleged election fraud. And Kemp’s office mistakenly released the personal information of six million registered voters. But there’s one thing they can all agree on: there’s nothing to worry about. Fortunately, this lack of technical prowess won’t prevent the working group from achieving the DHS’s goal, which appears to have little to do with actual cybersecurity. “Secretaries of State are committed to working with our federal partners to increase awareness of federal government cybersecurity resources and services that are available to election officials,” said NASS President Denise W. Merrill, Connecticut Secretary of the State. “We look forward to sharing state best practices and technical advice that will strengthen understanding and collaboration between state and federal agencies.”
8-29-2016 – BradCast – FBI Warns of New Election System Hacks; Last Minute Federal Court Battles Over Voting Rights – the FBI issues a new warning to states about voting system intrusion and last minute battles continue in federal courts over voting rights access to the polls.
8-29-2016 – Yahoo News – FBI says foreign hackers penetrated state election systems – by Michael Isikoff, Chief Investigative Correspondent – The FBI has uncovered evidence that foreign hackers penetrated two state election databases in recent weeks, prompting the bureau to warn election officials across the country to take new steps to enhance the security of their computer systems, according to federal and state law enforcement officials.
8-18-2016 – FBI CYWATCH unit – Targeting Activity Against State Board of Election Systems – Targeting Activity Against State Board of Election Systems – The FBI is requesting that states contact their Board of Elections and determine if any similar activity to their logs, both inbound and outbound, has been detected. Attempts should not be made to touch or ping the IP addresses directly.
8-17-216 – Reuters – U.S. offers states help to fight election hacking – The government is offering to help states protect the Nov. 8 U.S. election from hacking or other tampering, in the face of allegations by Republican Party presidential candidate Donald Trump that the system is open to fraud. Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson told state officials in a phone call on Monday that federal cyber security experts could scan for vulnerabilities in voting systems and provide other resources to help protect against infiltration, his office said in a statement.
CA Updates
8-27-2016 – Los Angeles Daily News – Will making voting easier in California boost electorate’s participation? Will anything? – It didn’t take Julian Assange to uncover the dirty secret of Golden State politics: that in ever-increasing numbers Californians have more important things to do on Election Day than perform our most basic civic duty. In 2014, only 31 percent of registered voters bothered to cast a ballot, a record low, dropping California to 43rd out of 50 states in voter participation. [editors note: people know the system is rigged against their interests – that is why they think their vote does not matter – in my humble opinion]
8-25-2016 – Courthouse News Service – Sanders Fans’ Fight Over Calif. Voter Rules Tossed – With the California primaries long over, a federal judge tossed a suit brought by Bernie Sanders supporters accusing election officials of violating their voting rights in the run-up to the June election. U.S. District Judge William Alsup dismissed the case as moot on Thursday, telling plaintiffs’ counsel William Simpich that “there is plenty of time to take an appeal.” [editors note: over 1 million votes for President were not counted in the June 2016 election – not enough votes to matter?]
8-25-2016 – Independent Voter Project – Nearly a Quarter of a Million Senate Votes Tossed – Several California voter registrars confirmed last week what the Independent Voter Project warned Secretary of State Alex Padilla about well ahead of the 2016 primary elections. As a result of insufficient voter education programs and ballot design problems there was mass voter confusion during the primary, resulting in — among other things — nearly a quarter of a million Senate votes being thrown out.
8-17-2016 – YourVoterGuide, Inc. – Ballot Design Issues Lead to Almost 250,000 Over-Votes in California, June 2016 US Senate Election – We have grouped the different ballot designs together to analyze the effect of the ballot design on the number of over-votes. In comparison to the US Senate race, there were only 5,833 total over-votes for Republican and Democratic candidates in the Presidential primary. The discrepancy between the two races is striking; in the US Senate race, approximately 230,000 more people had their votes disqualified due to over-voting.
WI, NC, TX updates
8-29-2016 – Bradblog – 7th Circuit: WI Photo ID Restriction to Remain in Place, Based on New Assurances from State – Despite being found a violation of the federal Voting Rights Act by multiple federal courts reviewing several challenges to Wisconsin’s Republican-enacted Photo ID voting restriction, the law will stay in place this November, as per a new federal court ruling issued Friday. The court’s reasoning is based on an assurance by the state that free Photo IDs will be made more readily available and easier to obtain than they have been in the past. The Wisconsin ruling stands in contrast to a recent ruling by the very conservative U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeal that softened Texas Republicans’ similar law by adding an allowance for voters without the requisite ID to be permitted to cast a normal ballot after signing an affidavit, and a U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeal ruling that completely struck down a similar provision in North Carolina after finding that it, and other NC GOP-enacted voting restrictions, were designed to “target African-American voters with nearly surgical precision.”
Resources
5-8-2015 – Reining in the Purcell Principle – Richard L. Hasen,University of California, Irvine School of Law – the Supreme Court’s application of “the Purcell principle:” the idea that courts should not issue orders which change election rules in the period just before the election.
Critical Fundraising links:
Group: Election Justice USA
Facebook: Election Justice USA – Facebeook or Election Justice USA – Facebook
Twitter Link: #ElectionJusticeUSA or @Elec_Justice
Link: Election Justice USA LawsuitsGroup: JAMPAC
Web Page JAMPAC – DNC Fraud Lawsuit
Facebook Page: JAMPAC – Facebook
Twitter Page: #DNCfraudlawsuit or #DNCLawsuit
Court documents: DNC CLASS ACTION LAWSUIT – This page contains court-filed documents available for download.
To sign up as a class representative for the lawsuit, please email:dncfraud@jampac.us
YouTube Page: JAMPAC – YouTube
If just half of those uncounted California primary votes were for Bernie, if my memory serves, that would have won him California.
And it’s ridiculous to not do anything about computer hacking in the home state of Silicon Valley. I mean, it’s not as though top experts couldn’t drive one hour to the state capitol and teach legislators and state officials, including Padilla, all about it. GRRRR.
“If just half of those uncounted California primary votes were for Bernie… that would have won him California.”
No. To be correct, your statement needs to read: “If just half of those uncounted California primary votes were for Bernie and none of those uncounted votes were for Hillary Clinton, that would have won him California.”
There were indeed about a million uncounted votes, which is troubling. And there were indeed enough uncounted votes that it’s possible Sanders could have won if all had been counted. But to do so, Sanders would need to have won a very large percentage of the uncounted votes.
The final count, according to NYTimes in August, was Clinton 2,713,259 and Sanders 2,326,030. That’s about 390,000 more votes counted for Clinton than for Sanders. So to win, Sanders needs to get at least 390,000 more votes than Clinton does out of the uncounted Democratic votes.
Now, here’s where doing the math becomes a problem. There were 1,050,165 uncounted votes, but those are Republican as well as Democratic votes.
If 100% of the uncounted votes were Democratic votes, then Sanders would need to win about 70% or more of the uncounted votes to get more than Clinton. That’s hard enough. But it’s highly unlikely all the uncounted votes were Democratic votes. It’s more likely that at least 1/4 of them are Republican votes.
So let’s say there were 750,000 uncounted Democratic votes. In that case, Sanders would need to have won about 575,000 and Clinton about 175,000 for Sanders to have won the primary. That means Sanders would have needed to win more than 75% of the uncounted votes.
And that’s assuming all the uncounted votes were countable. If there were valid reasons for rejecting some of those votes, then the percentage of the remaining votes Sanders would need to overcome Clinton’s 390,000 vote lead increases.
So while I find it very troubling that such a large number of votes remain uncounted, and hope people continue to investigate and call attention to this, it does not appear likely that the uncounted votes alone would have changed the primary outcome.
Thank you for your expert explanation, @Nova Land — I very much appreciate it, and appreciate knowing your conclusion as well. It makes a difference.
Now we need to unseat Alex Padilla as California’s Secretary of State the next time he comes up for election….
Yes!
Any elected official who tolerates election shenanigans, or who runs thing in a way which leaves many important questions unanswered — as happened way too often in this year’s primaries — needs to be removed from office, so that others in similar positions get the message that if they want the job they need to do the job.
Unfortunately Padilla was elected in 2014, and it’s a 4-year term, so he won’t be up for re-election until 2018. I hope Californians remember the 2016 primaries then and that a strong challenger comes forward to unseat Padilla, but I fear most of the rest of the nation will have forgotten about all this by then.
But there is a race coming up this November where at least one of the people involved in primary shenanigans will be coming up for re-election. Helen Purcell, the county recorder for Marcopa County in Arizona, where a number of questionable things have occurred in recent years (such as the drastic reduction in number of polling places in this year’s primary), is up for re-election and she has a strong challenger in Adrian Fontes, who got in the race specifically because he was appalled by how Purcell ran the primary.
This is a down-ballot race worth paying attention to — especially since Maricopa County has a population of close to 4 million people, making it almost as populous as the state of Oregon.
And if Fontes can defeat Purcell in November, the victory can be useful as a rallying cry 2 years from now when other officials who did questionable jobs in this year’s primaries come up for their re-elections.
That would be a good thing.
It’s a sad state of affairs when Iraq has more honest elections than America.
9-7-2016 update from trustvote.org
article on top of page by Lori Grace that exit polls showed Bernie won CA
she recounts the stolen elections that were not challenged – asked Gore about 2000 and he was worried it would cause a revolution and he didn’t have the energy for it
Some of the lack of energy is because the Republicans spent years going after Clinton every which way and Gore did not want to get gored.
We learn today on a post on Naked Capitalism that Clinton’s change in tax policy helped fuel the rise of CEO pay
The (Bill) Clinton Team’s Secret Meeting on CEO Compensation
thank you will also add the links to my next story
Greg Palast has been very active on the election integrity front
I follow him on twitter — his handle is Greg_Palast. You can type in twitter followed by his handle and get his tweets. He repeats himself a lot and is promoting his new movie “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy” and now he writes for Rolling Stone, so he is one of the top, if not the top public figure on elections.
Here are some links
Greg in RS
The GOP’s Stealth War Against Voters
Will an anti-voter-fraud program designed by one of Trump’s advisers deny tens of thousands their right to vote in November?
9-5-2016 article in salon.com
“There’s no such thing as a victimless billionaire”: Inside the shadowy voter fraud conspiracy that’s “still in progress”
Greg Palast uncovers voter suppression beneath alleged fraud in new documentary, “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy”
Greg has a lot to say about the Interstate Crosscheck process to purge voters. This is covered in his RS article. He has a petition to sign
Here is an article on it in AZ
AZ Officials Deny Crosscheck System Targets Minority Names
Over the years more and more people are aware of election fraud. Naked Capitalism has articles about the need for paper ballots publicly counted and follows the issue. The Bernie campaign educated many people about the issue.
When even a politician who is an actual member of the democratic party, and then John Kerry also a democratic do not want to challenge the US voting system, it was probably too much to expect that Bernie who was not a democrat and challenged the entire political establishment, that in his uprising, too much to expect that he would also have forced the issue of election integrity.
The corruption is now so deep, and the stakes are so high – e.g., TPP, and the establishment likes the way things are, that it doesn’t look like any meaningful action will take place in the near term.
The Native American uprising and their dog bites like those on the blacks in the south 50 years ago, and the new activism across many issues, and …. who knows
thank you, will also add the links to my next story!!!!
New article by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman
Distrust of 2016’s Hackable Election Is a Media Landslide With Just One Solution: Hand-counted Paper Ballots
thank you, will also add the links to my next story!