Fair Elections

Colorado's Democratic-controlled state legislature is ramming through an election bill that critics say will open the door to voter fraud and intimidation.

The "Voter Access and Modernized Elections Act" is expected to pass the legislature this week. Democrats control both chambers of the legislature, as well as the governor's mansion, meaning the bill could pass without a single Republican vote.

Key provisions include:

• Same-day voting after registration
• Mandatory mail-in ballots
• Eliminate local polling places
  

In short, it's a recipe for voter fraud and intimidation.

Read the whole thing.

More details here.

This is just the petition to get on the primary ballot in Indiana, not actual votes.  It is, nonetheless, indicative of the level of corruption in our political system that flies under the radar.  While the Libertarian Party struggles every year to get ballot access for its candidates under rules both inane and arcane, the Democrat party hires someone to forge the necessary signatures for ballot access.

Both candidates.

It's not like either Obama or Hillary would have real problems getting on the ballot the legitimate way, although the forged petitions might have kept Obama off the ballot in that state had they been challenged.  They were not -- because the people committing the fraud were the same election officials in charge of preventing it.

It's that last bit that's concerning.  What else would these election officials do to help their candidates?

Hat tip to Jay G.

The head of a group accused of illegally taping private meetings of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's campaign visited the White House days before the group's Twitter account began actively attacking the Kentucky Republican, according to White House visitors logs.

What did the President know, and when did he know it?

No one ever gets arrested for allegedly trying to rig them.

It should probably be noted that this is a bipartisan scandal.  State Senator Smith is a Democrat.  Mr. Halloran is a Republican.  I can't find the party affiliation for the others.

I'm curious which candidate was supposed to win, and what party they belong to.  There are some really interesting possible answers.

UPDATE: Noramie Jasmin was a member of the Illegal Mayors, so it's a safe bet she's a Democrat.

UPDATE: More details at Reuters.  Malcolm Smith, a Democrat, was charged with trying to buy a place on the Republican ticket for the New York Mayor's race.

Tab Clearing:

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has launched a nationwide campaign to assess police militarization in the United States. Starting Wednesday, ACLU affiliates in 23 states are sending open records requests to hundreds of state and local police agencies requesting information about their SWAT teams, such as how often and for what reasons they're deployed, what types of weapons they use, how often citizens are injured during SWAT raids, and how they're funded. More affiliates may join the effort in the coming weeks.

Took them long enough.

Milwaukee County prosecutors Thursday filed voter fraud charges against 10 people, including two accused of double voting in 2012 elections and two felons ineligible to vote.

North Carolina's State Board of Elections is referring evidence to prosecutors that five people appear to have voted in both North Carolina and in Florida. The information the board is passing on wasn't gathered by government officials, but by a private watchdog group called the Voter Integrity Project.

The state is turning over five names to prosecutors, out of 33 names given them by the Voter Integrity Project.  That project is not a government project, mind you; it's a volunteer effort, privately funded. 

When the left points at those five possible prosecutions out of millions of votes, and says that it demonstrates that voter fraud isn't a real problem, it's important to understand what sort of funnel goes on to get those five potential prosecutions.

It looks like this.

Some unknown number of people vote illegally -- maybe they vote more than once, or in two places, or vote once after a felony conviction.  Lots of possibilities.  This is the real size of the problem.

Some fraction of those people committed voter fraud by voting in two states.  This is likely small, because voting in two states is a lot of trouble for small gain (one additional vote).

Some fraction of the people who voted in two states listed two addresses on their voter registration paperwork.  This is also likely small, because people are likely to realize that it may get them caught if they realize voting in both places is wrong.

Some fraction of those people did so in North Carolina, rather than the other 49 states.

Some fraction of those were detected and investigated by the Voter Integrity Project -- probably a small fraction, limited by the resources of a volunteer project.  We know this number is 33.

Some fraction of those investigated had enough evidence to warrant referral to prosecutors.  We know this number is 5.

We don't know how many illegal votes resulted from this.  We can speculate that there are at least 66 (33 people voting twice).

And finally, we know that there are other investigations here and there turning up similar small numbers of prosecutable voter fraud cases.  One case I remember involved 5 people and 19 illegal votes.

We only see the five cases coming out at this point, but when you look at how many filters we passed through to get those five, it becomes clear that the scale of the problem could be much, much larger than that. 

... after all, everyone can vote as many times as they want to!

Remember when Bush's White House allegedly fired Department of Justice career prosecutors for political reasons, and how that was a huge scandal?

Obama's White House has allegedly transferred a Department of Justice career prosecutor in order to stifle criminal charges against the New Black Panther Party voting rights incident.  You may remember that case as the one where two individuals in uniform and with police batons intimidated voters outside a polling place.

It's not conclusive proof of any wrongdoing, but it sure is suspicious.

I got the tip from John Lott's blog.

UPDATE: Big Lizards has a detailed post with the complete timeline.

During the election last November, I noted a blatant case of voter intimidation.  A man wielding a nightstick and dressed in a paramilitary uniform stood in front of the polling place in a predominantly black neighborhood, and engaged with voters approaching the polling location.  He frequently used racial slurs as he spoke with voters.  His actions were "the most blatant form of voter intimidation" that a former civil rights worker (from the 1960's civil rights era) who witnessed their actions had ever seen.   The whole thing was videotaped and uploaded to YouTube.

And the Obama administration has declined to prosecute, with their political appointees overruling career lawyers.  It seems the Obama administration considers it sufficient to obtain an injunction barring the one individual from bringing a nightstick to a polling place in the future. 

Is this the change you were looking for?

... and oh, yes, I should mention one small detail.  The people engaging in voter intimidation were black.  Which goes a long way towards explaining the administration's actions, doesn't it? 

Unless, of course, you are the Louisiana governor, Kathleen Blanco, who has issued an executive order to that effect.

I can understand, politically, why she might want to do this.  It's undoubtedly difficult to hold elections after a devastating hurricane, especially when said hurricane exposed your own incompetence along with the incompetence of your political allies.  You might rightly fear a backlash from the voters.  You might even realize that you deserve a backlash from the voters.

But you do NOT suspend the elections indefinitely.

Not in America.

comes this story about new electronic voting machines in Florida crashing. C'mon, folks, I know software development is hard, but it's not that hard.

Amazingly, it's possibly for an illegal immigrant to become a deputy registrar of voters in Wisconsin -- simply because no one asks for proof of citizenship. And when someone does just that, it translates directly into voter fraud.

The Times piece was published just one week ahead of the U.S. presidential election on November 2nd, undoubtedly timed to directly influence the electoral debate. Whatever the merits of the accusations in the Times article (which have been strongly contested by the Bush Administration and are largely unproven), critical questions need to be asked with regard to the behavior of the IAEA and its overseeing body, the United Nations.

The credibility of the IAEA, currently headed by a Muslim, has been called into question by accusations of political motivations for the timing of their letter to news organizations regarding the "missing explosives" controversy.

For once, the opinions expressed by the New York Times mostly make sense. I'm less concerned about whether rules are federal vs local as I am about whether the rules make sense. Foremost on that list should be open-source software for electronic voting machines. We have a right to see how the votes are counted, especially when a machine -- rather than many individuals relatively trusted by the community -- is announcing the totals.

Unsurprisingly, the Times focuses their suggestions on issues that reflect poorly on Republicans. But there are some good ideas buried here, if actually applied in a non-partisan manner:

1. Prosecute vote fraud or intimidation as a felony
2. Require election software to be open-source
3. Require a voter-verifiable paper trail
4. Publically-announced purge lists with advance notice

Earlier this year, 13 Democratic congressfolk wrote a letter to the UN requesting election observers for the US. They got their wish: election observers from the OSCE will be observing elections in the US. Gunner has the details.

The New York Times has an article talking about some of the vote fraud and suppression accusations already flying around. When you read it, remember that the Democratic campaign manual instructs their poll workers to allege voter intimidation against minorities whether there actually IS any intimidation or not.

Speculation that the left wing would try to win the election by means of dirty tricks -- vote fraud, black-bag operations, etc -- have been running rampant. We've already seen quite a few examples. I'll be using this post to chronicle such instances on election day as I come across them.

• PowerLine reports that 30 vans rented by the GOP to drive voters to the polls had their tires slashed overnight. The police confirm the story.
• Drudge has reports that votes were "found on machines before the poll opened" in Philladelphia.
• Daschle v Thune is keeping track of legal developments in South Dakota, where the leader of the Democratic half of the Senate is doing poorly against the Republican challenger and prefers to go to court (in front of a judge who happens to be his close friend, no less).
• A military blogger in Chicago was (almost?) disenfranchised.
• This story has a summary of claims from both sides. The Kerry Spot has another good roundup.
• In another account of Democratic attacks on Republican vans, this account describes Democrats gone wild.
• Another roundup of fraud, with a lot of details.
• A polling place in New York has pictures of Abu Gharib and "Kingdom of Fear" written on the walls.
• White powder thrown into polling location, but it turned out to be salt. Still, it managed to close down the poll site for a while.
• PowerLine has another report of campaign violence, this one after the election. A crowd of masked man broke into the Republican campaign offices in North Carolina, spray painted vulgar messages, and burned an effigy. The police believe that the vandals attempted to place incendiary devices inside the building.

Recently I was called by representatives of a nationally known and famous political polling organization wanting to know if I was willing to share my thoughts and opinions on the upcoming presidential election. I was, in fact, not only willing, but anxious to do so and so we began the interview.

As I?ve thought about the situation since the end of that telephone call, however, I?ve become quite angry. Whenever I talk to newspaper editors and television program directors about why they don?t give more coverage to Libertarian Candidates, causes and activities, I always get an answer that is a variation on the same theme: ?All the polls show you have negligible support.? Yet, as this very incident clearly demonstrates, the people making media decisions are ?cooking the books", skewing the process to exclude the answers that they do not, apparently, wish to see. In those polls commissioned by Libertarians and aggressively neutral polling organizations, Libertarian Presidential Candidate Michael Badnarik polls between 1% and 3% regularly. In those polls where he is at first left off the polling list and then later included, his support often jumps to over 5%, indicating that when likely voters realize that they have alternative choices, they elect to take them.

Read the whole thing; it's worthwhile, and goes a long way towards explaining why Libertarian ideas don't get a lot of play.

Reports from Washington State speak of a break-in at a Republican party office; the thieves stole several key computers with important election plans, but left others alone.

UPDATE: There's another possible explanation for this event, now that I think about it. Although taking the computers doesn't fit that scenario.

UPDATE: Another break in has occurred in Washington State.

The Washington state headquarters for the president's re-election campaign was broken into last night, and police are investigating the theft of three computers from the Bellevue office.

Missing are laptop computers used by the campaign's executive director, the head of the get-out-the-vote effort and one that had been set for delivery to the campaign's Southwest Washington field director, said Jon Seaton, executive director of the state's George W. Bush campaign.

Seaton said data on the computers was backed up and available elsewhere. But, he said, the loss creates a potential security breach about the campaign's so-called 72-hour plan, the Bush get-out-the-vote effort.

There are basically two possibilities here. Either this is a simple theft of opportunity, or it was a deliberate attempt to obtain data on election efforts. If it's the latter, well, the last time we had something like that happen we called it "Watergate" and a sitting President was impeached and resigned his office because of it.

I find it hard to believe the Democratic Party would officially be that stupid, but someone acting on their own is a clear possibility with tensions so high. The reporter indicates that they took only three computers, all of which would have contained sensitive information, leaving many others behind.

I'll be watching for more information on this one.

Powerline has a warning about vote fraud in Minnesota.

Representative Rush Holt of New Jersey, who has introduced a bill requiring that digital voting machines leave a paper trail and that their software be available for public inspection, is occasionally told that systems lacking these safeguards haven't caused problems. "How do you know?" he asks.

What we do know about Diebold does not inspire confidence. The details are technical, but they add up to a picture of a company that was, at the very least, extremely sloppy about security, and may have been trying to cover up product defects.

What we really need is an open-source voting system.

California Attorney General Bill Lockyer said on Tuesday he would sue electronic voting machine maker Diebold Inc. on charges it defrauded the state with false claims about its products.

Hopefully this will lead to something I consider inevitable: open-source voting software.

On August 12, in response to complaints filed with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) and in response to a lawsuit jointly filed by the National Voting Rights Institute and previously excluded third-party challengers, a Federal Court in Washington ordered the FEC to conduct a full invesigation of the corrupt, bipartisan Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD). The District Court's ruling is an important victory in the campaign for transparent and nonpartisan presidential debates.

On August 23, Open Debates jointly issued a report with ten other pro-democracy groups -- i.e. Common Cause, Rock the Vote, Brennan Center for Justice, National Voting Rights Institute, Judicial Watch, Public Campaign -- critical of the CPD and supportive of the Citizens' Debate Commission. The 25-page report clearly and effectively outlines the problems with the CPD, and concludes with an endorsement of the Citizens' Debate Commission. You can read the report at: http://www.opendebates.org/documents/REPORT2.pdf

Today, an opinion piece co-authored by Open Debates' Executive Director George Farah and Tom Gerety, Executive Director of the Brennan Center for Justice, was published today in the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel: http://www.opendebates.org/news/relatedarticles/geretyfarah.html

Letting the candidates read from soundbite scripts is obscene. We need real debates so we can judge how well the candidates actually understand the issues. It's hard to argue ANY position when you don't know beans about policy, and any candidate for President needs to know beans about policy. You can argue something you don't believe in, with enough research, but you can't argue something you don't understand.

Napa County in Northern California said on Friday that electronic voting machines used in the March presidential primary failed to record votes on some of its paper ballots, which will force the county to re-scan over 11,000 ballots and possibly change the outcome of some close local races.

The glitch is the latest in a string of problems with the new generation of electronic voting machines being rolled out across the United States. Critics of the machines say they are inaccurate or susceptible to tampering, and can't be trusted in this year's presidential elections.