Fair Elections

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.

Michelle Malkin has a roundup of voter fraud problems that loom large for this election. I don't know how these incidents compare to earlier years, but following the 2000 Presidential Election and the way the Democrats have kept the issue alive despite 9-11 and the results of recounts favoring Bush, I suspect that many Democratic activists are willing to go a little beyond the usual in order to give their candidates an advantage.

The stakes are high for Republicans too, of course, but that kind of thing seems to be more frowned upon. That said, however, I would not be surprised to see allegations of fraud in any races using the Diebold electronic voting machines, due to their well-publicized security issues.

So should we require ID to vote? It's a tricky question.

It's a lot harder to fake an ID card than it is to fake a voter registration; the latter simply requires mailing in a card using a valid address and then taking the card to the polls. But we don't generally require ID in this country; the closest thing we have to a universal identification document is the driver's licence, and that is voluntary.

However, there are already some basic requirements of citizenship that require ID; the most obvious being entering and exitting the country (passports). Reluctant as I am to endorse any serious requirement for a national ID, it is clear that identification documents are a necessity for an honest and fair voting process. The alternative is massive and widespread voter fraud. Some might even say that we are already living the alternative.

Powerline has a warning about vote fraud in Minnesota.

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.

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.

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.

While having UN observers (or really, any foreign observers at all) on the US elections tends to raise my hackles, it doesn't mean it's time to head for the hills. We're talking about beaurocrats watching the conduct of public officials at polling places, and presumably checking to make sure that people legally able to vote are allowed to do so, examining voting equipment for signs of fraud, and so on. Those are tasks that someone needs to do, at least on a spot-check basis.

I definitely do NOT think we should expect to see UN blue-helmeted soldiers at our polling places. Some people in Florida will likely see men in suits. But no men in helmets. And the odds are that those men in suits will watch, maybe find a few minor things to complain about, and then go away.

This website, www.votebuddy.org, presents the idea that voters can team up while voting. One Bush-is-the-lesser-evil voter can team up with one Kerry-is-the-lesser evil voter. Once they've found each other, they can agree that neither will vote for their lesser-evil, and instead both will vote for the third-party candidate they really want. Because they have agreed ahead of time, they can be sure that their third-party vote won't help the greater-evil win.

It's an interesting idea. And it's got me thinking.

The PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE takes place Tuesday, August 31st, at 7pm eastern time. C-Span will broadcast the event, tentatively scheduled Sunday, September 5 @ 6:00pm [ET]. It is an OPEN debate.

Unlike the Presidential Debates run by the Democrats-Republicans, no legitimate candidate is excluded. The questions are NOT agreed upon by the candidates or otherwise scripted; this promises to be a lively debate: which means you're likely to get real answers to the questions. There will be no 'Applause' sign over the stage.

Starting at 7:00 PM each presidential candidate will be allowed a five minute opening statement. The moderators will then pose questions to the candidates for 45 minutes. This will be followed by a 30 minute period featuring questions posed by the audience. Candidates will be allowed two minutes for answers and 30 seconds for rebuttals (unless the question is addressed to all candidates in which case there are no rebuttals.) The debate will end with 3 minute closing statements from each candidate.

This debate ends up being between Badnarik (Libertarian) and Cobb (Green). I'll be watching out for any post-debate video before C-Span airs it. Although the lack of most of the candidates is somewhat disappointing, the Libertarian and Green platforms clash quite a bit, so it promises to be an exciting debate!

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.

A California voting systems panel recommended Thursday that the secretary of state decertify an electronic voting machine made by Diebold Election Systems, making it likely that four counties that used the machines will have to find others for the November election.

The panel said the state should decertify the Diebold TSx. The TSx was used for the first time in California during the March primary in Kern, San Joaquin, Solano and San Diego counties. Kevin Shelley, California's secretary of state, has until April 30 to decide whether to act on the panel's recommendation. The state must give counties a six-month notice to take machines out of commission before an election.

The Diebold folks are the ones who don't want to provide a paper trail yet have machines that are horrifyingly vulnerable to attack.

California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley ended five months of speculation and announced Friday that he was decertifying all electronic touch-screen voting machines in the state due to security concerns and lack of voter confidence.

He also said that he was passing along evidence to the state's attorney general to bring criminal and civil charges against voting-machine-maker Diebold Election Systems for fraud.

The actual changes have fewer teeth; they are completely decertifying one type of machine only, and allowing others to be used with changes. But it's a step in the right direction.

Someone whipped up a bunch of poster-style images referencing Diebold, and their electronic voting machines. Nice work.

Electronic voting has much to offer, but will we ever be able to trust these buggy machines? Yes, we will -- but only if we adopt the techniques of the ''open source'' geeks.

This is the only way to have trustworthy electronic voting.