A Georgia computer central to a lawsuit seeking to change the way votes are counted in Georgia was mysteriously wiped clean. Probably doesn't mean anything, right?

Courtesy of the AP: 

A computer server crucial to a lawsuit against Georgia election officials was quietly wiped clean by its custodians just after the suit was filed, The Associated Press has learned. 

The server’s data was destroyed July 7 by technicians at the Center for Elections Systems at Kennesaw State University, which runs the state’s election system. The data wipe was revealed in an email sent last week from an assistant state attorney general to plaintiffs in the case that was later obtained by the AP. More emails obtained in a public records request confirmed the wipe. 

The lawsuit, filed July 3 by a diverse group of election reform advocates, aims to force Georgia to retire its antiquated and heavily criticized election technology. The server in question, which served as a statewide staging location for key election-related data, made national headlines in June after a security expert disclosed a gaping security hole that wasn’t fixed six months after he reported it to election authorities. 

It’s not clear who ordered the server’s data irretrievably erased. 

The Kennesaw elections center answers to Georgia’s secretary of state, Brian Kemp, a Republican running for governor in 2018 and the suit’s main defendant. His spokeswoman issued a statement Thursday saying his office had neither involvement nor advanced warning of the decision. It blamed “the undeniable ineptitude” at the Kennesaw State elections center. 

After declining comment for more than 24 hours, Kennesaw State’s media office issued a statement late Thursday attributing the server wiping to “standard operating procedure.” It did not respond to the AP’s question on who ordered the action.

Oh yeah, SOMEBODY was very nervous about the data that was stored on that computer. 

And possibly for good reason.

In response to Russian hacking Virginia to do away with touchscreen voting machines.

Courtesy of The Hill: 

The Virginia State Board of Elections moved Friday to do away with touchscreen voting machines in the state by November’s election, a move aimed at boosting security. 

The board decided to phase out the machines this year after the Virginia Department of Elections recommended that the touchscreen voting machines be decertified. The recommendation came after security experts breached numerous types of voting machines with ease at the DEF CON cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas in July, according to The Richmond Times-Dispatch. 

The move comes amid heightened concerns over foreign interference in future elections, in light of the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia used cyberattacks and disinformation to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. 

Yes, yes, yes!

This is EXACTLY what needs to happen all over this country in order to regain our voting integrity.

We have known since 2000, that these voting machines can be hacked and it is WAY past time that we shit can them and go back to paper ballots.

The Russians will be back, and dammit we need to be ready.

Republicans vote to abolish commission that works to protect integrity of voting machines.

Courtesy of HuffPo: 

This past weekend, hackers gathered in Las Vegas with a simple mission: break into America’s electronic voting machines and take control. Within minutes, some had already succeeded – but that’s a good thing. These hackers were part of a workshop held to identify vulnerabilities so they can be fixed well before any Americans cast actual votes next election. This exercise underscores the very real danger posed by outdated and insecure voting-machine software – as well as the important mission our government must continue undertaking to close these vulnerabilities and safeguard our elections. 

However, in their FY2018 funding proposal, Republicans are going after the small but highly successful agency that protects the integrity of our voting systems: the Election Assistance Commission. In June, House Republicans included a provision in their Financial Services and General Government Appropriations bill that would abolish the Election Assistance Commission. 

Many Americans may not have heard of the Election Assistance Commission, a four-member bipartisan agency that Congress established in 2002 as part of the Help America Vote Act, but nonetheless they benefit greatly from its work. Created to address the flaws in our nation’s voting infrastructure, which contributed to the dispute surrounding the 2000 presidential election, the Election Assistance Commission protects Americans’ votes by helping to ensure that state and local authorities adopt best practices and uphold the highest standards of security for voting technology.

Literally the ONLY reason that the Republicans would vote to abolish this commission is because they do not want the the voting machine vulnerabilities to be identified and fixed.

And the only reason I can think of for that is because they need them to remain vulnerable.

Anybody have an alternate theory?

One of the largest counties in Texas is returning to paper ballots. A sign of things to come perhaps?

Courtesy of The Texas Tribune:

Frank Phillips spent last Wednesday staring down 600 boxes of election materials — voted ballots, blank ballots, precinct records — sitting in a warehouse run by Denton County. After sitting in storage for the legally required periods — up to nearly two years in some cases — the roughly 24,000 pounds of paper were finally ready to be shredded. 

Yet despite the hassle — and the significant cost — Phillips, Denton County’s elections administrator, is looking forward to this fall, when he will implement the county’s newest voting plan: a complete return to the paper ballot. 

The unusual move sets Denton, the ninth-largest county in Texas and one of the fastest-growing, apart from the state’s other biggest counties, which all use some form of electronic voting, according to data collected by the Secretary of State’s office. Both Bexar and Harris Counties, for example, have had all electronic voting systems in place for 15 years. 

Denton has been using a hybrid voting system that employs both electronic and paper ballots for about a decade. But county officials recently approved spending just shy of $9 million to buy new voting equipment from Austin-based Hart InterCivic that will return to an entirely paper-based system in time for this year's November elections. Even disabled voters, who will cast their votes on touch-screen machines, will have their ballots printed out and tallied through a print scanner.

Ahh, a return to voting system you can trust. 

Hopefully the rest of the country will follow suit, especially since we now know that the Russians tried to hack state voter data bases and software systems as well in order to change results.

While we are on the subject of voter suppression, you may like to know that so far only Arkansas has complied with Trump's "Election Integrity" commission and provided all of the voter data that they requested.

So, that is two good news stories about voting integrity in only one post.

Not bad for a Sunday morning.

Agency that certifies voting machines admits they were hacked. That is the "agency that certifies voting machines."

Courtesy of Buzzfeed: 

The government organization that oversees the integrity of voting machines and election administration databases was hacked, according to a report released Thursday. 

Recorded Future, a Boston-based cybersecurity company, identified a hacker by the pseudonym Rasputin who stole login information from the US Election Assistance Commission (EAC) and offered it for sale.

According to the report, Rasputin was in ongoing negotiations to sell 100 login credentials, some with the most powerful administrative privileges over the EAC’s databases, to a Middle Eastern government broker for several thousand dollars. Recorded Future does not believe Rasputin was sponsored by a foreign government.  (Yeah being named after a famous Russian mystic is NO indication that the Russian government is involved or anything.)

Whether the hack could delegitimize the results of the election is difficult to say. Levi Gundert, a researcher with Recorded Future, told BuzzFeed News, “We don’t know when the initial compromise occurred or how long the hacker had access, but it wouldn’t appear that those credentials would have the ability to materially impact the election.”

That last part is not exactly comforting since it is followed by this statement:

The EAC’s database also includes the specifications of electronic voting like where and which companies manufacture them or where they are in the process of security certification, Gundert said. US adversaries could use as advance knowledge to interfere with US elections. 

Because of other vulnerabilities in the EAC’s system, it is possible that the full extent of the hack is not fully known, according to the report.

So is there proof that this hack might have undermined our election?

Oh, we don't know.

Did the hack give them access to information that MIGHT have undermined our election?

Oh hell yeah!

Yeah, that puts my mind right at ease. 

Election recount update.

Broken seals on voting machines in Wisconsin.

There are a whole lot of moving parts on this recount thing so I thought I would try to include them in one update.

Here goes.

First off yes there are images and video of voting machines in Wisconsin with broken seals. However Snopes currently categorizes these stores as "unproven."

In other news we learned that Jill Stein has changed her strategy in the Pennsylvania recount effort by demanding an emergency federal court order: 

The announcement that it would seek an emergency federal court order on Monday for a recount came hours after it dropped a case in the state courts. 

"Make no mistake — the Stein campaign will continue to fight for a statewide recount in Pennsylvania," recount campaign lawyer Jonathan Abady said in a statement issued around 11:30 p.m. "We are committed to this fight to protect the civil and voting rights of all Americans." 

In the statement, Abady said barriers to a recount in Pennsylvania are pervasive and the state court system is ill-equipped to address the problem.

Along with that news is a report that Trump's margin of victory in Pennsylvania is now within 0.2% of a required recount:

On Friday, in response to President Elect Donald Trump’s application to stop the recounts in Pennsylvania, Green Party candidate and recount catalyst Jill Stein issued a statement where she noted that Trump’s margin of victory is now within 0.2% of an automatic recount. Stein cited this tweet from pollsters Decision Desk HQ for her figures.

Pennsylvania statewide with the Philadelphia tally now complete:
Trump 2,961,875
Clinton 2,915,440

— Decision Desk HQ (@DecisionDeskHQ) December 1, 2016

Because this is coming from Stein I remain a little skeptical, however if true this could really be a game changer.

We have also learned that a federal judge ordered that a recount in Michigan happen right away.

Now ultimately all of this might be much ado about nothing, OR we could actually find evidence that this election was stolen and this could be a very big deal indeed.

Whatever the case it has certainly gotten under Trump's skin.

The Green Party just dropped its recount suit in Pennsylvania and is losing votes in Wisconsin recount. Just a Stein scam to raise money!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 4, 2016

Yep, it could be a scam.

But then again this recount thing might terrify Trump because there really is something there for it to find.

All I know is that right now I am keeping an open mind. 

Did Mark Sanford legitimately win his South Carolin Congressional race? Or did he have help?

This was posted on the Brad Blog yesterday:  

Tonight, South Carolina's same 100% unverifiable touch-screen voting systems that declared the unknown, unemployed, never-once-campaigned-anywhere Alvin Green to have somehow defeated four-term state legislator and circuit court judge Vic Rawl to win the 2010 Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate, declared Mark Sanford the winner over Elizabeth Colbert Busch by a 9 point landslide... 

The unverified and unverifiable computer-reported results tonight led PPP's Tom Jensen to tweet: "I feel bad about our SC-1 polling, I'd feel worse if there had been any indication from any other polling that Sanford landslide was coming". 

Neither Jensen nor PPP should feel bad. There was no more indication that a "landslide was coming", than there is proof tonight that it actually came. 

We explained last month, in detail, why the votes cast in this race on SC's oft-failed, easily-manipulated ES&S iVotronic touch-screen voting system would be 100% unverifiable. As Vic Rawl, a Colbert Busch supporter and the man who inexplicably "lost" to Alvin Green told us at the time, no matter what the results would be tonight, no matter how inexplicable they might be, "the fact is, there's not a darn thing that anybody can do about it." 

While it's completely possible that PPP's pre-election numbers were entirely wrong, or that the disgraced Sanford legitimately, somehow, achieved an 18 point turnaround in just two weeks, the voters of SC will never know one way or another if he did or didn't. Once again, we have another 100% unverifiable faith-based election in the world's once-greatest democracy.

Now look I am well aware that anybody who questions the outcome of an election seems like a sore loser looking for a conspiracy theory to explain how THEIR candidate lost. And I don't want to be THAT guy.

However many of you know, because we covered it extensively during the last election, that the voting machines are completely unreliable and that in states where the Republican party is in charge Democrats cannot win unless they receive a large majority of the vote.

So did this happen in South Carolina? I don't know for certain, but there was something interesting that happened which first sent up red flags for me and which has made me question Sanford's victory ever since.

You see I had discovered that HuffPo was tracking the incoming results on a page which constantly refreshed every nine seconds, so I had left that page open on my computer in order to check back occasionally and see the progress of the vote tally.

For most of the morning the numbers were about 54% for Colbert Busch and I think about 47% for Sanford.

I got busy about halfway through my day and did not check the results for a two hour span of time. But when I checked again I was shocked to see that the numbers had completely reversed. In other words they were EXACTLY as I had seen them earlier but but they were on opposite sides of my screen.

Now I have reported before that there is software that was developed by the conservatives in charge of programming the voting machines which can flip the votes so long as the difference remains only 10%.

As you can see this election meets that criteria.

So did the South Carlina Republicans decide that as damaged as Sanford was he was still THEIR guy and help him to steal this election? Sadly we will never know.

But do you know what I think?

It's almost enough to drive you to drink.

I have an idea. How about not being a party full of douchebags?

Just a thought.

Karl Rove, yes THAT Karl Rove, claims that President Obama won due to voter suppression. WTF?

Courtesy of Think Progress: 

Rove — whose American Crossroads organizations spent $300 million in a mostly unsuccessful effort to defeat Democrats — attempted to diminish Obama’s victory by explaining that the president won less popular votes in 2012 than in 2008, and only “got more votes…among Latinos.” He complained that Obama characterized Romney, a former Bain executive, as “a rich guy who cares about himself” — a message voters largely embraced: 

ROVE: I think the Republicans lost in this election because of two things. One is that the Obama campaign was very effective in keeping roughly 92 percent of the people who voted for President Obama before to vote for him again. But they didn’t do a good job of growing the electorate…The Democrats, the the only group that they got more votes this time around than they got four years ago were among Latinos. About 700,000 more Latinos voted Democratic this year than the year before. But the president succeed by suppressing the vote, by saying to people, ‘you may not like who I am and I know you can’t bring yourself to vote for me, but I’m going to paint this other guy as simply a rich guy who only cares about himself.’

Here is a man who has used EVERY dirty trick imaginable to get his candidates elected in the past, and whose party, this time around, was caught red handed attempting to cut voter hours in Ohio ONLY for those most likely to vote for Obama, had programs installed that flipped votes for Romney, and whose operatives were caught throwing away voter registration forms.

And yet he accuses the President of "suppressing the vote?" What an asshole!

This is just another example of projection from this GOP criminal enterprise. They blame the other side for successfully doing, what they themselves know they tried unsuccessfully to do.

Clearly Rove is simply desperate to find SOME what to justify his humiliating defeat, and in his demented mind he MUST blame it on some kind of cheating. After all HOW could he be beaten fair and square?

However what Rove is purposefully ignoring is that the folks who were first able to "paint this other guy as a rich guy who only cares about himself" were Romney's Republican primary opponents. And some of the most damaging attacks, done on Newt Gingrich's behalf, were funded by GOP sugar daddy Shelden Adelson. You know, the same guy who then tried to buy THIS election for Mittens.

In fact ALL that the Obama campaign had to do was let Mitt's own words speak for themselves, demonstrate his affinity for lying, and then work hard to help get the Obama supporters to the polls.

Essentially the case Rove is making is that the Obama campaign "suppressed the vote" by not allowing the Republicans to steal, discard, or suppress votes from the Democrats. (How dare they?)

So all I have to say is "Fuck Karl Rove!" And let's all hope that this is the LAST time we see his malformed Mr. Potato Head involved in our political system.

He is nothing more than a malignant cancer in American politics, and it is high time we get that tumor removed.

Thankfully we now have Obamacare to help us with that.

Voting machine in Pennsylvania will NOT allow voter to select President Obama. Update!

Here is the voter's description of exactly what happened:

My wife and I went to the voting booths this morning before work. There were 4 older ladies running the show and 3 voting booths that are similar to a science fair project in how they fold up. They had an oval VOTE logo on top center and a cartridge slot on the left that the volunteers used to start your ballot. 

I initially selected Obama but Romney was highlighted. I assumed it was being picky so I deselected Romney and tried Obama again, this time more carefully, and still got Romney. Being a software developer, I immediately went into troubleshoot mode. I first thought the calibration was off and tried selecting Jill Stein to actually highlight Obama. Nope. Jill Stein was selected just fine. Next I deselected her and started at the top of Romney's name and started tapping very closely together to find the 'active areas'. From the top of Romney's button down to the bottom of the black checkbox beside Obama's name was all active for Romney. From the bottom of that same checkbox to the bottom of the Obama button (basically a small white sliver) is what let me choose Obama. Stein's button was fine. All other buttons worked fine. 

I asked the voters on either side of me if they had any problems and they reported they did not. I then called over a volunteer to have a look at it. She him hawed for a bit then calmly said "It's nothing to worry about, everything will be OK." and went back to what she was doing. I then recorded this video. 

There is a lot of speculation that the footage is edited. I'm not a video guy, but if it's possible to prove whether a video has been altered or not, I will GLADLY provide the raw footage to anyone who is willing to do so. The jumping frames are a result of the shitty camera app on my Android phone, nothing more.

Apparently CNN has also been sent this video, and like many other news agencies are asking for notification of any voter fraud.

God it just makes me sick to my stomach to see this.

Please make sure when you are voting with machines to make SURE it records your voter properly.

The fact that this is happening in America should embarrass all of us, but allowing this kind of shit to steal your vote must not be allowed.  We ALL have to be our own advocates to make sure our votes are recorded properly.

Update: Evidence of the same thing possibly happening in Ohio.

I saw Howard Dean on Morning Joe this morning saying straight up that if Ohio goes for Romney it will be due to voting machine fraud. As the ex-chairman of the DNC I take him at his word.

More information on that GOP formula to steal votes.

Last Friday I wrote a post titled "Proof that the Republicans are actively stealing our elections, and have been doing so since at least 2008." That post received quite a lot of attention, both from Obama supporters wanting to get that word out, and Romney supporters questioning, and even insulting, the data.

I actually don't think I receive a whole lot of Romney trolls so I was pretty sure we were on to something big when they started showing up in substantial numbers.

Anyhow since that post the information has indeed gone viral and I thought I would provide you with the findings of another progressive blog, Addicting Info: 

When these reports first came out, we went over the numbers instead of just rushing in with the story. The numbers are clear as day. The fix is in all across the country, and it is restricted to states run by Republicans. This kind of manipulation can only be done subtly: votes are not shifted more than 10%. 

The reason why the fraud is so easy to spot when you examine the primaries is because the tampering was not restricted to stealing votes from one specific competitor, but from several, which increased the rate of shift as the voting population increased. The large Republican primary base becomes the scam’s undoing. The computerized manipulation algorithm leaves a fingerprint easy to identify; all such things do…and now we know what to look for. 

To show how the manipulation works, here is a sample of the Ohio primary breakdown: 

• In Mercer County, a total of 383 people voted in the Republican primary. Of those, 42% voted for Santorum, while 30% voted for Romney. 
• In Highland County, 5,590 people voted, 39% for Santorum and 31% for Romney. 
• Now examine the results from larger Ashtabula County, with its 8,932 voter turnout: it shows that Santorum suddenly dropped to 35% while Romney’s votes climbed to 33%. 
• In the largest, Montgomery County, with its 56,283 voter turnout, Romney’s vote tally suddenly zoomed up to 38%, and Santorum’s tally dropped to a distant 31%. 

These results have been verified by cross-checking with the election results numbers posted on the Ohio Secretary of State‘s website. For the above charts, Choquette and Johnson also used Wisconsin‘s election results information by precinct, district and ward. 

For once, the Tea Party is correct: there is fraud afoot. But it is not dead people voting, it’s not non-citizens voting or people trying to impersonate other voters. It’s not voter fraud, it is election fraud. The election fraud going on is this: votes are being stolen by manipulating electronic voting machines to take votes from one or more candidates to benefit whomever someone (the vote counter?) has decided should win. This lucky candidate is always a Republican. State after state, case after case, the Republicans are clearly committing widespread, systematic election fraud.

I am not a mathematician by any stretch of the imagination, but it seems to me that this is a fairly simple  calculation for somebody with a good head for numbers to work through.

I have sent this to Nate Silver, Alex Wagner, Sam Stein, and a few other Twitter friends, and hopefully SOMEBODY will seriously address this well before next Tuesday.

Though to be honest I actually worry that since many of them think that the President is well ahead of Romney they might put this off until AFTER the election so as not to attract charges of launching a partisan conspiracy theory. Personally I think that would be a mistake.

Proof that the Republicans are actively stealing our elections, and have been doing so since at least 2008.

Courtesy of UK Progressive:

 In states where the winner will be decided by less than 10%, of the vote he already knows he will win. This is no tinfoil hat conspiracy. It’s a maths problem. And mathematics showed changes in actual raw voting data that had no statistical correlation other than programmable computer fraud. This computer fraud resulted in votes being flipped from Democrat to Republican in every federal, senatorial, congressional and gubernatorial election since 2008 (thus far) and in the 2012 primary contests from other Republicans to Mitt Romney. 

This goes well beyond Romney’s investment control in voting machine maker Hart Intercivic and Diebold’s close ties to George W. Bush. Indeed all five voting machine companies have very strong GOP fundraising ties, yet executives (including the candidate’s son Tagg Romney) insist there is no conflict between massively supporting one party financially whilst controlling the machines that record and count the votes. 

A retired NSA analyst has spent several sleepless nights applying a simple formula to past election results across Arizona. His results showed across-the-board systemic election fraud on a coordinated and massive scale. But the analysis indicated that this only happens in larger precincts because anomalies in small precincts can be more easily detected. 

“Easy to Cheat” 

Retired NSA analyst Michael Duniho has worked for nearly seven years trying to understand voting anomalies in his home state of Arizona and Pima County. This publication has written extensively about apparent vote machine manipulation in a 2006 RTA Bond issue election that is still being fought in the courts. Said Duniho, “It is really easy to cheat using computers to count votes, because you can’t see what is going on in the machine.” 

When Duniho applied a mathematical model to actual voting results in the largest voting precincts, he saw that only the large precincts suddenly trended towards Mitt Romney in the Arizona primary – and indeed all Republicans in every election since 2008 – by a factor of 8%-10%. The Republican candidate in every race saw an 8-10%. gain in his totals whilst the Democrat lost 8-10%. This is a swing of up to 20 point, enough to win an election unless a candidate was losing very badly. 

Since sifting through and decoding massive amounts of data was his work for decades on behalf of the National Security Agency, he wanted to understand why this was ONLY happening in large precincts. 

Nose Counting 

The idea of examining large precinct results came via a link to a report written by Francois Choquette and James Johnson. Choquette became curious about South Carolina primary results in the February Republican contest. There a poll observer noted an unusually big gain of votes for Mitt Romney in larger precincts than in smaller ones. Choquette wanted to know why? 

He examined and applied all of the normal statistical markers to see where a variance might occur: income level, population density, race, urban vs. rural, even party registration numbers. He found no correlation to explain why Romney votes trended upward while Paul and Santorum votes trended downward -yet only in large precincts. 

Choquette then looked at all 50 states and found roughly a 10% switch in votes from Democrat to GOP. This was noted in every state except Utah, where the presumption was, as it was Mitt’s religious home state and very conservative, there was no chance of Romney losing and no variance was found. 

Choquette even saw in Maricopa County, which is Phoenix and its suburbs, that in 2008 Romney used this technique against John McCain. But McCain beat him by too much for a 10% fraud gain to matter. McCain tried to do the same thing in the general election to President Obama but 9 million votes nationally were too many to make up.

I have been trying to post this extremely important story since last night, but have found it virtually impossible to open the article over at UK Progressive.  Today I learned why:

Our website has been under a DDOS attack for the last 12 hours by GOP operatives who do not want the story of stolen elections to get out.

That is why I put such a late sampling along with the video here at IM.  It is EXTREMELY important that we get this information out to the voters and authorities as quickly as possible.

I think in many ways this will come as no surprise to most of us, after all we have been talking about the GOP's many methods of stealing elections for quite some time, but to discover just how entrenched these methods are within the system itself, is fairly frightening.

Not to be too negative, but it may be too late to fix a problem like this before November 6, which means the ONLY way to beat it is to give President Obama a fucking landslide.

So if you have not voted yet, do it now, and get as MANY as your friends and family to vote early as well. Maybe, just maybe, we can beat these bastards despite their cowardly attempts to steal our democracy right from under our noses.

God damn this pisses me off!

Finally the voter registration fraud the Republicans have been warning us about is discovered to exist. Wait, which party was caught red handed? Update!

Courtesy of Salon:

A man originally reported to have been working for the Republican Party of Virginia was arrested by the Rockingham County, Va., Sheriff’s Office on Thursday and charged with attempting to destroy voter registration forms by tossing them into a dumpster behind a shopping center in Harrisonburg, Va. 

“Prosecutors charged him with four counts of destruction of voter registration applications, eight counts of failing to disclose voter registration applications and one count of obstruction of justice,” according to a report late Thursday afternoon from TPM’s Ryan Reilly. More charges could be forthcoming, according to officials. 

But there is more to the story, as evidence emerges to document that it ties into a still-expanding nationwide GOP Voter Registration Fraud Scandal that the BRAD BLOG first began reporting in late September, after we’d learned that the Republican Party of Florida had turned in more than 100 allegedly fraudulent and otherwise suspect voter registration forms in Palm Beach County. The story has continued to widen ever since, to a dozen Florida counties and several other states, now including Virginia, and even to the upper-echelons of the Republican Party itself. 

The man arrested today was 23-year-old Colin Small of Phoenixville, Pa. As it turns out, he does not only work for the Virginia Republican Party. According to an online profile, he appears to be working for the Republican National Committee and, prior to that, served as an Intern for Rep. Mike Kelly, R-Pa., in the U.S. House of Representatives. 

Joseph Tanfani at the Los Angeles Times is reporting that Small was “working as a supervisor as part of a registration operation in eight swing states financed by the Republican National Committee.”

That the Republican party is  responsible for the very acts that they accuse of others of doing, should not come as a surprise to ANY of us. Especially since the party has engaged in aggressive acts of voter fraud or voter suppression for over twelve years now. And in many places far longer.

In Alaska this is simply the status quo, and we have been the victim of tossed ballots, suddenly appearing absentee ballots, and voter machine vote switching for decades now. With no change in sight.

In my experience it has always been that while the Republican party is pointing to the left and saying "Look, those people are cheating!", over on the right they have been cheating all along.

I think that we are way overdue for both campaign finance reform and tougher fair election laws to be passed in this country.  But I am not holding my breath because it is clear to me that the Republicans simply do NOT want to compete on a level playing field.

Let's face it, without their mountains of money, and ability to game the system, they would have to actually run on their antiquated policies. And how can they possibly win in any place but the deep South with those?

P.S. By the way while we are on the subject of corrupt voting machines, guess whose son (Yes the same son who wants to "take a swing" at our President.) owns the ones Ohio is using?

Update: Here is a petition requesting that Eric holder to investigate Tagg's connection to the voting machines. I signed it and I think so should we all.

Voting machines being used in swing states owned by Bain Capital controlled company.

Here is more from the Daily Dolt:

Hart InterCivic is a national provider of election voting systems that are used in swing-states Ohio and Colorado, as well as in states we don’t really care about so much because we already know how they’ll turn out (e.g., Texas, Oklahoma, and Hawaii). Private equity firm H.I.G. Capital, LLC bought out a “significant” portion of Hart in July of 2011, and now the majority of Hart’s board directors are employees of H.I.G. (It’s not entirely clear how much of the voting machine company H.I.G. owns, but the financial advisors responsible for the transaction state that “Hart Intercivic was acquired by HIG Capital.”) 

H.I.G., in turn, has ties to Bain & Co. and Mitt Romney directly: 

H.I.G. was founded by Tony Tamer, a former Bain employee and bundler for Mitt Romney’s campaign. 

Of H.I.G.’s 22 American directors, 21 donated to Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign. One person made no political donations at all; one person donated to both Mitt Romney and Barack Obama; the remaining 20 directors donated exclusively to Mitt Romney in 2012. (See below for links to donations.) 

Of these 22 American directors, seven of them (nearly one-third) are former Bain employees. Now, we should note (as a reader helpfully pointed out), this is Bain & Co., which Mitt Romney left in order to start the affiliated Bain Capital. The connection is therefore a little more tenuous, but we still find H.I.G.’s overwhelming allegiance and financial support of the Romney campaign surprising (not that it’s surprising that a private equity company would lean Republican, but this level of support is pretty unusual). 

Four of H.I.G.’s directors, Tony Tamer, John Bolduc, Douglas Berman, and Brian D. Schwartz, are Romney bundlers along with former Bain and H.I.G. manager Brian Shortsleeve. 

Two of H.I.G.’s managing directors, Douglas F. Berman and Brian D. Schwartz, were present at the $50,000 per plate fundraiser where Mitt Romney made his notorious ”47%” comments. 

H.I.G. employees currently make up the majority of the Hart InterCivic’s five-member board of directors. Two of these three directors of the voting machine company, Neil Tuch and Jeff Bohl, have donated directly to Mitt Romney’s campaign. 

H.I.G. is the 11th largest donor to Mitt Romney’s campaign. H.I.G. employees have given $338,000 to the Romney campaign, outpacing even Bain Capital itself, which gave $268,000.

Republicans of course will call us paranoid and conspiracy theorists for being troubled by this, but we have already seen that the Republican party and Mitt Romney will do ANYTHING to win, so why would we NOT consider this a serious problem?

After all we do remember what happened in the 2004 election, don't we?

Let's face it folks our very democracy has been under attack for the last twelve years and if we are not extremely vigilant the Republicans will essentially make voting in this country an exercise in futility for ALL Americans. And we are already almost there.

The ONLY thing that beats this kind of cheating is a HUGE voter turnout for the Democrats.  So whatever else you do to help, make damn sure you VOTE!

Hold the phone! Is it possible Scott Brown DIDN'T win Massachusetts? WTF? Update!

According to preliminary media results by municipality, Democrat Martha Coakley won Massachusetts overall in its hand counted locations,* with 51.12% of the vote (32,247 hand counted votes) to Brown's 30,136, which garnered him 47.77% of hand counted votes. Margin: 3.35% lead for Coakley.

Massachusetts has 71 hand count locations, 91 ES&S locations, and 187 Diebold locations, with two I call the mystery municipalities (Northbridge and Milton) apparently using optical scanners, not sure what kind.

ES&S RESULTS

The greatest margin between the candidates was with ES&S machines -- 53.64% for Brown, 45.31% for Coakley, a margin for Brown of 8.33%. It looks like ES&S counted a total of 620,388 votes, with 332,812 going to Brown and 281,118 going to Coakley. Taken overall, the difference -- 8.33% Brown (ES&S) added to 3.35% Coakley (Hand Count) shows an 11.68% difference between the ES&S and the Hand Counts. Of course, as Mark Twain used to say, there are three kinds of lies: Lies, damned lies, and statistics. These statistics don't prove anything, and probably shouldn't be discussed without a grain of salt handy before examining more detailed demographics.

As a point of reference, however, in the Maine gay marriage issue recently there was no significant overall difference between machine count and hand count locations.

DIEBOLD RESULTS

Diebold's results are 51.42% for Brown, with 791,272 Republican votes counted by Diebold, vs. 47.61% for Coakley, with 732,633 Democratic votes counted by Diebold, for a spread of 3.81% favoring Brown.

LATE-REPORTED RESULTS

It's always interesting to watch hand counts beat machine count results to the newspaper.

In the Massachusetts special senate election, results from six of 71 hand count locations were reported about 2 1/2 hours after the polls closed, with the remaining 65 hand count locations in right away. The slower hand count results represent 8.45% of all hand count locations.

These latecoming hand-counted results favored Coakley very heavily (she got 55.68% of these, earning 4,610 votes to Brown's 42.9%, representing 3,552, a 12.78% margin) Whether the reports came to the media late or the media posted them late is unclear.

Son of a bitch!

Why in the hell did Coakley concede before a hand recount was conducted at ALL of the polling locations?? And why did the MSM not pick this story up?

So NOW we learn that Ted Kennedy's senate seat might STILL be in the hands of Democrats, and that the 60 vote, filibuster proof margin for health care could still have still been retained, and because Coakley conceded before they asked for a hand recount, she potentially damaged her party, her President, and her country.

I have no words.

(A very grateful hat tip to Jerry. Thanks for this link buddy.)

Update: Some people are arguing that I am jumping to conclusions or that the discrepancy between the machine count and the hand count is not that important.

I disagree with both arguments.

I am not saying that Coakley won this election, I am saying that because she conceded we will never really know if she won or not.

We KNOW that there have been multiple problems reported concerning our electronic voting machines.

We KNOW that the teabaggers poured a lot of money into Scott Brown's campaign and that the outcome was very important for their cause.

We KNOW that there were no exit polls conducted.

With all of those considerations it would seem obvious that such an important election would call for an increase in scrutiny and that the Democrats demand a recount if the election went in Brown's favor. There is nothing wrong with that, and we can say with absolute certainty that if the election had gone Coakley's way the Repugs would have thrown a giant hissy fit and demanded a recount as soon as possible. And they would have been completely within their rights to do so.

But what did Martha Coakley do? She conceded only an hour after the polls closed!

Why? Was her favorite television show about to start? Did she have a hot date? Did she leave her fucking oven on? What could possibly have been more important then making sure every Massachusetts's voter's ballot was counted correctly?

Not one damn thing! And yet nobody seems to have cared enough about Ted Kennedy's senate seat to to glove up and fight for it.

Martha Coakley, the people of Massachusetts. and the Democratic party should all, each and every one of them, feel ashamed. You let down your country. You let down your President. And you shit on the memory of Ted Kennedy.

Ohio suing Diebold over e-voting machines.

The name may have changed, but the artist formerly known as Diebold—now Premier Election Solutions—is still catching heat over problems with its electronic voting machines. Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brenner is suing the firm, seeking unspecified damages for breach of contract and fraud. The suit blames faulty software for losing votes in 11 of the 44 counties that use Premier machines.

The company was already embroiled in a legal battle with Ohio's Cuyahoga county, one it filed preemptively in May after election officials there decided to mothball $22 million worth of Premier touch-screen machines. Premier had hoped to forestall any claims against it by seeking a declaratory judgment that it had met its obligations.

This isn't the first time Ohioans have experienced buyer's remorse over the company's electronic voting systems. As Ars reported back in 2006, an exhaustive study of that year's primaries found a host of serious problems related to the voting machines, ranging from inadequate poll-worker training to equipment malfunction.

This great news for Ohioans and I certainly hope that other states with voting machine problems (like right here in Alaska for instance), follow suit.

As a country we need to take back our voting rights and not trust any company whose voting machines seem to invariably favor Republicans.

Our country is supposedly a shining example of democracy but most of us realize that this is a lie. If we work together perhaps someday soon it will be the truth.

Ohio voting machines are seized in criminal investigation.

At the request of election officials, the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation has seized voting machines for forensic analysis and has launched a criminal investigation into the Franklin County Board of Elections.

Well this is an interesting turn of events.

I wonder if this will have any impact on the delegates that Hillary "won" in Ohio.

A lot of us thought that her win there seemed a little hard to believe.