Prairie Weather

Voting for what?: How a Democratic win can be prevented... oh... so... easily...

The "glitches"

Tom Ashbrook, host, "On Point": So potential for manipulation... You also say that there's potential for glitches.  It's new software; some people just don't know how to use it.  Or there are problems within the software. Which do you see as the greater concern, active manipulation or just computer glitches that we have all come to know and not love!

Avi Rubin, computer scientist:  My biggest concern is the collection of those. Collectively they result in an election where we can't know that we got the right answer.  I don't know how likely it is that fraud will occur.  I guess whoever loses is likely to have some claim and I think the claim will be a lot stronger where there's a system that's not auditable and which can't be recounted.

.......

Ashbrook:  Are you saying that Karl Rove or Ken Mehlman went out an jimmied with these machines?

Mark Crispin Miller, Communications professor, NYU:  Well, I'm not saying they personally went out and jimmied with them.  What I'm telling is that if it were simply an innocent glitch then we would have seen roughly an equal number of examples on each side of the partisan divide.  What I'm telling you is that in 2004 there were almost no examples of these machines benefitting the Democrats.  If people go to my blog they'll find reports of early voting that's already taken place this time in Texas, Arkansas, and Missouri where there have been dozens of reports of the same thing -- people trying to vote for Democrats and the machine won't seem to respond.  It seems to want them to vote Republican. 

What if there's a close race?  No recount possible?

Ashbrook:  Sean Greene, that's a very disconcerting view from Avi Rubin.  Can we live with this level of uncertainty about the vote's outcome?  George Will says today, C'mon, there are a lot of people in this country and a lot of votes... Get over it. It's not the margin of victory we're talking about here. We've got to have a little tolerance... Can we live with this? Do we still need some kind of major overhaul?

Sean Greene, "electionline.org": About what Avi was talking about, there are a number of states which have moved to paper trails and having the voter-verified paper audit trail on electronic voting machines to be the actual record for a recount.  As Avi mentioned, I think there are 15 states plus the District of Columbia that use some touch-screen voting machines that are paperless.  It's a big concern for a lot of people in those jurisdictions.

But wait!  The Wall Street Journal tells us not to worry!

John Fund, Wall Street Journal:  ...I agree there are some problems.  We need oversight.  We certainly need open-source software, audits, things like that.  But I think the more extreme conspiracy theories have to be addressed.  I don't ask people to believe me.  I cite Joe Andrew, who was Bill Clinton's hand-picked chairman of the Democratic National Committee until 2001.  He is the only national chairman who was involved in the internet.  He's involved in several companies though nothing with voting machines.  He gave a speech a little bit ago to the Maryland Association of Election Officials in which he said that when it comes to electronic voting most liberal conspiracy theorists are just plain old-fashioned nuts.  He says there's no conspiracy trying to steal votes in America today.  And he says it's unfortunate that we have this anti-electronic voting machine bandwagon being circulated because "It is not possible to move a constant fraction of votes from one party to another in each jurisdiction without it being obvious that something is going on.  The internet activists who say this are bonkers."

Are you feeling reassured by the Wall Street Journal?   Just in case you're not, there are some people looking out for our interests as voters.

Ian Inaba, filmmaker, activist: In the process of making "American Blackout," I really found that there had been this evolution in citizen journalism around elections.  What happened in Florida in 2000 with all the problems down there, there were only corporate journalists who covered those events.  A lot of individual stories of personal voting rights were not captured.  But as I continued to make the film and then Ohio 2004 happened, we saw this new wave of citizen journalists who actually went to the polls to document the problems particularly in states with African-American and working-class voters as they attempted to vote in 2004.  And so we wanted to further this effort.  This year what we're doing is coordinating with the Election Protection organization who receive a majority of the calls from voters at the polls, and we'll be working with them to then dispatch our volunteer videographers to capture irregularities on film.

....

Ashbrook:  So the day after -- or the week after -- the vote, you'll have a pile of videotape.  How might that be used to improve or watchdog the system?

Inaba:  It's actually even better than that!  We're actually designing a system in which we're going to be uploading the videos the same day.  We're going to be broadcasting these images on the web before the races are called.

Ashbrook:  And if people want to participate?  How do they do it?

Inaba:  They can sign up on our website.

The full text of the hour-long discussion can be found here.

Isn't everyone libertarian, except a bunch of weirdos on the lunatic fringe?

You get smarter as you get older.  No question about it.  Perspectives change, of course. But nothing much has changed in my political opinions since I was about 15, and that was a long time ago.  I know more, but the values have stayed pretty much the same. 

What has changed is the political culture in America.  Even this New England-bred lefty concedes that the 1960's left us with a legacy of nannyism of  the kindly, intrusive, intensely annoying variety on the Democratic side -- which then got taken over by the self-righteous goon squads on the Republican fringe and turned into hardcore authoritarianism, into statist nannyism.   

I don't like either of them.  They leave us with no air to breathe.  When I returned to the US after a long time overseas, this finger-wagging conformity, this dreadful nannyism, was probably the most noticeable uh-oh! in America next to environmental degradation.

These days my old-fashioned New England leftiness, unchanged, is showing its libertarian streak.  That streak is turningup in lots of fellow lefties who are skeptical about the Democratic Party. 

We're the ones who demand a government which stays out of marriage, out of personal medical decisions, out of historical revisionism, and countless other areas of life.  We want a state that facilitates liberty, not redefines it downwards and fences it in. 

John Tierney writes about libertarians in today's New York Times. He seems to think only Westerners tend to be libertarians.  Wrong.   He misses the libertarian toughness now ever more visible in progressives and others on the left who live  in Oregon and Washington as much as in Nevada, in Tennessee and Pennsylvania as much as in Maine and New Hampshire.  Or here in Texas.  Leave out the fringies on the left and the right and you'll find a huge coalition of mildly libertarian centrist conservatives and progressives .  They're all looking at the 21st century perversion we call federal government and thinking R-E-F-O-R-M.

Tierney reminds us:

...The Republican war on marijuana — the chief priority of the current drug czar — isn’t playing any better in the heartland. More than 40 percent of people over the age of 12 have tried marijuana, and more than three-quarters of Americans support legalizing it for medical purposes. The White House and the Justice Department have had little luck in their attempts to stop states from legalizing medical marijuana, but they have succeeded in alienating voters...

...Western Democrats have been siphoning off libertarian voters by moderating their liberal views on issues like gun control, but Republicans have been driving libertarians away with their wars on vice and their jeremiads against gay marriage (and their attempt to regulate that from Washington, too)...

And here's the one which resonates with me:

...They distrust moral busybodies of both parties, and they may well be the most important bloc of swing voters this election, as David Boaz and David Kirby conclude in a new study for the Cato Institute...

If I had to give only one reason why I left the Democratic Party several years go, it would be precisely that.  Disgusted by the moral busybodies on the right,  I had to admit I was no less disgusted by the moral busybodies in my own party.  I had the occasion a little while back to talk with an energetic Democrat running for a high state government position.  What struck me was the extent to which he shares that view.

Both parties are facing splits in their own ranks.  How the Democratic Party deals with the independence and libertarian streak of the new progressive movement will define its future, I think.

Funny. The machines never make mistakes in favor of Democratic candidates, do they?

Down in the Sunshine State, during a week of early voting before next week's nationwide midterm election, certain Diebold machines have been registering some votes for Democrats as selections for the Republican candidate. For instance, Gary Rudolf, a voter at a polling site near Ft. Lauderdale, tried to vote for gubernatorial candidate Jim Davis (D); however, when the Diebold machine gave him the final review screen, it showed his vote was about to be cast for Charlie Crist (R). The problem took three tries to get resolved with the help of a local poll worker. Mary Cooney, a Broward County Supervisor of Elections spokeswoman, informed The Miami Herald that it's "not uncommon for screens on heavily used machines to slip out of sync, making votes register incorrectly. Poll workers are trained to recalibrate them on the spot -- essentially, to realign the video screen with the electronics inside. The 15-step process is outlined in the poll-workers manual."

Huh? How exactly does a computer -- one that is being used heavily for one day a year, and not a $100 PDA -- "slip out of sync" ? Further, no one in Broward County is even sure how large of a problem this is "because there's no process for poll workers to quickly report minor issues, and no central database of machine problems."

Psst! Wanna be a federal judge? Well, here's da deal...

The Center for Investigative Reporting and Salon have collaborated in an investigation of payments from federal judges to those who appointed them.  Bush has made a nice business out of this.

A four-month investigation of Bush-appointed judges by the Center for Investigative Reporting reveals that six appellate court judges and 18 district court judges contributed a total of more than $44,000 to politicians who were influential in their appointments. Some gave money directly to Bush after he officially nominated them.

And there are no laws against it.  It's beginning to look like George W. Bush's most successful business venture has been as President.  Face it -- Democratic politicians have made out like bandits in the federal bench business as well... 

Oops! Bush must authorize investigation of Bush secrecy

So much for increasing presidential powers.  President Bush has managed to create a situation in which the authority to investigate him has been taken away from Congress and given to... President Bush.  Isn't that special!

Via Steven Aftergood at Secrecy News and UPI:

A panel set up last year to reduce excessive secrecy in government is being labeled toothless after its chairman told lawmakers that he could not act except at the request of the president.

Audio

Discussions about voting machines and what to expect in next week's (!) elections coming up at 10 am ET.

Diane Rehm show at WAMU

On Point at WBUR

Discussion about just how "anti-war" a Democratic majority in Congress would be  -- on KCRW's To the Point.

Update:  The "On Point" discussion is lively, interesting -- and a little scary.  Apparently there are signs already during early voting in four or five states (including my own) that in some cases the machines make it very difficult to vote for anyone but a Republican.  And "The margin of victory in competitive races is within the margin of error on the voting machines."