"Raw, inside glimpse" of Republican vote manipulation

A former GOP political operative who ran an illegal election-day scheme to jam the phone lines of New Hampshire Democrats during the state's tight 2002 U.S. Senate election said in a new book and an interview that he believes the scandal reaches higher into the Republican Party.

Allen Raymond of Bethesda, Md., whose book Simon & Schuster will publish next month, also accused the Republican Party of trying to hang all the blame for a scandal on him as part of an "old-school cover-up."

A stocking stuffer?  McClatchy has a pre-publication copy.

Raymond's book, "How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative," offers a raw, inside glimpse of the phone scandal as it unraveled and of a ruthless world in which political operatives seek to win at all costs.

The guy's an educated, hard-working American.

Raymond, 40, who served three months in jail last year, said he earned a graduate degree in political management at New York's Baruch University solely to make money off politics, and it made no difference to him whether he was a Republican or a Democrat.

One of the midnight responses to McClatchy's article reads like this:

"this is a typical anti-GOP smear piece by a democratic rag called McClatchy -- posing as a news media outlet. this Neo-Liberal rag will use any opportunity to promote liberals and put down conservatives.

"McClatchy, a typical, run of the mill, left wing rag."

Meanwhile in Colorado, speaking of voting, voting machines have been decertified.

The review, by electronic voting systems experts, outside auditors and cyber-security specialists, found multiple problems with machines that were made by Sequoia Voting Systems, Hart InterCivic and Election Systems & Software and that are used in 52 of Colorado’s 64 counties, including Denver.

Two types of Sequoia electronic machines could not accurately trace security breaches, the review found. Hart’s optical scan machines did not count votes accurately, and the optical scan and electronic machines made by Election Systems & Software suffered programming errors and could be disabled by voters.

In the crucial state of Ohio, the new Democratic Secretary of State (replacing the infamous Kenneth Blackwell) is working to clean things up.

All five voting systems used in Ohio, a state whose electoral votes narrowly swung two elections toward President Bush, have critical flaws that could undermine the integrity of the 2008 general election, a report commissioned by the state’s top elections official has found.      

“It was worse than I anticipated,” the official, Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, said of the report. “I had hoped that perhaps one system would test superior to the others.”

At polling stations, teams working on the study were able to pick locks to access memory cards and use hand-held devices to plug false vote counts into machines. At boards of election, they were able to introduce malignant software into servers.

Ms. Brunner proposed replacing all of the state’s voting machines, including the touch-screen ones used in more than 50 of Ohio’s 88 counties. She wants all counties to use optical scan machines that read and electronically record paper ballots that are filled in manually by voters.

In a number of states, efforts have been made to keep students from voting, including police action.

Of course, no one can guarantee a clean 2008 voting procedure yet, not right across the country.  And there are bound to be Republican sleazeballs out there with new ways to skew the votes -- news that we'll only hear well after election day.