Co-opt another GOP tactic besides starting from scratch? Close down the government?
I was a member of this panel. Too mainstream. I suggested that John Kerry had conceded Ohio 2004 so early because of a Skull and Bones obligation to support fellow members professionally upon graduation and entry into the professional world NO MATTER WHAT. The Yale University group had chosen our forty-third president.
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At the second of the two panels sponsored by Simpson, "Urgent Election Reforms for the 2018 Midterms," Lulu Friesdat, a seasoned MSM tv journalist and producer of the film "Holler Back," was more optimistic. Professor Alex Halderman has shown how ridiculously hackable the machinery is--education is important and election reform is possible, not like climate change.
Those DREs being used in Georgia district 6 unless the lawsuit tomorrow replaces them with paper ballots? They're probably uncertified!
Virginia Martin, Election Commissioner of Columbia County, New York since 2008, welcomes public oversight of her hand-counted paper ballot elections, as does her GOP counterpart, Jason Nastke, in a uniquely bipartisan setting, a Peaceable Kingdom on Earth that the EI movement treasures.
Citizens are paid to count ballots and the public is welcome to observe all proceedings short of the vote itself.
No one has ever contested an election result or requested a recount, she said. 41,000 vote in Columbia County, its total population 63,000.
Online registration is a good idea from the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) that has given birth to Kansas SoS Kris Kobach's version of Interstate Crosscheck, so scratch that. Even Florida did. Early voting, protracted as it is, requiring a complicated chain of custody, also invites security flaws. It doesn't increase the number of voters so much as make voting easy for many of them, so it's a work in progress we shouldn't toss. Souls to the Polls would go with it, and we need that. Electronic poll books are also subject to security breaches.
Technology is great, but it has its limitations [!!]. Martin is no luddite, just a realist.
John Brakey of AUDITAZ, a group operating out of Pima County, Arizona since 2003, calls himself a "social gadfly" immersed in litigations that patiently expose outrage after outrage. I reviewed his film "Fatally Flawed" years ago, which shines a light on the swamp he and his colleagues attempt to dredge, a swamp that doubles as an impenetrable concrete wall.
Brakey has authored a detailed paper on how to make elections verifiable. He has traveled to other states to pursue his goals. He's about nonpartisanship, not right or left. And "It's the primary, folks," he pointed out. 150,000 votes were suppressed. Independents couldn't vote in many states.
Not only was Margaret Mead right that great changes begin with small groups . . . sometimes things get out of hand when the groups get larger.
Fraction magic (a new discovery that's been operative since the early 2000s without our knowledge--see blackboxvoting.org for details) pollutes all systems except for HCPB; 40 percent of this country votes using ballot images--that is, using photocopies to count votes.
YahNe Ndgo, a compelling activist imported from Philadelphia because Simpson was so impressed with her rhetoric, told us what we know and deplore--how disappointed the black communities are with the Democratic Party; many stay home from elections altogether.
Our electoral system is but a part of a larger one that can't be fixed, she said. So few benefit from it. AN ELECTION SYSTEM THAT ARISES FROM A CORRUPT SYSTEM WILL BE CORRUPT.
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