After a couple of weeks off for the latest KPFK/Pacifica Radio fund drive, The BradCast was back at full throttle this week!
First up: Fred Karger joined us from the airport in Maine, fresh off his latest victory against the anti-freedom group calling itself the National Organization for Marriage (NOM). Karger, a Republican and long time political consultant for campaigns such as those for Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, was also the first openly gay candidate for President of the United States when he ran for the GOP nomination in 2012. On Tuesday, the state of Maine levied a record fine of more than $50,000 against NOM after finding, based on a complaint filed by Karger, that the group committed egregious campaign violations in their $2 million effort to ban marriage equality in the state 2009.
We discussed that, his similar victory out in California against NOM and the Mormon Church, the remarkable recent string of court victories in the marriage equality movement, and why the hell Karger is still a Republican.
Next up: My round-up of the woeful state of the CA Sec. of State’s race, which holds its primary next Tuesday. From the Democratic candidate (Padilla) who willfully misled the public about his radical e-vote reform bill; to the other Democratic candidate (Cressman) who is great on campaign finance reform, but not as great on voting systems; to the Republican candidate (Peterson) who just can’t seem to denounce disenfranchising polling place Photo ID laws, even though he claims to be against them; to the Green Party candidate (Curtis) who would love to see Internet Voting, but is now threatening to sue me and The BRAD BLOG for pointing that out to the public (and defaming us to boot!)
Good luck, California!
Finally: As usual, Desi Doyen joins us for the latest Green News Report as the state of California learns the very very sad news that the fracking reserves in the Monterey Shale oil fields have only been over-estimated by some 2300%!
Enjoy!
Download MP3 or listen online below…
[audio:http://bradblog.com/audio/BradCast_BradFriedman_FredKarger_CASoSRace_052814.mp3]
Brad, you forgot to mention Jeff Drobman (D), a computer scientist whose campaign for SoS is entirely based on Internet voting.
So is there an answer to the “Why the hell is this guy still a Republican?” I had to read it twice to make sure I had indeed read that he is a Republican.
David Jefferson said:
Didn’t forget. Just hoping to avoid another lawsuit. 🙂
Soul Rebel asked:
There is. But you’ll have to listen to the show to get it! 🙂
David Jefferson @1 wrote:
At least with some of the other candidates, support for Internet Voting can be attributed to a profound ignorance of the scientific evidence that establishes that, in the words of U.C. Berkley Computer Science Prof. David Wagner, there “is no known way to audit Internet voting.”
But what are we to make of a computer scientist who actually knows this, yet runs on a ‘Let’s have Internet voting’ platform?
Rather amusingly, Drobman links to an article that boasts that “elections using Internet voting have been conducted securely over 100 times, around the world” and that “not ONE of these elections…has had results that were affected by security incidents.”
Hmmm! Apparently, neither the D.C. Internet hack nor the recent meltdown in Belgium ever really occurred.
Ernie said @ 5:
To be fair, the D.C. Internet hack was of a mock election, set up at the last minute, at the insistence of folks like David Jefferson, just before the system was to be used in a real election. The complete hack of the mock election stopped the system from being used in the real election. It was one of the few times (maybe only time, up until then?) that such a system was opened up publicly for folks to try and disrupt.
The Belgium meltdown was of precinct-based e-voting, versus an Internet election, though, as I note in that same article, the Estonian Internet Voting system (which is likely the source of most of those “100 times” Drobman cites) was found to be completely hackable by White Hat hackers just a few weeks ago, even if they did not do so during the actual voting.
In truth, Drobman has no idea if any of those “100 times” he cites was “affected by security incidents”. He’s pulling that straight out of his ass. What he means is “…that he knows of”. And, of course, that’s the problem.
His claim, by the way, is also demonstrably not true. Just look at what happened in Canada in 2012 and, not that Drobman probably included it, but on NBC’s The Voice in 2013.