Guest blogged by Ernest A. Canning
“One of the great questions of our time is whether the American people, through Congress, will control the greed, recklessness and illegal behavior on Wall Street, or whether Wall Street will continue to wreak havoc on our economy and the lives of working families.”
– Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) 9/16/11
Sanders’ question is indeed one of the “great” ones for our time. But, as Yoda said, “there is another.”
If there was ever a candidate perfectly suited to expose the lie that is to be found in the pseudo-populism of the mega-billionaire Koch brothers funded and controlled ‘Tea Party’ that helped Scott Brown (R-MA) secure a reported upset win in the 2010 special election to fill the U.S. Senate seat vacated by the death of the late Edward “Ted” Kennedy (D-MA), it would be Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat.
The brilliant, straight-talking Harvard Law Professor and special adviser appointed by President Barack Obama to oversee the development of a new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), whose interview with Michael Moore for Capitalism: A Love Story (see video below) established her to be the same thorn in the side of Wall Street’s financial “products” that Ralph Nader was to GM when he exposed the Corvair in Unsafe at Any Speed, announced last week that she is a 2012 candidate for the U.S. Senate seat now occupied by a GOP Senator who has turned to Wall Street, in a big way, for financial support.
There is little question but that Warren’s brilliance, eloquence, and sincerity will come into play during the ensuing campaign. But while Warren plants her flag in the fight for oversight, transparency, and accountability for our financial system, will she (and other candidates) come to understand the importance of oversight, transparency, and accountability for our electoral system before it’s too late? Before yet another election — like the one which brought Brown to the Senate in the first place — is decided under a cloud of unverified results reported by easily-hacked, oft-failed, optical-scan voting systems such as those made by Diebold and programmed by a company with a criminal background in the great commonwealth of Massachusetts?…
The great overlooked issue of 21st Century U.S. politics
The Crimson reports that Brown claims to be “an ‘ordinary Joe’ with the ability to connect with voters and understand their concerns.”
Warren, no doubt, has the capability of addressing whether Brown really meets that description, or whether MA’s Republican junior Senator, like NJ Gov. Chris Christie, is but a sly political chameleon who pretends to be a “moderate Republican” in order to hide an allegiance to mega-billionaires like the Kochs and their democracy-perverting, union-busting, radical-right agenda.
If the 2010 MA special election to fill the seat held by the late Ted Kennedy for five decades is indicative, it is likely that neither candidate will focus on the one issue that lies at the very core of our democracy — the need for both the winner and loser of an election to know that the official “winner” is the candidate who actually received the most votes.
Within just over an hour or so after the close of polls on Tuesday, Jan. 19, 2010, the, Associated Press declared that Brown had defeated his Democratic rival, State Attorney General Martha Coakley, to become the first Republican U.S. Senator from MA in 30 years. Even before AP had called the race, Coakley conceded (defeating her fellow Bay Stater, Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), in breaking the land speed record for prompt electoral capitulation).
Early the next morning, The New York Times, which described the reported Brown win as an “extraordinary upset,” declared that Brown had received 52% of the vote as compared to Coakley’s 47%.
There’s just one little detail which AP, Brown, Coakley, and The New York Times overlooked, but which we noted here at THE BRAD BLOG. At the time each declared or conceded the Brown “victory,” no human being had counted so much as a single vote that was actually cast in the pivotal election which undid the Democrats filibuster-proof super-majority in the U.S. Senate.
Nearly all of MA voted on the same Diebold optical scan system that was seen being notoriously hacked in HBO’s Emmy-nominated documentary Hacking Democracy.
In the film, Finnish computer security expert Harri Hursti exploited the Diebold system’s vulnerability by way of a minor change in its memory card’s programming instructions. A mock election was then conducted in which the question was posed as to whether Diebold’s machines could be hacked. Two paper ballots were marked “yes,” six “no,†as seen during the taping of the live, on-camera test. All eight ballots were fed into the Diebold system. The “election” was then closed and machine-tabulated. A paper receipt was spewed out bearing stunning results: Yes 7, No 1, the inverse of what we had all expected them to be. To insure this was not just a number fed onto the paper receipt, the optical scanner’s memory card was uploaded into the voting systems central tabulator (in Diebold’s case, it’s called GEMS). The result, once again: Yes 7; No 1.
As noted by Brad Friedman and Nathan Barker in the Right-leaning Gueverneur Times, while questioning a Democratic “victory” in 2010’s special Congressional election in NY-23, the Hursti “hack sent shockwaves throughout the e-voting industry, and among state and federal election officials. But the federally certified machines were never decertified by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission [EAC], despite the discovery of the code in violation of federal standards. That code, allowing this simple exploitation,” was still in place during the Jan. 19, 2010 MA Special Election for the U.S. Senate.
Diebold admitted that the tabulator software on their voting system doesn’t work as promised and, among other short-comings, may drop thousands of votes without notice to the system operator. Diebold also acknowledged the memory cards on their op-scan paper-ballot systems are prone to failure.
Lack of reliability went beyond the hardware and software of the Diebold systems themselves. Almost all of MA’s voting machines were sold and serviced by the notorious LHS Associates — the private company with the criminal background that has admitted to illegally tampering with memory cards during elections, and which has a Director of Sales and Marketing who embarrassed himself with obscene comments here at The BRAD BLOG some years ago, resulting in his being barred from CT by their Sec. of State.
In Massachusetts, however, LHS continues its work, as election officials turn the other way, and voters are left in the dark about the vulnerabilities of the system they rely on to determine who will represent them.
Now is the time to demand a hand count
The most transparent means for ensuring that every vote lawfully cast is accurately counted is by application of “Democracy’s Gold Standard” — hand-marked paper ballots, as publicly hand counted at the precinct level on Election Night, with results posted at the polling place before ballots are ever moved anywhere.
While it is possible to attempt to verify or refute a computer opt-scan reported result after an election, as revealed by our series of articles pertaining to the recent, hotly contested WI Supreme Court election, post-election hand counts are rife with the opportunity for ballot manipulation absent strict adherence to transparently secure chain-of-custody procedures. Expensive post-election hand counts, days or weeks later, may, as in the case of the Wisconsin election, offer no more assurance to winners or losers (or their supporters) that ballots were accurately tabulated in the first place, defeating the entire point of the exercise.
Moreover, a post-election request for a hand-count carries with it the “sore loser” charge even though there is no way of knowing whether the optical-scanners accurately tabulated (or even engaged in what many refer to as “counting”) in the first place, absent hand counting the paper ballots in front of the public on Election Night.
The time for both Brown and Warren to request a publicly hand-counted election is now. While Brown is likely comfortable with the machines that declared him the “winner” in 2010, Warren ought to understand the dangers of tabulation being carried out in secret, outside of the public eye, without the ability for human oversight to assure accuracy.
Whether either will call for such transparency remains the $64,000 — or, perhaps more appropriately, the $64 billion, or even trillion — question.
Michael Moore’s interview with Elizabeth Warren in Capitalism: A Love Story follows…
And here is a video of Elizabeth Warren’s announcement of her candidacy…
I agree with every sentiment expressed by Ernie.
But I think it is time that we peruse the data that informs us that we are now quite solidly living in a plutonomy.
It does not matter who wins elections in that sense in terms of economy, because we cannot elect our way out of that.
Neither can a consumer protection agency be a critical factor when 1-2% control upwards of 90% of the spending that needs to be protected.
The public debate may need to move forward about 40-50 years to be relevant now.
It looks like I’m moving to Virginia to help Mom. Are there any other Bradblogdinians in the Boston area that would consider taking on the mission of getting Elizabeth Warren to look at this data–
http://electiondefensealliance.org/files/BelieveIt_OrNot_100904.pdf–about the last Massachusetts special election?
Let me try that link again–
http://electiondefensealliance.org/files/BelieveIt_OrNot_100904.pdf
We elected Obama.
Die sniveling, die bold – Diebold doesn’t care, as long as we die…
I live in western MA and we still use paper ballots as do the majority of the towns around mine. While I think Diebold is corrupt, I think Brown’s win was because Coakley chose to go on a 3 week Carribean cruise while pink pants drove around the state in his little pick-up and met people. Plus, the turn out was less than 20%. I like Warren’s odds in MA in a presidential election year and with a Democratic governor, if there’s any questions about voting hanky panky, I believe it will be thoroughly addressed.
CAF. I’m pleased that some W. MA towns still use paper ballots. Do you know whether those ballots are publicly hand counted at the precinct level on Election Night, as many small towns do in NH?
It is quite possible that Coakly’s cruise and a low turnout were the source of Brown’s 2010 “win.”
It is also possible that the Brown “victory” was the product of either a deliberate manipulation or of a malfunction of the Dibold optical scan and/or central tabulation systems.
The point of this piece, and other election integrity articles, in not to argue that Brown actually lost the election but was declared the “winner.” It’s that, without a hand-count of the paper ballots, there is no way to know who won and who lost.
The machines told us that Brown won. On nothing more than blind faith in the e-voting system, the MSM and most Americans simply accepted that he did.
In a democracy, the People are entitled to know that the individual who is officially declared the “winner” actually received the most votes.
For the details on which towns use what voting equipment in Masachusetts, including the towns that still use hand counted paper ballots, see the verifier tool at verifiedvoting.org:
http://www.verifiedvoting.org/verifier/index.php
Indeed, a number of towns (particularly it appears in western Massachusetts) do use hand counted paper ballots.
On a related topic, Attorney General Martha Coakley’s rejection of a proposed ballot question that would have required ID to vote (she correctly ruled it an unconstitutional poll tax) has not stopped the push for IDs in Massachusetts. If you can get to Boston this Wednesday afternoon at 2:00, come testify to the Joint Committee on Election Laws against 13 bills that would affect (negatively, as far as I can tell, although I haven’t read all of the bills yet) people’s right to vote without showing ID. The link is http://tinyurl.com/3h9s8l5.
If you can’t be there, MassVote will deliver your testimony to the committee if you email it to sbrady at massvote.org with the subject line “tell the Election Laws Committee”.
I’ll check this thread for any last minute advice any of you folks would like to give me for what to be sure to include in my testimony.
Thanks!
Re CambridgeKnitter @9:
The most powerful testimony exposing photo ID polling place restrictions as a means for voter suppression; testimony which demolished the Big Lie that is the GOP “voter fraud” canard is the written testimony [PDF] submitted by Law Prof. Justin Levitt at the 09/08/11 U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights hearing on New State Voting Laws: Barriers to the Ballot.
Bless you, my brother at the bar. I have a meeting tonight during which I can look through this for the parts to say during my testimony, and I will submit the entire thing for the record.
It seems pale next to the enormity of vile decisions in Georgia today, but it’s one thing I can do that may make a difference in the future.
Not sure this will reach you in time for tonight’s hearing, CambridgeKnitter, but keep in mind the point made by the ACLU in its challenge to South Carolina’s photo ID law.
Polling place photo ID restrictions have “the potential to prevent one, and only one, type of voter fraud — voter impersonation…a person…going to a polling place on Election day, fraudulently requesting a ballot under the name of a qualified voter of that precinct who has registered to vote but has not voted prior to the fraud
“The Truth About Voter Fraud,” the 2007 study by the non-partisan Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School “which found that ‘voter fraud is extraordinarily rare’ but did not find a single incidence of voter impersonation” — for an obvious reason:
Photo ID is a solution in search of a problem.
Also, it would be of interest if you could document the disparate impact in MA polling place photo ID restrictions would have on seniors, minorities, college students, etc.
Be delighted to hear how tonight’s hearing went.
Ernie, the hearing is Wednesday (tomorrow) afternoon. I just went to the beginning of tonight’s School Committee meeting and Planning Board meeting and looked through Professor Levitt’s testimony while people blathered on about stuff I wasn’t interested in. The knitting came out for the interesting stuff. If David Lasagna hasn’t left for Virginia and can get over to the Statehouse, it would be great if he could say a few words as well.
Your line about a solution in search of a problem is my favorite description of photo ID as well. I plan to suggest that, if they’re really interested in preventing fraud in connection with elections, they bring back hand counting ballots statewide, instead of leaving it to just a few communities.
After a long fight with the Democratic Secretary of the Commonwealth, MassVote audited exactly one precinct recently and found that the machine didn’t count correctly (as far as I know, we have all paper ballots in Massachusetts, counted mostly by machines but occasionally by humans). Secretary Galvin put a stop to any further such meddling in the affairs of machines. As we all know, that is a far greater threat to fair and accurate elections than voting without IDs is.
And another couple of things. Martha Coakley already refused to certify a ballot question along these lines on the grounds that it was an unconstitutional poll tax. I read all thirteen bills (most are variations on a theme, but a few are a bit different), and none of them address the poll tax issue. I can speak with authority about how much it cost to get a copy of my husband’s birth certificate from Indiana a few years ago because the Passport Office didn’t like his original one (take that, birthers!) because it didn’t have a raised seal on it. In other words, even though the ID itself might be free, obtaining the ID to get the ID isn’t.
My mother was terrified about being able to vote because she recently moved in with my sister in Florida and so wouldn’t have any particular proof that she lived at that new address. She had me get copies of her birth certificate and marriage license from up here (no ID required for me to get them, by the way, just cash; of course, I do have an honest face, and I’m sure I could have gotten the City Clerk to identify me had it been necessary).
Martha Coakley is right. These proposals are nothing but poll taxes, and they serve no protective purpose. As I recently wrote to my friend the rightwing political operative, even though Republicans would like voting while Democrat to be a capital offense, that isn’t yet the law. I added that voter ID is a solution in search of a problem, unless the problem is voting while Democrat, in which case it is an excellent solution.
Time to get some beauty sleep.
Here’s my report on the hearing this afternoon. The acoustics in the hearing room were atrocious, so I don’t know who all the speakers were. Only one, some state rep who has got to be a Republican, whose name was indecipherable to me, spoke in favor. He not only could not back up the existence of a problem when he was asked, he finally worked his way up to the idea that it really doesn’t matter whether there is one because we just have to do this. Much of what he said was soundly refuted by later speakers.
Rosie’s Place (a private agency that serves homeless women), the NAACP, MassVote and Common Cause, along with others I couldn’t identify, gave facts and figures about why this was a bad idea. MassVote also had stickers that said “Let the living vote” in a horror magazine typeface next to the silhouette of a zombie, which most of the speakers, including me, wore.
By the time it came around to me, the next-to-last speaker, I didn’t need to cite facts and figures yet again, so I gave the panel the copies of the two Justin Levitt pieces Ernie kindly pointed me to, saying that these contained the documentation they had repeatedly asked for, and then I repeated what Pamela Wilmot of Common Cause had said about this being a solution in search of a problem, adding that it is a very expensive solution at that.
Thanks to what I learned from Professor Levitt’s material, I pointed out that the Supreme Court did not actually approve the Indiana voter ID law. In fact, a majority acknowledged that such a requirement could be too much of a burden on some eligible voters. Instead, the Court refused to overturn the law because there wasn’t evidence of how it worked in practice because it hadn’t yet gone into effect.
I told the story of getting a copy of my husband’s birth certificate from Indiana so that he could get a new passport and pointed out that, even if the Commonwealth didn’t charge for its ID, it costs money to get the papers together so that one can get the free ID (note that these bills do not in fact provide for free IDs). I also pointed out that millions of people have no birth certificate because they were born at home and no one ever filed the paperwork or their records were destroyed, perhaps in fires or the floods in New Orleans and elsewhere on the Gulf Coast and recently in western Massachusetts, Vermont and the eastern seaboard.
I know we educated one representative who really didn’t get how many people don’t have IDs and how difficult it could be for some of them to get one. She was also thinking of this as a service to them in that they would be getting an ID, which would give them access to various aspects of modern life. I had an opportunity to talk to her after the hearing, so I asked her why the ID would need to be linked to voting if the goal was simply to get people IDs to make their life easier. She agreed with me that it didn’t need to be; she had just seen this as a vehicle without considering the consequences that she would not support.
I don’t think these bills are going to get a favorable recommendation from the committee, and I think that will kill them.
Very nicely done, CambridgeKnitter.
I’m sure that Prof. Levitt’s work will be well-received by any MA representative who has a conscience and a brain.
Thanks so much for the detailed account, which I’m sure will be of interest to readers of The BRAD BLOG.