This morning, NBC News’ top election expert, Chuck Todd, tweeted the following…
The voting machine conspiracies belong in same category as the Trump birther garbage.
— Chuck Todd (@chucktodd) October 21, 2012
Todd was responding, no doubt, to the many folks who have been justifiably concerned of late, since it was discovered that a bunch of Bain Capital investors, led by Mitt Romney’s son Tagg, via a company called H.I.G. Capital (believed to stand for Hart Intercivic Group) took over control of Hart Intercivic, the nation’s third largest voting machine company, in 2011.
The Austin-based Hart company, according to VerifiedVoting.org’s database, supplies electronic voting machines and paper ballot tabulators that will be used to tally votes in the Presidential Election this year in all or parts of California, Colorado, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia and Washington.
I offered my point of view about those concerns earlier this month, explaining that it was not just the private ownership of Hart’s machines by Romney backers which voters should be concerned about, but the private ownership of the similar systems in all fifty states that will once again be used to tabulate the results of this year’s Presidential Election with little — and very often zero — possibility of oversight by the public or even by election officials.
Todd does an extraordinary disservice to the electorate with Tweets like the one above, and I’d be happy to come on his daily MSNBC show any time to explain why, as I have told him via Twitter in response to the above.
As Todd has not responded in kind, and to expand upon my response to Todd there, I’d like to ask him these few respectful questions…
• Was it ‘conspiracy garbage’ when paper ballot optical-scan tabulators made by Sequoia Voting Systems in Palm Beach County declared incorrect results of three different races last March, including declaring two losing candidates to be the “winners”?
• Was it ‘conspiracy garbage’ when the Canadian firm, Dominion Voting, which now owns Sequoia Voting Systems admitted the failure in Palm Beach was caused by a bug in all versions of its central tabulation software which will be used to tabulate the Presidential Election (and many others) on November 6th this year in Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin?
• Was it ‘conspiracy garbage’ when, despite using Dominion/Sequoia’s recommended “fix”, the same problem occurred yet again in Palm Beach County’s August primary elections, as their Supervisor of Elections recently explained to me on air?
• Was it ‘conspiracy garbage’ when 16,632 votes were found unaccounted for when those same machines were first used in Palm Beach County back in 2008?
• Was it ‘conspiracy garbage’ when eight (8) top election officials — including the County Clerk, a Circuit Court Judge and the School Superintendent — in Clay County, KY were sentenced last year to 156 years in federal prison for gaming elections, including changing the votes of voters on ES&S electronic touch-screen voting machines?
• Was it ‘conspiracy garbage’ when the President of Diebold Election Systems, Inc. (by then renamed Premier Election Systems, which is now owned by the Canadian firm Dominion Voting) admitted in 2008 that the company’s GEMS central tabulation software, used in some 34 states, does not tabulate votes correctly and routinely drops thousands of them when they are uploaded to the central server?
• Was it ‘conspiracy garbage’ when Diebold/Premier’s spokesman admitted to the CA Secretary of State during a 2009 hearing that the supposedly permanent “audit logs” in all versions of its GEMS central tabulation system fail to record the deletion of ballots, after it was discovered that their electronic tabulator had failed to tabulate hundreds of paper ballots in a Humboldt County election (or to even notify system administrators that it had deleted those ballots)?
• Was it ‘conspiracy garbage’ when the CA Sec. of State decertified federally-certified electronic voting and tabulation systems made by Diebold, Sequoia and Hart Intercivic in 2007 after a state-commissioned team of computer science and security experts from the University of California, Livermore National Laboratories and elsewhere “demonstrated that the physical and technological security mechanisms” for all of the state’s electronic voting systems (also used across the rest of the country) “were inadequate to ensure accuracy and integrity of the elections results and of the systems that provide those results” and that their “independent teams of analysts were able to bypass both physical and software security measures in every system tested“?
• Was it ‘conspiracy garbage’ when the 2007 landmark study commissioned by OH’s then Democratic Sec. of State, found “Ohio’s electronic voting systems have ‘critical security failures’ which could impact the integrity of elections in the Buckeye State” and when she (unsuccessfully) recommended, along with the then Republican Speaker of the Senate, who is now the state’s Republican Sec. of State, that all touch-screen systems in the state be decertified due to concerns of, as she told The BRAD BLOG, “viruses that can be inserted into [Ohio’s e-voting and tabulation] system through something as simple as a PDA [Personal Digital Assistant] and a magnet and then the cards are passed from machine to machine almost like Typhoid Mary” so that “If there is malicious software, like a virus put into the system, it can not only affect the machines at the polling places, it can affect the tabulation that occurs at the server and it can also affect future elections if it’s not detected”?
• Was it ‘conspiracy garbage’ when the New York Daily News discovered in 2012 that hundreds of paper ballots at just one precinct in the Bronx went uncounted in 2010 during the September primary (failure rate of 70%) and the November general election (failure rate of 54%) on their brand new ES&S DS200 paper ballot optical-scanners, which are also used in OH, AZ, MI and elsewhere?
• Was it ‘conspiracy’ garbage when the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) released a warning in 2011 from a “Formal Investigation Report” that those same systems failed to count paper ballots correctly, on the heels of Cuyahoga County (Cleveland), OH’s previous finding that 10% of those machines failed during pre-election testing in 2010?
• Was it ‘conspiracy garbage’ when Oakland County, MI wrote a letter of concern to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC), seeking advice in 2008 after finding their ES&S M-100 optical scanners “yielded different results each time” the “same ballots were run through the same machines” during pre-election testing?
• Was it ‘conspiracy garbage’ when Princeton University discovered in 2006 that they could, in seconds time, implant a virus onto Diebold touch-screen systems used in dozens of states which could then spread itself from machine to machine and result in an entire county’s election being flipped with little chance of detection?
• Was it ‘conspiracy garbage’ when a computer security expert hacked a memory card on a Diebold paper ballot optical-scan system and flipped the results of a mock election (see the hack and its results as captured in HBO’s Emmy-nominated 2006 documentary Hacking Democracy here) in such a way that only a hand-count of the paper ballots in the election could reveal the true results?
• Was it ‘conspiracy garbage’ when a CIA cybersecurity expert testified to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission(EAC) in 2009 that e-voting was not secure, “that computerized electoral systems can be manipulated at five stages, from altering voter registration lists to posting results” and that “wherever the vote becomes an electron and touches a computer, that’s an opportunity for a malicious actor potentially to…make bad things happen”?
• Was it ‘conspiracy garbage’ that the Vulnerability Assessment Team (which also monitors nuclear facilities) at Argonne National Laboratory (the non-profit research lab operated by the University of Chicago for the Dept. of Energy) released a report earlier this year finding that Diebold’s touch-screen systems and, according to the team’s lead scientist, “pretty much every electronic voting machine”, can be hacked with just $10.50 in parts and an 8th grade science education, or just $26 if you want to do it remotely?
• Was it ‘conspiracy garbage’ when, in Volusia County, FL’s 2000 Presidential Election a paper-based optical-scan tabulator made by Global Elections Management Systems (GEMS, thereafter purchased by Diebold to become Diebold Election Systems, Inc.) tallied negative 16,022 votes for Al Gore thanks to a supposed “software flaw” which has never been explained by anyone, and which Leon County (Tallahassee), FL’s Supervisor of Elections Ion Sancho — the man, so well respected by both major parties, that he was placed in charge of the aborted 2000 Presidential Election recount in Florida — believes was a purposeful hack of the electronic tabulation system which is now used in hundreds of counties in dozens of states?
I could go on and on, obviously, but I won’t. You’re welcome. There are some 10 years worth of articles at The BRAD BLOG that folks can peruse to determine the facts underscoring my concerns and those of the others who have legitimately expressed them to you, Chuck Todd, about private, unaccountable corporations — owned by associates of Mitt Romney or by anybody else — having so much unoverseeable control of our once-public electoral system.
But, to misinform your 272,035 Twitter followers, not to mention your millions of viewers on television, that concerns about oft-failed, easily-manipulated electronic voting and tabulation systems are little more than “conspiracies” which “belong in the same category as the Trump birther garbage” is an extraordinary disservice to your readers, your viewers and the U.S. electorate as a whole.
They deserve a much better understanding of our electoral system from someone such as yourself, who is relied upon by so many as an expert in these matters.
Again, I would welcome the opportunity to discuss these concerns with you on your Daily Rundown show on MSNBC any time.
If, in fact, you are correct, that these concerns are little more than ‘conspiracy garbage’, you will do the electorate a great service by having me on, and putting me in my place once and for all by explaining why.
If these concerns are not ‘conspiracy garbage’, as I would argue, you would be performing a great service to the electorate by helping the electorate understand why they are not, and what voters may be able to do at this point to help minimize the possibilities of their votes not being counted accurately or transparently, or even at all, this November 6th.
Either way, the electorate will end up being much better informed before this year’s Presidential Election, which is, after all, as I’m sure we can both agree, the most important core function of your job — and mine — as journalists.
We currently have a premium offer for signed copies of investigative journalist Greg Palast’s new best-seller Billionaires and Ballot Bandits and his “Election Files” DVD, including his BBC reports on fraudulent U.S. elections in 2000, 2004 and 2008. Details on that limited time offer right here…
I wouldn’t waste my time on that piece of human trash. He’s as useless as teats on a boar hog.
After reading Victoria Collier’s excellent election integrity pieces in Harper’s and Truthout over the weekend, I woke up this morning obsessing about what sort of piece still could be written directly to the media that might break their spell of denial, get a little help from them on this critical issue, and ask for a little accountability.
I come home from a little family outing and find you’ve been hard at work on all that.
You are such a dude!!!!
I tweeted:
Todd is a corporate hack, and I have no use for his pea-brained verbal smack. He gets paid to be a shill for the right-wing; I have infinitely more respect for streetwalkers than I do Todd.
There is much more to the voting machine story than meets the eye. The Romneys are into big, easy money, like stealing the pensions that people paid into their entire working lives. And then they hand 10-percent of their dirty money over to their cult…how lucrative for the flock.
Owning a voting machine company is glaring small potatoes for these entitled tax dodgers. Why was Solamere Captital formed? Oh yeah:
“Solamere Capital was formed by a group of influential business leaders to leverage their industry expertise to access and execute superior private investments.”
And as we all know, a voting machine company is a SUPERIOR PRIVATE INVESTMENT, about equal to investing in a hot-dog stand.
So, Chuck Todd, while Brad Friedman won’t say it, because he’s too much of a gentleman and scholar, I will: Go straight to hell, you over-paid prick.
Chuck Todd is not the brightest bulb in the lamp. But Chris Hayes, Noam Chomsky, Barney Frank, and Glenn Greenwald are all extremely sharp. My first hand experience with them in bringing up the problems with the machines and our faith-based voting system is that none of them get it. Of the four only Glenn Greenwald was not dismissive. This is a tough nut to crack. This issue is the taboo of all taboos, seems to me. I keep trying to figure out how to present the fucking thing in a way that might penetrate the culturally highly reinforced bubble of ignorance and denial shielding awareness of it.
Yes, Chuck, here’s a result I’d like you to explain.
Prior to the 1996 Nebraska Senate election, Business Records merged with Chuck Hegel’s company AIS to become ES&S.
Out the outset of the 1996 Nebraska Senate election, Gov. Ben Nelson (D) led Hegel 65% to 18%. By the time of the election, Gallup predicted a dead heat. With ES&S counting 85% of the vote, Hegel won in a 15% landslide; a landslide that was put into perspective eight years later when election officials in Sarpy County, Nebraska were left to scratch their collective heads, wondering how the ES&S e-voting systems produced 10,000 more votes than voters on Nov. 4, 2004.
Here’s another example of a wild “conspiracy theory” in action.
TWO OHIO ELECTION OFFICIALS CONVICTED FOR RIGGING 2004 PRESIDENTIAL RECOUNT!
I am giving Todd a ration of S on twitter. I expect everyone else to do the same.
Heres a simple litmus test for knowing if the Romney’s owning a voting machine company stinks like a 4 day old mackeral;
If the names were reversed and it was the Obamas with a straight line financial connection and conflict of interest to the 3rd largest voting machine comany, machines that will play a large role in the 2012 elections, would the Reich wingers be screaming to the heavens about conflict of interest and conspiracies? You damn well know they would be.
This nation has been subjected to 4 YEARS of these wingnuts and their birther nonsense, and the MSM in complicit in spreading the insanity. Funny how the MSM refuses to do any actual investigative journalism into real issues such as this one, and concentrating on birther nonsense.
Todd is a tool and I have no clue how he got such a prominent position. He along with David Gregory is incompetent and dishonest in their right wing leaning.
Every time Todd comes on I tune to another station.
Great post, Brad. I have Todd’s bullshit book “How Onam Won” which he wrote with Sheldon Gawiser, Elections Director of NBC News. Two mediawhores.
Not one mention of the fact that Obama won the National Exit Poll (17.836 respondents) by a whopping 61-37% or that Obama won the state exit polls (83,000 respondents) by 58-40.5%.
But Todd quotes bogus final exit poll demographics throughout the book.
Let’s bury those guys with the FACTS.
My 2012 presidential forecast/ election fraud simulation model has three new graphs which PROVE SYSTEMIC ELECTION FRAUD.
http://richardcharnin.wordpress...orecast-model/
Typo fix: “How Obama Won”. I post too fast when I am angry.
Chuck Todd is such a damn phony. But they are ALL mediawhores
Chuck Todd is a snicker-dick weasel / a relic of bad journalism. He’s towed the corporate line about e-voting for years, no matter HOW many times we’ve pointed him to the facts.
I, for one, will be tweeting that douche-canoe non-stop for the next few weeks.
Thanks for the head’s up, Brad.
Oh! And hey, Brad-tribe – VICTORIA COLLIER’s article in HAPER’s MAG is on stands NOW!
You can read an excerpt here:
“An Excerpt From “How to Rig an Election: The G.O.P. aims to paint the country redâ€
http://www.harpers.org/archive/...0/hbc-90008943
I’m tweeting that link to Chuck over and over again.
If Obama wins, none of this matter.
But in what Romney win scenario does it not?
Even if Romney were to win fairly, a large group of voters will never accept him as legitimate.
That’s a huge problem. On the other hand, maybe nothing makes the MSM happier than when the rest of the country is at each others’ throats 24/7.
I accept that this is legal, but it’s not ethical, and as a businessman, Romney knows better.
Amazing lack of digital literacy concerning software determined election results. The whole country seems to be in denial or just having critical thinking issues.
Count paper ballots in the polls on election day.
How can the NBC Chief Political & WH correspondent get that job and be so ignorant as to the long history of questionable activities and results surrounding the integrity of our country’s voting systems? I know journalism students who are better informed than Chuck Todd!
Can we all request paper ballots…and with any confidence that they’ll be counted?
Election integrity is not rocket science. At its core is the issue of transparency, which can be assured only through application of Democracy’s Gold Standard — hand-marked paper ballots, publicly hand-counted before the press and all parties on Election Night at each precinct, which must post the verifiable totals for all to see before the results and/or ballots are forwarded to a central tabulation location.
That is precisely the process now utilized by many NH towns, whose results are often more expeditious and always more reliable than those provided by the machine-counting counterparts.
Not only is this the only method that insures accountability, but it is less expensive than the purchase of either optical scan systems or 100% unverifiable DRE touch screen voting systems. Moreover, where the monies flow out of state and often to companies located in other nations, monies paid to hire temporary poll workers to assist in the Election Night count is recycled into the local economy.
For at least the past year Chuckie has increasingly been going further to the Reich.
I hear him say stupid manure every week.
This however is beyond ignorant even for him.
How can any intelligent person make a comparison between birther conspiracies–which were invented from whole cloth—and a situation where one of the candidates has ties to the vote counting machines?
He has lost his mind. Also, all my respect.
Chuck Todd is sweating bullets over the upcoming fixed election not matching exit polls yet again.
What the fuck is an “ADJUSTED exit poll result” anyways?
NBC employee Chuck Todd should bother reading NBC – MSNBC news articles such as this year old one http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/447...y#.UISaTmclrTo
by Matt Liebowitz about the $26 hacking demonstration.
I don’t tweet but how’s this?
Create our own reality Rove+Bain/Romney easy to hack no oversight voting machines=conspiracy garbage? On what mindless planet?
Chuck is, and always has been, a douchebag. I’m sure I have made this comment before. Probably many times here.
Why are voting machines, a for profit business in the first place?
Wow, Chuck Todd is an idiot. This isn’t some crazy round about conspiracy with a mind bending spiderweb of connections and coincidences. It’s a straight up A to B conflict of interest. How the hell does this clown con people into taking him seriously?
We knew Chuck was clueless when he said in a tweet to you a few years ago, and I am paraphrasing from memory (We all use ATM’s, Tell me how using electronic voting machines is different)
They don’t call chuck todd Chuck Turd for nothin.
Marty @ 14 said:
Disagree.
Charlie asked @ 17:
Depends where you live. In California, for example, yes. Check with your county. If they say no, check with your Sec. of State.
That’s a different story, and not a particularly good one.
Crib sheet for Chuck: the correct answer is “No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, and no.”
“I haven’t the slightest clue” would also be credible, though.
Frankly I’m not surprised that the MSNBC political news commentators are coming out now to marginalize anyone who speaks out about problems relating to electronic voting systems because of the new Harpers’ Mag Nov issue, the Truth Out article and recent interviews on RT with Mark Crispin Miller, [VIDEO] http://wp.me/pkFiL-8TR
“Abby Martin talks to Mark Crispin Miller, NYU Professor & Author of ‘Fooled Again’ ”
I also heard from a MSNBC staffer that if a news commentator crosses the line and does a story that is considered “old” or too critical of the current administration that that person will be banned from any news/TV for 4 years.
Look what happened to Keith Olbermann. He was silenced.
Michelle unbelievably voted ABSENTEE! The First Lady cannot even hitch a ride to Illinois to vote in person?
Greg just explained yet again that absentee ballots are extremely easy to challenge, or even deliberately booby trap with the WRONG envelope included or ridiculous rules to follow.
Why not request paper ballots no matter what county?
Do it for no other reason than to be an annoyance. Maybe if enough people keep asking eventually some will say “Hey maybe that’s not a bad idea, how quaint, paper and pencil you say…now what number lead should we use?”
I agree that we should be concerned about the integrity of voting machines. Having Romney son owning a company responsible for these voting machines is sickening and is a threat to our democracy. That is about the perfect scenario for republicans who have done everything already to cheat and win.
Ernest A. Canning â€@cann4ing wrote…
I suspect that Chuck Todd is not ignorant at all, but is a bare-faced liar with an ugly agenda. In other words, that he is an active participant in a real conspiracy, while falsely accusing others of a crime that he really is guilty of.
Irwin Mainway @22 asked:
A better descriptor would be “CORRUPTED exit poll results.”
When dealing with foreign elections, our government treats a marked discrepancy between exit-polls and the official count as indicative of election fraud.
But in the U.S., where elites pretend that election fraud is impossible (just as they use to pretend that Wall Street fraud was impossible), if there is a discrepancy, the illogical assumption is made that the fault lies with the polling data. Hence, the polls are
adjustedcorrupted in order to eliminate publication of the discrepancy.Welcome to George Orwell’s Oceania where Chuck Todd heads up the Ministry of Truth.
As I have posted here before…I was present during a talk in the run up to the 2010 election when Brit Hume informed his audience they should ignore the exit polls.
Also,prior to the Wisconsin recall Ed Schultz basically hung up on me when I tried to express my concerns about the voting machines….said..he wasn’t “going to go there”. He also told another caller he wasn’t going to discuss a certain issue because it was “a career killer.”
I just wonder what kind of BS excuses they will come up with if the next election is stolen.Even if Obama manages to remain in office..I am sure there will be falsified down ticket races.
We are so screwed…
Marty @14 doesn’t get it. Election integrity does not entail whether Obama or Romney wins this election.
As Brad Friedman has so frequently stated, it is not about Left or Right but about right and wrong. Election integrity entails a transparent system that insures that the person who is declared the winner actually received the most votes.
Citizens in a functioning democracy are entitled to know that they can rely upon the official results.
Thus, when an issue arose as to the accuracy of an e-vote determination that Democrat Bill Owens defeated Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman in the 11/7/10 NY-23 Congressional election, Brad Friedman wrote articles questioning the reliability of the result and calling for a full hand count.
The disturbing feature about e-voting is not just that there have been many elections where there have been stark discrepancies between the official count and exit polls, but that there have been impossible results.
See, for example, Exclusive: Impossible Election Results in Monroe County, Arkansas, Puzzle State, Local Officials
Thus, it is deeply disturbing when someone in a position to affect the perceptions of so many — Chuck Todd — can tweet something like this that, at best, reflects a profound ignorance. At worst, Todd’s tweet reflects willful dissembling.
In either event, Mr. Todd has done this nation and our democracy a great disservice by suggesting that issues of election integrity amount to conspiracy “garbage.”
Here is what it comes to. Chuck Todd is ignorant, cowardly, or corrupt. However it is, there is no way that intellectual eunuch and sniveling coward has the moral fortitude (aka the balls) to interview Brad Friedman.
Well, I was with you there, right up to the end. All that stuff about the machines, and the failures, and the rudeness… spot on. But when you implied, in that final sentence, how both you and Todd are “journalists”… I can’t go there. However, I’ll give you credit for being half right.
Perhaps Chuck and his idiocy have done us a favor. Consider how the NYT opened itself /to massive criticism after Keller’s repeated ACORN missteps (ie, provable lies). We need to similarly start hammering NBC and MSNBC with emails and phone calls. Todd’s dishonesty is no less than Keller’s, so he and his employer have earned our criticism. Who’s gonnna post those contact numbers and email addys?
This is typical of what we can expect from one of the princes of McTell News anymore.
Todd’s true stripe are revealed. The only question? How long ago did he cross over to the dark side?
He knows they are going to steal it, and he wants to keep his well-paying but now worthless job.
Ernest@38
Alvin Greene comes to mind…
When something like the Harper’s article comes out, a lot of pressure is put on folks like Todd to go into “move along, nothing to see here” mode. The code of silence has been broken, so now it needs to be reestablished.
Clearly we’ve never ever had issues with voting machines before in this country…
Hacking Democracy; watch it and tell me again how a relative of a candidate being involved with voting machines in any way is ‘conspiracy garbage’. Please.
I have no idea really, but I suspect Chuck Todd is not being a conscious dissembler. Everyone has their blind spots. Even Glenn Greenwald is not aware of how deep our election integrity problems run. I do not believe Glenn Greenwald is shilling for anyone, he just doesn’t know, yet. I suspect that’s the situation for most people. If we’re right, and we are, the implications couldn’t be more disturbing and disorienting. And people are already disturbed and disoriented for all their different reasons. Best thing for us to do is keep plugging away. I believe we’re making progress.
Personally, I think it is shortsighted to make Chuck Todd into yet another “them” by making him into a conscious dupe of the dark side. Be outraged. Be passionate. But the vilification kind of energy generates too much bad will and, generally speaking, just makes it harder for people to hear a subject that is already almost impossible to hear.
In my opinion, we need to be passionate, persistent, and strong but we need to make our efforts a form of communication art that’s informed by love.
Floridiot @44 is spot on.
For those unfamiliar with Alvin Greene, I would strongly urge that you read the It’s the
machinestransparency, stupid! section of Still Clueless About Touch-Screens in S. Carolina.This dealt with the Democratic Primary race for U.S. Senate.
The numbers were beyond absurd. Lancaster County paper absentee ballots went to Rawl 84% to 16%. The unverifiable touch-screens in the same county, however, said Rawl lost…by 17%. Greene received more votes than were cast in 25 Spartanburg County precincts. The votes of 50 other precincts were missing from the final count. Statewide, the virtually unknown Greene somehow managed to captured 60% of the vote, according to the iVotronic DREs.
No doubt, Chuck Todd believes that the two computer scientists who testified that system malfunction provided the only plausible explanation, the voters who testified they saw their votes flipped on screen and the campaign workers who saw poll workers swapping out memory cartridges during the election were all crazed conspiracy theorists.
Maybe others will make mistakes like the ‘dumpster dropper’ in Florida, who could have simply shredded the registration forms in his hotel room and eaten the evidence with some fava beans and a nice chianti.
Maybe with Democracy itself facing downsizing with a Romney Supreme Court, Democrats will finally ‘go there’ and make vote hacking a MSM topic.
I have long said Chuck Todd is a Republican plant. This guy was SALIVATING on Meet The Press to tell a story how Democratic “enthusiasm” is way down.
P.S. I have personally alerted Rick Unger over at Forbes to King Lincoln Bronzeville and the “man in the middle” evidence there. He covered this story and ends by saying that if there IS some “mistake” in the election in Ohio this year it will no doubt be an “honest error”!!!
To clarify: I meant that Rick Unger is covering the Hart Intercivic Tagg Romney story. He claims to have read up on the 2004 election in Ohio but says there is “NO EVIDENCE” to prove the allegations of theft there.
Would anyone accept this rate of error on an ATM machine?
Carolab @52–
I don’t know Rick Unger but the way you report his assertion of “NO EVIDENCE” proving theft in Ohio in 2004 looks to me like a possible red flag indicating bias.
If he HAS read up on Ohio in 2004, has he read the Conyers Report–What Went Wrong In Ohio? That report alone throws serious doubt on the claim of a Bush victory there. And that’s not counting possible electronic hanky panky which there certainly was with Triad employees driving around switching hard drives in selected computers as an attempted recount was ongoing. Cybersecurity expert Steven Spoonamore unequivocally states there is no good reason to be switching hard drives like that. The only reason would be to remove evidence.
Richard Hayes Philips’ book Witness To A Crime also has compelling evidence of theft.
Maybe he’s being a reasonable stickler for what constitutes proof. But the way you write about him makes me worry he’s coming in with the same old denial bias.
That the mass media parrots the party line is no surprise, is it? These people are whores or they would not be allowed anywhere near a ‘news’ outlet. Of course some otherwise reliable folks such as Chomsky won’t touch it because they are worried about their “credibility.” Anything which takes the discussion over the invisible line is shunned. You know that. America depends for its psychic survival on denying some of its worst secrets. There is still mass denial over the Kennedy murders. Why? Because to face the music on these things is to open the curtain and reveal how the empire is run and by whom. This election is obviously subject to being cooked, just as 2004 was. And the reduction in exit polls is a companion step in the process.
Much of Western Europe still uses nothing BUT paper ballots
DavidLasagna@54: Go there and read what he wrote for yourself as well as my comments and his replies to me and to others and tell me what you think.
If there’s no “there there” then why is the RW sending out their surrogates to shut this down? I just found that CHARLES COOKE at the NATIONAL REVIEW is now DISCREDITING RICK UNGAR’s piece at FORBES as “conspiracy theory”.
http://www.nationalreview.com/c...rles-c-w-cooke
Oh, and now Rick Unger is ANSWERING Charles Cooke! I just saw Unger on Current TV and his main complaint was that elections machines and “contributions” do not mix. It’s not a “contribution”, UNGER. It’s a CONFLICT OF INTEREST that the former Ohio SOS Brunner has said on msnbc.com today is VERY CONCERNING.
Chuck Todd makes his living by pretending we still have a real democracy and trying to keep the race close. Once people understand the true state of our political reality in an age when the Green and Justice parties have to media coverage and voting machines are owned by private companies, the three pseudo news networks would be of no interest to anyone, and he’d be out of work. Have you noticed that he has no sense of right nor wrong. He treats politics like a sporting event, trying to keep it close to remain interesting. By the way, your human checker is legible. That’s great.
Please register at the Guardian and comment on election theft in the US.This publication is read world wide. The darkness cringes at Light.
“What difference does it make if there are not fair elections .
From the Bradblog , Ernest Canning, a brilliant reporter makes this statement.
“Prior to the 1996 Nebraska Senate election, Business Records merged with Chuck Hegel’s company AIS to become ES&S.
Out the outset of the 1996 Nebraska Senate election, Gov. Ben Nelson (D) led Hegel 65% to 18%. By the time of the election, Gallup predicted a dead heat. With ES&S counting 85% of the vote, Hegel won in a 15% landslide; a landslide that was put into perspective eight years later when election officials in Sarpy County, Nebraska were left to scratch their collective heads, wondering how the ES&S e-voting systems produced 10,000 more votes than voters on Nov. 4, 2004.”
Read Bradblog for an explanation as to why the US elections desperately need monitors. Totally corrupt. And the democrats did nothing when they had control of the WH, house and senate. The entire system is fascist to the core. And that little nugget will get you banned on all the so called US progressive websites, except Bradblog.
Carolab @57–
I read his article and the first two pages of comments. My judgement is that Unger is a complete novice to this topic. You gave some strong stuff to him. He ignored you. His comments regarding James O’Keefe in his article are particularly damning and ignorant. He’s shocked and amazed at the situation vis a vis the voting machine company and the Romney campaign. As you were trying to point out to him, this is just the tip of the iceberg. This shit has been going on for some time. As of now, he sounds pretty clueless to me.
Lasagna @ 22 – that’s a FINE tweet! Can I tweet it FOR you? I’m making twitter-bombing that critter-shit part of my morning routine…
…yoga, hard boiled egg, coffee, read the paper, take a nice twitter-crap all over Todd.
Work, home, sleep and repeat.
LMK @ 41 –
David Kearns started a brill-yant TWEET-BOMBING TODD campaign, which we’re taking quite seriously over at our FB page, OCCUPY RIGGED ELECTIONS.
Here’s Todd’s twitter feed:
https://twitter.com/chucktodd
Here’s the email contact for his silly show DAILY RUNDOWN:
DailyRundown@msnbc.com
(Show’s webpage is here: http://rundown.msnbc.com)
Here’s more twitter fodder:
@DailyRundown is the show account
@brookebrower is the show’s senior producer
@annajotuman is the show’s researcher
…and here’s his silly show’s FB page:
https://www.facebook.com/dailyrundown
If everyone who commented here would just send one comment, one email, one #CHUCKZINGER to shame him publicly into having Brad on the show, that’d be the BEST cyber flash-mob, ever.
(David Lasagna – just re-tweeted you w/o your express permission. Couldn’t resist.)
Nice work Brad!
Jeannie Dean,
You know I love when you tweet me in all the myriad ways you do.
love,
Dave
Citizens, call U. S. Dept. of Justice Voters Fraud Division at 1-202-514-2000 and say I want to file a formal complaint to disqualify Romney in all counties using his ‘family-owned’ voting machines or disqualify use of ‘family-owned’ voting machines in this election where he is a candidate.
ernest,
thank you for posting the impossible numbers article
since ct knows everything ,why dont we ask him what happened there?
He is probably in denial about this by claiming that a compnay wouldn’t undermine its credibility by stooping to the level of fixing elections. They would lose their business. This may be true if the MSM was actaully investigating this sort of thing. But the contrary can also be stated. A company that helps Republicans win can be given long contracts to ensure a similar outcome in future elections, therfore making their shareholders happy (the basic concern of any publically traded company). If that publically traded company happens to have a major stock holder who is in the a candidate that will be decided by the product of that company it is serving two potential purposes at the same time, ensuring future contracts and rewarding it’s stockholders. How is this not rationally concluded by the MSM? Unless they are in denial that our country is above such base anti-democratic activities. If we are then he must also believe that the MSM publicized voter supression activities are similarly conspiracy theories. I was ambivialant about Chuck Todd before, now I have no respect for his ability to analyze a political story without bias.
This is the “formula” for anyone who has been paying attention: first the pundits like Chuck Todd create the scenario that it is a close election like they did in 2010 and PA over the last few years and then the citizens believe it and when the election is won (mostly by republicans) people do not question it –after all the election was “neck in neck” Enter the voting machines flipping a few hundred here and a thousand there and we end up with what we have for elected officials today: ignorant, self- serving ,owned by the company, liars.
I personally had an experience with a voting machine “flipping” while voting last year during primary voting. When I pressed the screen to vote for my choice of county commissioner (dem) the column to the left which had the judges I had voted for literally flipped them right in front of my eyes. I stepped back and said there is something wrong with this machine, it just flipped my votes; the response was pretty much that they had been having trouble with the machine all day, it seemed to hiccup! I was then to make sure that everything was as I wanted it when I pressed the vote now button; I asked how can I be sure that it didn’t flip everything when I finished, they said it wouldn’t do that. These machines are not a conspiracy. This is voter fraud.
Did Romney’s machines cost Santorum the nomination?
http://agonist.org/rigged-elect...ey/#more-95831
Hey Chuck Todd Wake the **** up and you’re full of **** because Voting machines are Conspiracy Garbage are you ******* kidding up
@COMMENT #9 – abso-f**kinglutely right on!
Todd is a pusillanimous recreant little weasel. A year or two ago he was on Bill Maher’s show whe Jeremy Scahill was on and he was just as big a whiner about something Jeremy said about the US corporate medias lack of critical looking at our wars and our behavior in Arab countries.
Todd was obviously displeased at the time with Jeremy pointing out some inconvenient facts but his big response was after the show telling Jeremy “That Was a Cheap Shot”– “You Sullied My Reputation on TV”. Check it out here.
http://videocafe.crooksandliars...hill-was-cheap
In other words, he’s a pusillanimous recreant little weasel!
Liberals/Progressives can’t expect much courageous reporting’ from Todd in particular or, unfortunately MSNBC in general – even Rachel. Just look at their coverage of Wiki-leaks.
Chuck Todd has a lot of growing up to do.
He is shockingly naive.
I wanted to give him a cyber bitch slap. John was guest hosting Viewpoint with Eliot Spitzer, he commented on Progressives over reacting to the news of Tagg Romney having ANYTHING to do with voting machines ANYWHERE!
No John, there’s no fuck’n over-reacting here, if I had any power or pull, I’d be in front Taggs house with a 100,000 angry anarchists calling for his traitorous head on a stake… ESPECIALLY after the last 13 years of voter fraud/suppression. IT’S TIME TO ATTACK until someone comes up with nationwide election standards and get the money OUT of politics.
We must fight back you see… because our law enforcement officials and Justice Department done nothing to save the American PEOPLE from the corruption. The best example being VA Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli has refused to press charges against Colin Small for throwing away the voter registration forms filled out by Democrats in a Convenience Store dumpster. WHAT?
And this BS is going on all over the USA by a bunch of religious zealots and Liberal hating fanatics. Why do they hate us so much? I don’t know, I don’t think those Conservative assholes even know, They hate Liberals because the AM radio Limbaughs and FOX told them so. I hope there’s Progressives near Colin Small who locate him and beat his ass, because what he did is about as un-American as it gets.
©2012 by FGE spoact.blogspot.com
“We must fight back you see… because our law enforcement officials and Justice Department done nothing to save the American PEOPLE from the corruption.”
While I realize Brad is the ultimate moderator here, I would like to point out that this post may very well be deliberate disinfo/psyops
designed to sow problems for progressives everywhere. Note the unnecessarily violent language (“bitch slap”, “beat his ass”) and use of the inflammatory and misleading term “anarchists”, a term frequently used by our propaganda media to minimize valid protests, much the way “conspiracy theory” is used for similar reasons.
For these reasons I will respectfully decline to visit his blogspot page, as I expect it could easily be a “honeypot” for frustrated yet unsuspecting progressives.
Maybe this is what all the hollow point bullets are for. The paranoia of crooks worried the public will finally wake up.
Prior discrepancy in exit polls to votes, Billboards showing people behind bars warning of voter fraud, fraudulent phone calls. Democrats not acting on this and Republicans calling it a conspiracy. Were the hell are we, China?
F This! The entire thing stinks to hell.
Seriously folks we are sending our brave young men and woman over to political hell spots to get killed and maimed and to kill foreigners for God knows what reason this month when in actuality we need those brave soldiers here cleaning out the real bad guys in our own back yards.
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Thank you so much, Brad, for your excellent coverage and summation of voting machine malfunctions and manipulations! I am extremely disappointed with Todd, and discouraged that he has such a high position on MSNBC.