A vote for "fusion tyranny"

I had rather hoped that when I resumed blogging, I would be able to speak about something other than vote fraud. But the news keeps piling up...

Snohomish County: This new analysis has implications that go far beyond the region under scrutiny. The authors are Paul R. Leto, an attorney who served on the Board of Governors of his state's Bar Association, and Jeffrey Hoffman, Ph.D., a physicist. Neither writer is a statistician (a fact which rightists will no doubt seize upon), although Hoffman seems to have a good grasp of that discipline and they had input from a professional mathematician.

Their argument speaks for itself. Analysis of voting pattern show that Sequoia touch-screen votes heavily favored one party (guess which) while optical scan votes favored the other; no other variable seems to account for the discrepancy.

Sequoia's managers, you will recall, have been accused (and in one case, convicted) of bribery of public officials.

The Leto/Hoffman paper makes a number of other pertinent points. I'll note but four:

1. Machines which recently had their CPUs "repaired" (how the devil do you repair a CPU?) developed a mysterious tendency to spew out Republican votes. (Note: The authors may have confused the terms "CPU" and "motherboard" in a section of their paper.)

2. Touch screen voting was supposed to help eradicate undervoting, yet undervoting remained four times the national average in minority districts of New Mexico using the technology.

3. The low rate of undervoting in Snohomish County may be connected to the numerous reports of "pre-selections" for Bush. (And that, in turn, may be connected to point 1, above.)

4. Sequoia requires -- for no reason I can discern -- that its machines have their power cords daisy chained. Is it possible to transmit data through the power line? In a word: Yes. Sequoia's enigmatic insistence on plugging the machines into the juice in a certain way may indicate the presence of a hidden network.

That last point has boggling possibilities. Even if we make sure that no election machine contains a modem, how can we be sure that outsiders aren't "talking" to the computers using this covert route? If the devices are plugged in, manipulators can plug in to their data.

Even if the machine, as originally designed, does not contain internal devices capable of transmitting and receiving data via the power cord, such a device can be easily installed during "repairs."

Shelley: People are starting to catch on to the possibility that California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley was railroaded out of office because of his staunch opposition to Diebold and touch screen voting. (If you haven't read the post below, you may want to do so now.)

We now have a sample letter of protest, which contains a defense of Shelley. It's a little too long-winded (not that I'm in a position to carp about such a thing!), but it makes some excellent points.

The "sexual harassment" charge against Shelley, mysteriously unspecified in most news accounts, apparently amounts to little. He lost his temper at an employee and used foul language. Not an advisable action, of course -- but such an outburst hardly justifies an attempt by the media to frame the poor fellow as a sex-crazed fiend.

And if that charge turns out to be mere hype, we have every reason to suspect that the other charges have been blown out of proportion.

(Can I be accused of sexual harassment because I used the word "blown" in the previous sentence?)

The battle over the new California Secretary of State has spawned an important web site called Ban the Machine. I advise you to check them out.

John McLaughlin: I never much cared for him or for his band of stuffed shirts. But he's old and cantankerous enough to allow himself the occasional snarl at the leash, and he comes from the William F. Buckley wing of the conservative movement. (God help me, but I miss the days when guys like Buckley constituted the Face of the Enemy.) At any rate, McLaughlin recently said on his program that Bush won Ohio by 70,000 votes. Which leads to this simple question: Who handed McLaughlin that number, which differs from the official tally?

Iraq: The subject of the Iraqi election is too massive for me to address here. Bottom line: If we can't trust the numbers in this country, surely we cannot trust the vote over there. The video footage of democracy-hungry voters in line was taken in a mere five polling stations which the American military erected as Potemkin villages. Initial announcements of a turnout exceeding 70 percent turned out to be purely imaginary. American soldiers transported the ballot boxes. International election observers did not dare to observe most of the country. The whole election was, in short, a shoddy masquerade.

Nevertheless, even the ostensibly "liberal" media organs described this sham as the most satisfying example of democracy since Pericles.

Dot Commies: Skeptical articles by Arabic writers on the Iraq "election" have described the Iraqi Communist Party as "a lackey organization of the US invaders." This story, for example, alleges that Iraqi CP members functioned as "extras" in propaganda footage of gleefully teeming polling stations. (The Bushites used such Hollywood trickery before, when the statue fell.)

The administration's alliance with the local bolshies may astound many, but I see in it the continuance of a pattern. Last time I checked, China is still ruled by a communist party. The Bush regime, by allowing cheap Chinese imports to flood our country, has helped that country become an economic powerhouse. The administration has rattled sabres against North Korea, but I suspect that those sabres will remain un-drawn. The neo-con movement contains within its ranks a number of former Trotskyites.

In an earlier post, I called fundamentalism the "third menace" -- Fascism and Communism being menaces one and two. The historical connections between the first and third Menaces are fairly well-known to those who bother to read history. Now I'm beginning to wonder: Are there subterranean linkages between menaces two and three?

I propose a name for this phenomenon: "Fusion tyranny."