Wednesday, November 01, 2006

Vote stuff

A lot is happening. I thought I'd offer a compilation of brief items, primarily on the topic of vote fraud...

Brad Friedman, the go-to guy on election fraud (his preferred term), will be broadcasting all through election night. More on that soon...

A GOP court victory may make it much easier for the GOP to disqualify votes in Ohio.
According to Harvey Wasserman and Bob Fitrakis, there has been a surge toward absentee ballots to avoid the mistrusted election machinery. But:
On all absentee ballots, [House Bill 3] demands an identifying driver's license number, or the equivalent. But Ohio driver's licenses have two codes on them. The "correct" one has two letters and six numbers. The "wrong" one is an eleven-number bureaucratic code that appears above the ID photo.

According to preliminary reports, as many as ten percent of those sending in absentee ballots so far have included the wrong code, thus disqualifying their vote.
There's much more. The Senate race is close enough to allow for the engineering of a "shocking upset" in Ohio...

Push polls. Tennesee is a state we need, which is why sinister forces have filled the state with push polls smearing Democratic candidate Harold Ford. In this post, luaptifer reveals some interesting details about those forces. The dirty work is being done by a group called "CommonSense," which has branches in a number of states; the key figure appears to be Proctor & Gambel exec Nathan Estruth.
The link to CommonSenseOhio.com increases question of Common Sense's claims of independence since Estruth was already under fire as a a financial backer of the Republican candidate for Ohio Governnor, the current Secretary of State, Kenneth Blackwell.
By tracking the IP addresses of the various CommonSense sites (as well as Estruth's personal site), luaptifer has uncovered what appears to be another "Christian" conspiracy to deceive.

Polls. They can drive you crazy.

The latest Rasmussen poll has the Republican Corker ahead of Ford in Tennessee, 52-44, which is very bad news. Benenson Strategy Group -- a Democratic polling firm -- has Ford ahead by five. In Missouri, the debate over stem cells may be the key to an onionskin-thin Democratic advantage for Claire McCaskill -- which means that the real winner of this race could be Michael J. Fox.

In what may be the most closely-watched race in the country, Virginia's Jim Webb appears to have nosed ahead of that notorious victim of testosterone poisoning, George Allen.

Debra Bowen. For months, this column has pushed the candidacy of Debra Bowen for Secretary of State in California. This is a crucial office for all of us, because the Arnie-appointed Bruce McPherson is fighting like a pissed-off pit bull to certify Diebold's lousy equipment. Obviously, he wouldn't do that -- not in the face of so much bad publicity -- unless the Republicans planned to heist California's massive number of electoral college votes. (Engineering that feat is Schwarzenegger's real job. If he has to govern like a Democrat to stay in office, so be it.)

Bowen could turn out to be the only person standing in the way of G.O.P. takeover in 2008. So please check out her new ad here -- it's a striking dramatization of vote theft in action.

Diebold, incidentally, is doing all it can to stop HBO from showing the film Hacking Democracy. They have described the documentary as "riddled with errors," even though their complaints are based on another film entirely.

Vote switches are occurring with disgusting regularity, espeically in Texas. Brad's covering it, of course. Funny, innit, how the switch always goes from R to D...?

Now hear this. Mark Crispen Miller, Sean Greene and others did a great radio interview on election fraud. This is a great program with Tom Ashbrook.

A warning from Michael Collins, TruthisAll, and Scoop Online:
A micro faction of the Republican Party is in the drivers seat operating major state voting systems and defining the laws that require, no mandate, local elections officials to buy equipment from firms either overwhelmingly favorable to the Republicans or whose corporate ownership has yet to be determined.

That’s why it’s left to those in this small but growing community of reality based activists to say the obvious. We have a lousy elections system that favors one party on a consistent basis and systematically distorts the franchise for political purposes.

5 comments:

dqueue said...

Add a Hopsicker story to the mix, pointing out all sorts of interesting details of vote counting companies...

Anonymous said...

And Lou Dobbs is actually covering this. He did a one hour special on CNN last Sunday on the dangers of e-voting. Nothing in it we don't all know, but I think it is a tiny bit encouraging that the issue is getting some serious airtime in the MSM.

Anonymous said...

joe, you scooped me!! there were only a couple of points i'd made that you skipped here.

one is mentioned by anon above; lou dobbs has actually been looking at the machine issue, and doing a fairly good job. he even mentioned the hbo special on tomorrow night, 'hacking democracy' at 9 est.

which was my second point; that show.

the third thing is that raw has a link stating "no exit polls," but the story doesn't even address exit polls. i just read an interview with the guy who's taking over mitofsky's position on that (mitofsky died a couple months ago), and it did not appear they were dropping exit polls.

in any case, the ohio ruling is devastating. even though it will likely be reversed on appeal, there is no time. i'm trying to find out more about that judge.

thanks for all this; good on ya!

Anonymous said...

this is NOT America... where did our country go?

Anonymous said...

Hey Anon 1: 57, you might want to backtrack through the archives on this very blog. The downfall is chronicled quite nicely here.

Here's the part from that last quote that I find to be nothing less than chilling:

"...or whose corporate ownership has yet to be determined."

It's nice to see someone acknowledge this somewhere again, but--horrors.