Sunday, August 31, 2008
Hurricane Gustav, Shock Doctrine and "Election" Events
Hurricane Gustav bearing down on New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, expected to hit Monday, has already affected the presidential candidates' campaign calculus, and completely altered the media's telling of the campaign narrative. The NY Times reports the Republican convention scheduled to start tomorrow will be held in a very scaled back form and that the storm has also deflected media attention from both Obama's Thursday night acceptance speech (YouTube) and McCain's Friday veep announcement (YouTube).
If there is destruction and chaos on the Gulf Coast, this could easily become the pretext for triggering federal martial law, as reportedly occurred locally in some places following Katrina. Only now the National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive has modified succession of powers, enabling any event to trigger consolidation of all government under the executive. See Naomi Wolf's "End of America" for various historical precursors to this "echo," a repeating pattern in which the rise to absolute power comes through a series of superficially legal maneuvers, including funking up elections.
Because November's "election" event, if it is even conducted, cannot produce a conclusive and verifiable outcome, the People's huge preference must be undeniably evidenced prior to that. 84,000 were in attendance for Obama's outdoor stadium acceptance speech, which saw all tickets accounted for in a one day application process. On Friday, McCain announced the relatively unknown yet scandal-plagued Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate at a rally that couldn't fill a 10,000 seat venue. Lost in the equation are compelling visual examples of Obama's clear and commanding lead. Instead, the media perpetuate the false narrative of a close race.
Let me be clear that I endorse no candidate. I'm a fair election supporter. Though I don't think he'll be a revolutionary agent of change, if Obama has the votes to win then he should win. But first he should become outspoken about the process. Part of addressing the process, from my view, in this case, is something Obama supporters could do. I'm not usually in the position of offering advice to this seemingly massive and growing majority, but this is what I can see as the most likely way to ensure the outcome of the "election" event reflects the will of the People.
As with the juxtaposition of the numbers above, there must be constant and overwhelming collective displays of public Obama preference beyond individual expressions such as buttons, bumper stickers and lawn signs. There must be aggressive efforts to ensure the media depiction, including reporting on opinion polls, shows comparisons of candidate support are unequivocal. In this way, just having the "election" event becomes a formality. The inherent uncertainty of the unverifiable results may be neutralized without the suspense and doubt of a seemingly close race, a facade created for the power play necessary to funk up the results.
In addition, these pre-"election" displays need to directly address what will be done should the outcome be funked up. For that matter, such demonstrations of People power also ought to address rejecting the final dictatorial power grab looming over us, threatening the prospect of even having an "election" event. Velvet Revolution has launched a campaign to encourage and support candidates who raise challenges to election results. They also have a prosecute Karl Rove campaign.
Lest anyone think my suggestions or perspective are partisan, I reiterate my view that this is all simulated competition and Obama is in many ways a false alternative. That is not to say Obama and McCain are identical, but rather that Obama's talk of change is woefully inadequate at busting the myths of democracy, capitalism, free speech, free press, free markets and the rest of The Big Lie. However, while McCain appears ready to use the storm backdrop for political theater, Obama is pledging to wait and see, then organize, inspire and motivate citizen volunteers to assist in the aftermath.
And what can we expect this to look like? There is already a heavily armed military and law enforcement presence, while the war criminal enterprise Blackwater seeks to hire more mercenaries for the scene. The Department of Homeland Security (sic), FEMA (sic), and the Department of Defense (sic) will of course interfere with the command of state governors. And in a recurring theme here at WDNC lately, Naomi Klein's "Shock Doctrine" illustrates the pattern of exploitative security and privatization responses to disasters.
Pulling that thread just a little further, the North Coast Journal recently published Shane C. Brinton's book review of "Shock Doctrine," followed by my letter to the editor based on the review (the letter was given the great title of "Fascists!"). This week's Journal includes another wonderfully titled letter "Mas Fascismo" based on my letter.
The Journal is a free weekly paper with a focus on local Humboldt County, CA events. I always enjoy seeing them publish letters from readers outside our area, and in this case from an H.M Johnson coincidentally located in Redwood Falls, Minnesota, just under 100 miles from the partly aborted Republican convention, where some blatantly fascist police tactics have been used on protesters. See Uptake.org for lots of video, and also Twin Cities Daily Planet for some additional reporting.
Between Gustav and two potential flash points to create excuses for declaring martial law, this is shaping up to be a dangerous week.
October 17, 2007
Official White House Transcript
Q Mr. President, following up on Vladimir Putin for a moment. He said recently that next year when he has to step down, according to the constitution, as President, he may become Prime Minister, in effect keeping power and dashing any hopes for a genuine democratic transition there. Senator McCain --
THE PRESIDENT: I've been planning that myself. (Laughter.)
Permalink:
http://wedonotconsent.blogspot.com/2008/08/hurricane-gustav-shock-doctrine-and.html
Labels: false alternative, fascism, Gustav, inherent uncertainty, Katrina, martial law, McCain, Naomi Klein, Naomi Wolf, North Coast Journal, Obama, Palin, simulated competition, Velvet Revolution
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Surging Support For Hand-Counting Paper Ballots in Humboldt
First, let's be clear that there has never been more support than there is right now for hand-counting paper ballots (HCPB) in Humboldt County. The Voter Confidence Committee (VCC) has led the charge, with recent support coming from the Redwood ACLU, Democratic Central Committee and Veterans For Peace Chapter 56.
I'll be joined by members from each of these groups in a Thursday afternoon meeting with Registrar of Voters Carolyn Crnich. This isn't about lobbying her that day. We are seeking information that will further our ability to create tangible forecasting of time, cost and labor needed to conduct a fully hand-counted election here.
This emerging coalition will also have an opportunity to display solidarity at this Saurday's Peace March in Eureka. The VCC will be tabling at the Gazebo in Old Town, and we will have several to many people roaming the crowd in pursuit of sign-ups for our list of willing hand-counters (the VCC site also allows sign-ups).
An e-mail newsletter circulated yesterday by the VCC asked volunteers to print this page and bring it on a clipboard on Saturday to help us gather more names. In almost an afterthought, the VCC also issued this press release yesterday documenting some of the problems we observed during the February Primary. Bob Olofson took point on this one and he will be interviewed on KMUD radio later in the week.
Following the Peace March, it is conceivable we will have a sufficient number of volunteers willing to hand-count. Even at only 50% or more, the surging support suggests next week will begin another new phase of the Humboldt Hand-Count Campaign where we will begin presenting information to the County Supervisors during public comment. We will also target outreach to the current candidates for Supervisor seats up for election in June.
As if all this momentum isn't exciting enough, I have also been booked to speak to the Humboldt County Republican Central Committee on Thursday night. Read about my first date with the Republicans, speaking to them right after Hurricane Katrina. As with the Registrar, I don't perceive this so much about winning them over to supporting HCPB, and will instead focus on sharing information and building a bridge.
A few slight disappointments warrant mention here as well. The press release and position statement supporting HCPB previously posted at the Redwood ACLU blog has apparently gone missing from their site. Fortunately it has been archived here at WDNC (plus here).
The HCPB resolution adopted by the Democratic Central Committee can be found here on their site. Oddly, on March 1, the Eureka Times-Standard ran a brief mention of this in their recurring feature "Election Roundup," found on page A2 of that day's paper, but absent from the T-S website. I submitted an inquiry to editor Rich Sommerville and web editor James Faulk but received no response.
Then there is the Vets For Peace resolution which was sent to the media with a press release that the Eureka Reporter printed almost verbatim, applying edits only to make factual statements into matters of opinion. To wit:Last summer, Berman said, California Secretary of State Debra Bowen conducted a top-to-bottom teview [sic] of voting systems used throughout the state. He said her security experts were able to compromise every system tested, including Humboldt County's Diebold optical scanners.
The "article" gave the VFP and VCC websites but omitted the link that was provided for the We The People Foundation study of the NH primary. I'll mention that too when I write a letter to the editor about this. If you get that we have to confront the challenge of inherent uncertainty, I encourage you to submit your own letter to editor@eurekareporter.com. You can point to Bowen's study here and NH precinct info in the tables found here, "Berman said."
Berman said the same equipment was used to count approximately 80 percent of the votes in the New Hampshire primary in January.
"The other 20 percent of New Hampshire's ballots were hand-counted," the news release stated. "According to a report by the We The People Foundation, a statewide recount found the error rate was significantly higher where the scanners did the initial count, and that the scanners' error rate exceeded the limit allowed by federal law."
Permalink:
http://wedonotconsent.blogspot.com/2008/03/surging-support-for-hand-counting-paper.html
Labels: ACLU, Bob Olofson, Carolyn Crnich, Eureka Reporter, Eureka T-S, hcpb, Humboldt Dems, Humboldt Republicans, inherent uncertainty, NH Primary, Peace March, VCC, VFP, We The People Foundation
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Humboldt Dems Call For Hand-Counting Paper Ballots
At 8:50pm this evening, after a 45-minute discussion, the Humboldt County Democratic Central Committee (HCDCC) by a vote of 7-4 adopted a resolution calling on the County of Humboldt, CA to ditch Diebold by the June Primary Election and commence hand-counting paper ballots. The resolution, shown in full below, also resolves that the HCDCC "will commit some of its resources to educating the community about the benefits of this change, and to recruit registered voters to serve as pollworkers and/or voter counters."
The resolution, which I wrote and first posted here, was submitted following my presentation on behalf of the Voter Confidence Committee (VCC) at last month's HCDCC meeting. The Communication and Education subcommittee took up the resolution a few weeks ago and unanimously approved it. From there, according to Chairman Milt Boyd, it went to the executive committee which then allowed it to the floor of this evening's meeting.
In accordance with Roberts Rules, Boyd stepped down from the Chair position in order to speak in opposition to the resolution. He called hand counting "tedious, lengthy and more expensive" than optical scanning, which he said was "effective and accurate." He claimed that Diebold's optical scanners are more accurate than scantron machines used to grade exams in high school, and as a teacher, he was certain he could not grade papers as accurately by hand as with the scantron.
The debate protocol allowed alternating speakers for and against the resolution. I think this is a topic that people really like to talk about, perhaps contrary to popular belief. I also find that there is a lot of misinformation, such as the suggestion that dead people voting is a real problem, or paper ballots are bad because the ink can run, or that in Humboldt you vote without a paper ballot.
We were at least 20 minutes into the discussion before one member pointed out that we all vote on paper ballots here in Humboldt. It was a little uncomfortable to sit through this, particularly in the few moments that devolved into cross-talk with more being said than I could absorb or write down. I was not sure if I would get to speak, but I was trying to listen carefully to what needed to be addressed. In the end, Larry Hourany requested that I be allowed to speak, but another member objected and the matter was dropped.
In one aspect of the discussion that I really liked, Richard Marks and Roger Smith both emphasized that this resolution was exactly the type of progressive leadership the Democratic Party should exhibit. "This is not radical," said Marks. "This would be a very positive thing for the Central Committee."
What was most glaringly missed in this discussion is the secrecy of vote counting. If you really want to get to the core of what has plagued our elections most, beginning with the 2000 presidential election, the crux is that we don't all agree on the outcome. Why is that? More than any other reason, it is secret vote counting.
Current elections require our blind trust, or faith, rather than providing us with a reason to believe the reported results, a rational basis for confidence.
Instead, inherent uncertainty is created, waters intentionally muddied to the point that we can't know for sure. This happens everywhere, not just with "elections." It is not an accident or unintended consequence.
Keeping citizens divided is necessary for a government to transform a society into fascism, as has happened here in what used to be the United States of America. Wedge issues such as abortion and evolution are one way to keep people divided. Censoring, stifling, and propagandizing climate change and other science is another divisive tactic and it shows how people can be divided about non-spiritual beliefs.
What we get is a rift in the perception of reality. Matters of fact become differences of opinions that can never be resolved, like paperless electronic voting and other secret vote counting systems that create unverifiable "elections," events that are not really elections but resemble them closely enough to fool most people.
When a society cannot even agree on what constitutes reality, it is very difficult to build community support and consensus for what constitutes progress. Hand-counting paper ballots is but one benchmark.
We're only closer to the goal if this resolution results in HCDCC members joining in the efforts of the VCC. We are attempting to demonstrate to the County that there is sufficient public support for the idea of hand-counting, and enough willing counters to get the job done on election night. There is a sign-up form at the VCC website, along with all sorts of resources for the Humboldt hand-count campaign. Some of this stuff could be really useful to other community groups working for hand-counting elsewhere.
And finally, a note about this blog, We Do Not Consent. It is largely an archive for my writing, but not where it is most often read. If you are reading this post on another website, or from an e-mail list, I invite you to stop by my blog. This post is exemplary of both themes I frequently cover, and my advocacy journalism approach, using the medium to report on and advance real world efforts for change. It is the only way I judge my success.Resolution adopted by the Humboldt County Democratic Central Committee
2/13/08
Whereas elections in Humboldt County rely on Diebold's (now Premier) precinct-based optical scanners, and Diebold's GEMS central tabulator program to combine all precinct results; and
Whereas computer security experts have repeatedly demonstrated and documented the ability to tamper with this equipment, changing election results without leaving behind a trace of evidence; and
Whereas academic studies have repeatedly demonstrated and documented that security flaws in this equipment exist by design, and cannot be remedied with "procedural mitigations," or new security methods; and
Whereas claims of "trade secrecy" prevent citizens, the media, and even elections officials from observing the inner workings of this equipment, denying everyone the right to see their vote counted as cast;
Whereas elections conducted under these conditions require blind trust, or faith, to accept unverifiable and inherently uncertain outcomes that provide no rational basis for confidence in the reported results; and
Whereas the County of Humboldt is free to choose not to use Diebold's equipment, and is likewise not prevented from choosing to hand-count paper ballots at poll sites on election night; and
Whereas hand-counting paper ballots provides transparency, security, and verifiable accuracy that creates a rational basis for confidence in reported results;
Therefore be it resolved, the Humboldt County Democratic Central Committee hereby calls for Humboldt County to discontinue use of Diebold equipment and to introduce hand-counting of all ballots no later than the June 2008 primary election; and
Therefore be it further resolved that the Humboldt County Democratic Central Committee will commit some of its resources to educating the community about the benefits of this change, and to recruit registered voters to serve as pollworkers and/or vote counters.
Permalink:
http://wedonotconsent.blogspot.com/2008/02/humboldt-dems-call-for-hand-counting.html
Labels: fascism, hcpb, Humboldt Dems, inherent uncertainty, Larry Hourany, Milt Boyd, Richard Marks, rift in the perception of reality, VCC
Friday, January 11, 2008
NH Chaos Represents Opportunity; Nancy Tobi Pleads For No "Recount"
Speculation represents the preponderance of verbiage about the New Hampshire primary. I can't say for certain what happened on Tuesday, or any other day in New Hampshire for that matter. But given where things stand, I would like to make the case that this chaotic time is an opportunity. Before I get to that, I will again site the BradBlog index of stories and the OpEdNews writer's campaign for detailed reporting. Meanwhile, the controversy has served as the latest shouting point dividing the blogosphere.
There is one voice that I want to offer this space to, and it is not because I necessarily agree with what she is saying. Nancy Tobi of Democracy For New Hampshire is a respected colleague who has been very generous with her time consulting the Voter Confidence Committee about hand-counting paper ballots. Nancy has posted at least two passionate statements urging that a "re-count" not be pursued. Here are excerpts, followed by my suggestions:From: No Recount Please
I don't mean to contradict Nancy here, but rather to address a matter of framing. I've said many times that we are not having elections but rather events that closely resemble elections. Similarly, this isn't as much about whether or not to have a "re-count" as it is about "counting all the ballots."
"I am telling everyone who asks to beg Paul and others to NOT request a recount. I would beg you to urge everyone to STAND DOWN from this strategy. It is a trap. Use all your influence to inform the Paul and Kucinich campaigns, which are being targeted to carry this out, to please NOT pursue the recount this year. I can not stress enough how important it is they do NOT have a recount.
We have no control over the ballot chain of custody and we have learned the pain from the 2004 Nader recount, in which only 11 districts were counted, chosen by a highly questionable person, and then nothing showed up. Now all we hear is how the Nader recount validated the machines. A candidate asking for a recount may well be a tool used to "prove" everything was okay and then that candidate will be further discredited. This is high stakes, no bullshit."
...
"No. It is time to take control. We want accountability and change. We get this NOT from a recount, but from an investigation. We need questions asked and answered, and changes made so we have a clean election in NH in November."
# # #
From: We need to eliminate secret vote counting, not a recount
"Now activists around the nation are calling for a recount. In New Hampshire the manual recount has always been held as justification for holding elections in which more than 80% of our ballots are counted in secret by private corporations.
Does this logic hold up? Will a recount rectify the problem before us?
I say no. The problem before us is that we have outsourced the most precious thing in our democracy: the counting of our votes. And in New Hampshire, we have outsourced more than 80% of our votes to a private corporation counting those votes in secret, and, as it turns out, that private corporation has a convicted drug trafficker on its executive team to boot. A recount does not solve this problem."
...
"New Hampshire already knows how to fix this problem. For the past four years, New Hampshire citizens have been asking the State to fix this problem, but the State has thus far refused. We don't need a recount now. What we need now is for the State to reconsider and implement procedural and legislative solutions to guarantee open and honest elections.
A recount won't provide any significant benefit to the cause of free and fair and open elections. Bringing back full citizen oversight and checks and balances to all New Hampshire elections is the only way to avoid having any more questionable election outcomes in the Granite State."
...
"It's pretty easy to see what happened in New Hampshire: We had an election in which 81% of our ballots were counted in secret by a private corporation, and this resulted in an outcome that is called into question.
That's what happened.
No recount is going to change this. What will change this is to get rid of corporate controlled secret vote counting in our elections."
I appreciate Nancy's point that a re-count can be self-affirming as a stamp of approval. But the really important thing to realize is that this is the very thing we should seek to take on, and in as many ways as possible. This idea that some modicum of public acceptance will settle in and endure to future elections is the very thing that we are now poised to prevent, the biggest framing opportunity this side of Busby/Bilbray.
The idea is inherent uncertainty. From before the polls even opened, we knew with certainty the outcome would be uncertain, indeterminate, unknowable, necessarily inconclusive. It is time for everyone to see this as an intentional component of the joint government/media effort to keep the public divided. There is no need for any further primary "elections" when we know now in advance of them all that they too will fail to produce unanimous acceptance of the reported results.
As I see it, it doesn't matter whether the "recount" plan goes forward or not. Either way it is just part of the same opportunity for us. Raise your hand if you've been reading Naomi Klein's "Shock Doctrine." The disorientation occurring right now, this instant, is precisely our window of opportunity to act with the ideas we have lying around. We The People are long overdue to withdraw our consent. Do not accept the results of this election. Take action to prevent local Registrars (or equivalents) from certifying results.
We can seize this moment and define the story being told. We should invoke again, if perhaps with a slight edit, the stance dozens of groups took in response to the CA-50 "election" in June 2006. From the California Election Protection Network's Voter's Resolution of No Confidence, written here at WDNC:We, The People, DO NOT CONSENT to transferring power and authority to candidates claiming victory in this illegitimate election. We will do everything within our Constitutional and Human Rights to protect and preserve possession of this power that is inalienably Ours to be given but never taken away.
Public officials have been nakedly acting against the interest of the greater good for far too long and they are now cornered. Will we continue to let them take advantage of us, to assume they have our consent?
Ray Raphael is an historian here in Humboldt County and he's written many books. I read his "First American Revolution" and learned that by 1776, much of the Revolution had already taken place. Raphael describes a resistance tactic mirrored throughout the colonies where courts were shut down by citizens who forced judges to rule by locally written charters. The alternative for the judges who wanted to continue under King's Law was often public humiliation such as tar and feathering.
I'm not sure what the modern equivalent would be but it has to involve preventing legitimacy from being conferred upon faith-based results of secretly counted "elections." My advice to Nancy is to think more about now than the future.
"If we don't take action now, we settle for nothing later. We'll settle for nothing now, and we'll settle for nothing later." --Rage Against The Machine
Permalink:
http://wedonotconsent.blogspot.com/2008/01/nh-chaos-represents-opportunity-nancy.html
Labels: BradBlog.com, CEPN, Democracy For New Hampshire, inherent uncertainty, Nancy Tobi, Naomi Klein, OpEdNews.com, Rage Against The Machine, Ray Raphael, Shock Doctrine
Wednesday, January 09, 2008
Humboldt Dems May Consider HCPB Resolution
While everyone is talking about the improbable outcome of yesterday's NH primary, I've barely had a chance to read about it. Voter Confidence Committee work for hand-counting paper ballots has kept me very busy, including making a presentation earlier tonight to the Humboldt County Democratic Central Committee. I forgot to bring my voice recorder. But I was brief and it went more or less like this:Thank you for inviting me here tonight. I know I have to be brief so I won't go into detail about things we all know about, like the successful hack tests and the academic reports that conclude no "procedural mitigations," or new security precautions, can completely secure the machines we use here in Humboldt. The VCC spent 8 months studying the local situation and we've put out a 20-page report as well as a flier, a fact sheet, a diagram and more. These things are being passed around the room.
Milt Boyd, the Committee Chair, then told me of their subcommittee structure and I thanked everyone and sat down. I left before the end of the meeting.
Among the many recommendations we make, there is one that is clearly most important. We have to get rid of these secret counting machines and get the community together to count the ballots by hand. The big resistance to this comes from unfounded opinions that usually say it will take too long or require too many people.
Our Feb. 5 primary ballot has 8 contests. In NH, where they have a long history of hand-counting, they say it takes six seconds to count each contest on each ballot. That would mean 48 seconds per ballot for us in Feb. Let's figure as newbies we might be a little slower, say one minute per ballot. Our last federal election was November 2006 when we averaged 266 ballots cast per precinct. If it took one minute to count each of those ballots, it would take just under 4.5 hours to count all the ballots on election night in the precincts using teams of four people.
We had 109 poll sites in Nov. 2006. That means we'd need 436 counters. That is about one-half of one percent (0.5%) of all registered voters in Humboldt. That's not a high bar to reach. We've already collected over 200 names of willing hand-counters. The sign-up sheet is going around the room.
So I'm here to talk to you all as individuals who can choose to support this and of course if the group as a whole wants to get behind this I'll leave it to you all to determine what that would look like.
Around 8:30pm, Larry Hourany, longtime member of both the Dems and the VCC, called to say it went very well. He was very helpful in figuring out the approach for tonight, which I stuck with exactly as planned. Hourany said that near the end of the meeting he attempted to make a motion but the Chair steered it to one of the subcommittees. That means that now we (Larry, me, VCC) are going to get to write a resolution that this subcommittee will consider and potentially send to the full group with a recommendation. I've been listening to a lot of Rage Against the Machine lately, so excuse me when I say this is fucking excellent.
Now, to this New Hampshire situation, where it appears Obama beat Clinton in towns with hand-counting but Clinton won the state on the strength of her victories in towns counted by Diebold optical scanners, identical to those used here in Humboldt. Because I haven't been able to fully read up on this yet, I'm going to give you the links of what I'm about to dig into. But first, I have to say one more thing and it really harkens back to the essay I wrote on the GuvWurld blog called Why Old Election Numbers No Longer Matter.
See, we don't really learn anything from holding the so-called election that we didn't know before. The votes will be/were counted in secret. The expected result and the actual result are inherently uncertain. Nobody should be trying to convince anybody that fraud did or did not happen on the basis of data from what passed for an election yesterday. Hand count all the ballots, then we can first have a serious conversation about an election that occurred.
Read Rady Ananda's piece at OpEdNews. She has picked up my inherent uncertainty frame and run with it. She's got good quotes from several people including me.
BradBlog has several stories, of course.
Black Box Voting has a thread I was referred to by Tom Courbat of SAV-R-VOTE in Riverside County. Hi Tom, thanks. This one has charts and graphs.
The great Bob Koehler has a column for Tribune News Services called Primary Concerns.
Feel free to post more links in the comments for this post. And a reminder that Thursday between 6-7pm PT you can tune into KHUM.com and I'll be on the air during the KHUM Review program.
Permalink:
http://wedonotconsent.blogspot.com/2008/01/humboldt-dems-may-consider-hcpb.html
Labels: Black Box Voting, Bob Koehler, BradBlog.com, hand-counting paper ballots, Humboldt Dems, inherent uncertainty, Larry Hourany, NH Primary, OpEdNews.com, Rady Ananda, Report on Election Conditions, VCC
Saturday, January 05, 2008
NYTimes: Can You Count On These Machines?
Sunday's New York Times Magazine has a 7800+ word feature story on electronic voting, "Can You Count On These Machines?" The column is already online, spanning ten pages on the NYT website. As I read it I excerpted many passages I thought I might want to comment on, collectively about 1/3 of the article. As I work through a second pass to lay it out for you here, I will try to limit that further. For starters I would say the article really doesn't provide much substantial new information and performs worse still as a matter of framing.http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/magazine/06Vote-t.html
So opens the expose, providing a little background and clearly setting the stage for the no basis for confidence meme, which is never explicitly stated. In fact, for the appearance of balance, the article goes on to quote renowned electronic voting machine apologist Michael Shamos, who often gives the appearance of acknowledging real problems while simultaneously minimizing and discounting them with subtle reframing:
January 6, 2008
Can You Count On These Machines?
By CLIVE THOMPSON
This article will appear in this Sunday's issue of the magazine.
...
For a while, it had looked as if things would go smoothly for the Board of Elections office in Cuyahoga County...Then at 10 p.m., the server suddenly froze up and stopped counting votes...No one could figure out what was wrong. So, like anyone faced with a misbehaving computer, they simply turned it off and on again. Voilà: It started working - until an hour later, when it crashed a second time. Again, they rebooted. By the wee hours, the server mystery still hadn't been solved.
...
Introduced after the 2000 hanging-chad debacle, the machines were originally intended to add clarity to election results. But in hundreds of instances, the result has been precisely the opposite: they fail unpredictably, and in extremely strange ways; voters report that their choices "flip" from one candidate to another before their eyes; machines crash or begin to count backward; votes simply vanish. (In the 80-person town of Waldenburg, Ark., touch-screen machines tallied zero votes for one mayoral candidate in 2006 - even though he's pretty sure he voted for himself.) Most famously, in the November 2006 Congressional election in Sarasota, Fla., touch-screen machines recorded an 18,000-person "undervote" for a race decided by fewer than 400 votes.It's difficult to say how often votes have genuinely gone astray. Michael Shamos, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University who has examined voting-machine systems for more than 25 years, estimates that about 10 percent of the touch-screen machines "fail" in each election. "In general, those failures result in the loss of zero or one vote," he told me. "But they're very disturbing to the public."
The majority of this article shows Shamos' quote to be ridiculous on its face. With such limited auditing of the machines we can't really know what percentage of them fail nor can we know the true extent of known failures. What we know is that our elections are unverifiable so the outcomes are necessarily inconclusive. Such inherent uncertainty is fueled by paperless electronic voting machines that prohibit the possibility of a recount:During this year's presidential primaries, roughly one-third of all votes will be cast on touch-screen machines. (New Hampshire voters are not in this group; they will vote on paper ballots, some of which are counted in optical scanners.) The same ratio is expected to hold when Americans choose their president in the fall. It is a very large chunk of the electorate. So what scares election observers is this: What happens if the next presidential election is extremely close and decided by a handful of votes cast on machines that crashed? Will voters accept a presidency decided by ballots that weren't backed up on paper and existed only on a computer drive? And what if they don't?
What if they don't? What if, huh? Have we learned anything in the past seven years? Certainly a lot of information not immediately available to us in the aftermath of the 2000 election has since emerged to enable our understanding of a completely and intentionally broken process. Last August, Dan Rather presented an investigative report on HDNet (thanks BradBlog for the archive) that revealed Palm Beach County's ballots were knowingly foisted upon them with flaws. I noted the Times' failure to mention this at what seemed an opportune spot in the article (though it is mentioned toward the end of the piece):The 2000 election illustrated the cardinal rule of voting systems: if they produce ambiguous results, they are doomed to suspicion. The election is never settled in the mind of the public. To this date, many Gore supporters refuse to accept the legitimacy of George W. Bush's presidency; and by ultimately deciding the 2000 presidential election, the Supreme Court was pilloried for appearing overly partisan.
What a completely bogus and false premise: electronic voting results are conclusive. How so? Corporate trade secrecy says otherwise. This is a gigantic example of how the media continues to shape perceptions of fundamentally flawed aspects of democracy. Even before the no basis for confidence meme had crystallized in my mind and pervaded my writing, I had the basic notion down as early as November 28, 2000, right in the middle of the prolonged recount battle between Bush, Gore, and the intellectually dishonest Supreme Court.
Many worried that another similar trauma would do irreparable harm to the electoral system. So in 2002, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which gave incentives to replace punch-card machines and lever machines and authorized $3.9 billion for states to buy new technology, among other things. At the time, the four main vendors of voting machines - Diebold, ES&S, Sequoia and Hart - were aggressively marketing their new touch-screen machines. Computers seemed like the perfect answer to the hanging chad. Touch-screen machines would be clear and legible, unlike the nightmarishly unreadable "butterfly ballot." The results could be tabulated very quickly after the polls closed. And best of all, the vote totals would be conclusive, since the votes would be stored in crisp digital memory. (Touch-screen machines were also promoted as a way to allow the blind or paralyzed to vote, via audio prompts and puff tubes. This became a powerful incentive, because, at the behest of groups representing the disabled, HAVA required each poll station to have at least one "accessible" machine.)
The Times' article next turns attention to Ohio, describing the use of Diebold TSx touch-screen machines, confusing paper trails with paper ballots and also wrongly concluding (with no evidence) it would take weeks to count:Under Ohio law, the paper copy is the voter's vote. The digital version is not. That's because the voter can see the paper vote and verify that it's correct, which she cannot do with the digital one. The digital records are, in essence, merely handy additional copies that allow the county to rapidly tally potentially a million votes in a single evening, whereas counting the paper ballots would take weeks.
The article mentions that Diebold voting systems are built on notoriously buggy Windows platforms on which unanticipated voter behaviors have caused system crashes. And the REAL QUESTION, (OF COURSE), is not whether any specific machine is worthy of trust but rather whether it is appropriate for election results to require our trust, as opposed to providing verifiable outcomes reflecting an actual rational basis for voter confidence in the reported results.
...
[Referring to the May 2006 primary in Cuyahoga County]...poll workers complained that 143 machines were broken; dozens of other machines had printer jams or mysteriously powered down. More than 200 voter-card encoders - which create the cards that let voters vote - went missing. When the machines weren't malfunctioning, they produced errors at a stunning rate: one audit of the election discovered that in 72.5 percent of the audited machines, the paper trail did not match the digital tally on the memory cards.
...
Still, the events of Election Day 2007 showed just how ingrained the problems with the touch-screens were. The printed paper trails caused serious headaches all day long: at one polling place, printers on most of the machines weren't functioning the night before the polls opened. Fortunately, one of the Election Day technicians was James Diener, a gray-haired former computer-and-mechanical engineer who opened up the printers, discovered that metal parts were bent out of shape and managed to repair them. The problem, he declared cheerfully, was that the printers were simply "cheap quality" (a complaint I heard from many election critics). "I'm an old computer nerd," Diener said. "I can do anything with computers. Nothing's wrong with computers. But this is the worst way to run an election."
He also pointed out several other problems with the machines, including the fact that the majority of voters he observed did not check the paper trail to see whether their votes were recorded correctly - even though that paper record is their legal ballot. (I noticed this myself, and many other poll workers told me the same thing.) Possibly they're simply lazy, or the poll workers forget to tell them to; or perhaps they're older and couldn't see the printer's tiny type anyway. And even if voters do check the paper trail, Diener pointed out, how do they know the machine is recording it for sure? "The whole printing thing is a farce," he said.
...
The Nov. 6 [2007] vote in Cuyahoga County offered a sobering lesson. Having watched Platten's staff and the elections board in action, I could see they were a model of professionalism. Yet they still couldn't get their high-tech system to work as intended. For all their diligence and hard work, they were forced, in the end, to discard much of their paper and simply trust that the machines had recorded the votes accurately in digital memory.
THE QUESTION, OF COURSE, is whether the machines should be trusted to record votes accurately...One might expect computer scientists to be fans of computer-based vote-counting devices, but it turns out that the more you know about computers, the more likely you are to be terrified that they're running elections.In the infrequent situations where computer scientists have gained access to the guts of a voting machine, they've found alarming design flaws. In 2003, Diebold employees accidentally posted the AccuVote's source code on the Internet; scientists who analyzed it found that, among other things, a hacker could program a voter card to let him cast as many votes as he liked. Ed Felten's [Princeton University] lab, while analyzing an anonymously donated AccuVote-TS (a different model from the one used in Cuyahoga County) in 2006, discovered that the machine did not "authenticate" software: it will run any code a hacker might surreptitiously install on an easily insertable flash-memory card.
That graf sent up a red flag for me because I remember the report of Felton's hack, and recall that BradBlog was the supposedly anonymous machine donor. Sure enough, in his own coverage of the Times story, Brad Friedman calls out Felton for continuously depriving him of due credit.
Like I said, this is a long article. Toward the end, the Times gets around to talking about the secrecy of electronic voting systems:But the truth is that it's hard for computer scientists to figure out just how well or poorly the machines are made, because the vendors who make them keep the details of their manufacture tightly held. Like most software firms, they regard their "source code" - the computer programs that run on their machines - as a trade secret. The public is not allowed to see the code, so computer experts who wish to assess it for flaws and reliability can't get access to it. Felten and voter rights groups argue that this "black box" culture of secrecy is the biggest single problem with voting machines. Because the machines are not transparent, their reliability cannot be trusted.
Secrecy is indeed at the heart of the issue, but not because the lack of transparency makes the machines untrustworthy. Again, it is because trust is not an appropriate part of the equation. This is the most basic element of the election integrity message.If the machines are tested and officials are able to examine the source code, you might wonder why machines with so many flaws and bugs have gotten through. It is, critics insist, because the testing is nowhere near dilligent enough, and the federal regulators are too sympathetic and cozy with the vendors. The 2002 federal guidelines, the latest under which machines currently in use were qualified, were vague about how much security testing the labs ought to do. The labs were also not required to test any machine's underlying operating system, like Windows, for weaknesses.
Testing, like trust, is a red herring. A test on one machine is not indicative of the performance of any other machine, even if they are the same make and model. Further, testing of any given machine is not proof of how that same machine will perform in an actual election. Yet more context:
Vendors paid for the tests themselves, and the results were considered proprietary, so the public couldn't find out how they were conducted. The nation's largest tester of voting machines, Ciber Inc., was temporarily suspended after federal officials found that the company could not properly document the tests it claimed to have performed.The upshot is a regulatory environment in which, effectively, no one assumes final responsibility for whether the machines function reliably. The vendors point to the federal and state governments, the federal agency points to the states, the states rely on the federal testing lab and the local officials are frequently hapless.
The Times article makes further Florida reference, finally connecting the dots between Dan Rather's HDNet report, known problems with ES&S voting machines reported by the vendor but ignored by election administrators, and the 18,000 undervotes in the November 2006 Jennings/Buchanan election for Florida's 13th district Congressional seat. Smoothly segueing to Pennsylvania...
This has created an environment, critics maintain, in which the people who make and sell machines are now central to running elections. Elections officials simply do not know enough about how the machines work to maintain or fix them. When a machine crashes or behaves erratically on Election Day, many county elections officials must rely on the vendors - accepting their assurances that the problem is fixed and, crucially, that no votes were altered.
In essence, elections now face a similar outsourcing issue to that seen in the Iraq war, where the government has ceded so many core military responsibilities to firms like Halliburton and Blackwater that Washington can no longer fire the contractor. Vendors do not merely sell machines to elections departments. In many cases, they are also paid to train poll workers, design ballots and repair broken machines, for years on end.
"This is a crazy world," complained Ion Sancho, the elections supervisor of Leon County in Florida. "The process is so under control by the vendor. The primary source of information comes only from the vendor, and the vendor has a conflict of interest in telling you the truth. The vendor isn't going to tell me that his buggy software is why I can't get the right time on my audit logs."But what's notable about Centre County is that it uses the iVotronic - the very same star-crossed machine from Sarasota [County, FL]. Given the concerns about the lack of a paper trail on the iVotronics, why didn't Centre County instead buy a machine that produces a paper record? Because Pennsylvania state law will not permit any machine that would theoretically make it possible to figure out how someone voted. And if a Diebold AccuVote-TSX, for instance, were used in a precinct where only, say, a dozen people voted - a not-uncommon occurrence in small towns - then an election worker could conceivably watch who votes, in what order, and unspool the tape to figure out how they voted. (And there are no alternatives; all touch-screen machines with paper trails use spools.) As a result, nearly 40 percent of Pennsylvania's counties bought iVotronics.
Unverifiable conditions in any location leave no basis for confidence in federal election results, which therefore justify protest and rejection of results in every location. Finally bringing the article to a close, optical scanners are mentioned with barely a perfunctory caution for their known flaws.GIVEN THAT THERE IS NO perfect voting system, is there at least an optimal one? Critics of touch-screen machines say that the best choice is "optical scan" technology. With this system, the voter pencils in her vote on a paper ballot, filling in bubbles to indicate which candidates she prefers. The vote is immediately tangible to the voters; they see it with their own eyes, because they personally record it. The tallying is done rapidly, because the ballots are fed into a computerized scanner. And if there's a recount, the elections officials can simply take out the paper ballots and do it by hand.
That may be the letter of the law, but there may be no such vendor compliance. In 2004, a CA Secretary of State investigation of Diebold revealed the company had illegally installed uncertified software in all 17 CA counties using its machines.
...
Still, optical scanning is hardly a flawless system. If someone doesn't mark a ballot clearly, a recount can wind up back in the morass of arguing over "voter intent." The machines also need to be carefully calibrated so they don't miscount ballots. Blind people may need an extra device installed to help them vote. Poorly trained poll workers could simply lose ballots. And the machines do, in fact, run software that can be hacked: Sancho himself has used computer scientists to hack his machines. It's also possible that any complex software isn't well suited for running elections. Most software firms deal with the inevitable bugs in their product by patching them; Microsoft still patches its seven-year-old Windows XP several times a month. But vendors of electronic voting machines do not have this luxury, because any update must be federally tested for months.There are also serious logistical problems for the states that are switching to optical scan machines this election cycle. Experts estimate that it takes at least two years to retrain poll workers and employees on a new system; Cuyahoga County is planning to do it only three months. Even the local activists who fought to bring in optical scanning say this shift is recklessly fast - and likely to cause problems worse than the touch-screen machines would. Indeed, this whipsawing from one voting system to the next is another danger in our modern electoral wars. Public crises of confidence in voting machines used to come along rarely, every few decades. But now every single election cycle seems to provoke a crisis, a thirst for a new technological fix. The troubles of voting machines may subside as optical scanning comes in, but they're unlikely to ever go away.
This just plainly leaves a false impression. Optical scanners have been proven every bit as vulnerable to tampering as touch-screen machines and operate in just as much secrecy. Further, no mention is made of touch-screen opponents who also reject optical scanners and prefer instead to count paper ballots by hand.
As I mentioned last night, this lengthy article, while offering some reasonable context for newbies to election integrity issues, serves only to reinforce the inherent uncertainty of election results produced under current election conditions. We have no reason to expect anything different from a newspaper that lead the cheerleading for war in Iraq, suppressed its own reports of criminal activity in the White House, and continues daily to treat the horse race of political theater as a legitimate campaign for votes that can never be tallied with certainty. Perhaps the final nail in the coffin of credibility for the Times was the recent announcement that neocon spokesliar Bill Kristol has been hired as an opinion columnist. Backlash commentary is widespread.
Permalink:
http://wedonotconsent.blogspot.com/2008/01/nytimes-can-you-count-on-these-machines.html
Labels: Bill Kristol, BradBlog.com, Dan Rather, Diebold, Ed Felton, Electronic Voting Machines, ESandS, inherent uncertainty, Ion Sancho, Michael Shamos, NYTimes
Friday, January 04, 2008
From Around The World, Inherent Uncertainty Comes Home To Roost
In his Town Dandy column this week, North Coast Journal editor Hank Sims does an excellent job of tracing the origin of a widely held misconception related to the now famous confrontation a few months ago between Rob Arkley, Eureka's wealthiest businessman, and Larry Glass, a member of the Eureka City Council. The matter has been referred to the state Attorney General. Meanwhile, Glass has taken umbrage at Sims' suggestion that at some point Glass "changed his mind about pressing charges." Glass alleges the confusion stems from erroneous reporting in the Eureka Times-Standard. Sims writes:It seemed to me that Glass' objection called for a bit of research. I'm certain that I'm not the only one who remembered that Glass seemed to originally signal that he was inclined to let the whole Arkley matter fade from memory as quickly as possible, and that he then seemed to have changed his mind. Was that understanding in error? Does it matter? I'm rather inclined to think it doesn't matter: People should be allowed to change their minds without penalty. But it mattered to Glass, and I stood accused of perpetuating a myth. So I figured I owed it to everyone to figure out the truth of the matter.
I say bully for Sims for taking this on. I leave it you, WDNC readers, to go back and follow Sims' trail. Of course it comes as no surprise that Sims' investigation led to the following conclusion:
I was unsuccessful. But here's what I found.So if I had to guess, I'd guess that this small little bit of uncertainty will join all the other, larger, stranger bits of uncertainty attached to that night that Rob Arkley got aggro on Larry Glass, shoving him or not shoving him, threatening to destroy him (or not), all in front of a roomful of society people who carefully and fastidiously failed to witness any of it.
Three sides to every story, right? It amuses me that Sims goes to such great length, doing really responsible journalism, only to reach a conclusion often described here at WDNC as inherent uncertainty. I have discussed this subject with Sims in the past, and he was either unwilling, unable, or incapable of acknowledging that unverifiable elections guarantee inconclusive outcomes, or inherent uncertainty. We see this elsewhere too, such as the "official story" of 9/11, which contains contradictions and scientific impossibilities; and more recently with varied explanations for the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.
Now it turns out that from beyond the grave, Bhutto has opened a whole new case file in the realm of inherent uncertainty. Interviewed by Sir David Frost less than two months prior to her slaying, Bhutto claims that Osama bin Laden was murdered. Frost does not pick up on this comment during the interview though in the past ten days or so this has been widely discussed.
Len Hart, blogging as the Existential Cowboy, has excavated some gems from the memory hole, citing first a Fox News story from 12/26/01 and then a New York Times column from 7/11/02, both reporting the death of bin Laden. Now of course both of these so-called news sources have subsequently published articles about new video or audio tapes supposedly from bin Laden. And certainly no corporate media have called the bluff of the "war on terror."
No, instead we have the intentional creation and perpetuation of inherent uncertainty. It serves the power structure to keep the masses divided. Wedge issues are just the most superficial and obvious ways. More insidious and apparently not as easy to recognize is the rift in the perception of reality created by inherent uncertainty. See Blueprint For Peaceful Revolution for more on this.
Americans have been turned against each other. I have previously described the Manchurian Nation, the support structure for society that has been indoctrinated to demonize dissent and conflate activism with terrorism. At OpEdNews.comtoday, Kathryn Smith raises awareness of one such example, a declassified FBI memo obtained by the ACLU. Under the heading "International Terrorism Matters," the Pittsburgh Division Joint Terrorism Task Force reports on groups planning peaceful protests. Of course this should surprise no one either, assuming you've familiarized yourself with the typical signs of fascism taking over your country.
A couple of other quick notes...following up on the series of posts I did on the DOJ case compelling NY state to comply with HAVA:http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/V/VOTING_MACHINES?SITE=FLTAM&SECTION=US
Also, today, Editor and Publisher (by way of BradBlog) gives a head's up for a "massive" article in this Sunday's New York Times about the problems with electronic voting. Put in perspective, this is not going to be a mea culpa for the Times being years behind the facts, and will instead be yet another way to (justifiably) increase the already (understandably) enormous doubts about election results. In other words, the Times is about to contribute greatly to creating more inherent uncertainty.
Jan 4, 7:42 PM EST
NY Sets Voting-Machine Upgrade Schedule
By RICHARD RICHTMYER
Associated Press Writer
ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) -- The New York Board of Elections on Friday gave a federal judge a timetable under which it plans to replace all of the state's lever-action voting machines by September 2009.
...
The Help America Vote Act requires New York to replace the mechanical pull-lever machines that were introduced in the state more than a century ago with high-tech machines. It also requires the state to provide at least one machine accessible to the disabled at each polling place.
State election officials have said part of the problem is that state requirements for voting machines are stricter than federal ones.
The plan submitted Friday doesn't say what kind of machines New York would use to comply with HAVA, but [election board spokesman, Lee] Daghlian said none of the touch-screen machines currently on the market meet state standards.
(similar AP story in Newsday)
Permalink:
http://wedonotconsent.blogspot.com/2008/01/from-around-world-inherent-uncertainty.html
Labels: 9/11, ACLU, AP, Benazir Bhutto, Existential Cowboy, fascism, Fox News, Hank Sims, inherent uncertainty, Larry Glass, Manchuran Nation, New York Times, Newsday, Rob Arkley, The Journal
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Keepin' your head above water
Making a wave when you can.
Temporary lay offs.
Good Times.
It seems warped to me, but the honest truth is I can't get the theme song from the 70's sitcom Good Times out of my head. I think a defiant posture of positivity in the face of real-life challenges is something to strive for. I'm enthusiastic and encouraged that today I heard both Jon Matthews and Plastic Jackson, morning and evening DJs respectively, read the brief Voter Confidence Committee public service announcement on KSLG. Then I think, who cares, Martin Cotton II died last week in the Humboldt County jail after a physical encounter with the Eureka Police Department.
Good times. Right.
Last Thursday I received a phone call from a representative of the Humboldt Green Party. With apologies for the short notice, I was asked to make a presentation about the Voter Confidence Committee "Report on Election Conditions in Humboldt County, CA," and our campaign for hand-counted paper ballots, at the Green Party General Assembly on Saturday. I was glad to do it and especially pleased that two people offered to join us in tabling to sign up people wishing the County to know they are willing to hand-count votes on election night. I had my voice recorder, but forgot to start it when my talk began. I'm not sure I said anything WDNC readers don't already know.
The same day I got that call, I also attended a so-called Town Hall Meeting convened by Eureka police chief Garr Nielson. About 50 community members filed into a back room at a restaurant owned by Eureka Mayor Virginia Bass. That might not be the ideal setting for such a gathering, but this too was presented as a matter of short notice. Nobody had planned for the death of Martin Cotton II on August 9. Likewise for the five other community members who have died from dealing with the Eureka Police Department in the past two years. In each case, skeptical members of the public challenged the police version of events.
I should point out that I never met Martin Cotton II, nor was I present for his final altercations. By all accounts, he was fighting with folks at the Eureka Rescue Mission, which precipitated the arrival of the police. At this point there are many different stories and I shall not attempt to portray any one of them as reality. Consider this inherent uncertainty part of a vast trend I have outlined many times before.
And still, the VCC campaign rolled on with a promise from Registrar of Voters Carolyn Crnich that the group will be able to make a brief presentation about the report, the campaign, and the spreadsheet tool (.xls) at the next meeting of the Election Advisory Committee. That is less than two hours from now. Taking place at the same time is a Eureka City Council meeting at which members of the Redwood Curtain CopWatch intend to attend en masse, making their views known to the Council about the death of Martin Cotton II and the role of the police in that sad loss.
In an e-mail circulated yesterday, RCCW claimed to have documented reports from many witnesses who have been too afraid to speak to the police or the media. I think they will have an uphill battle trying to change popular opinion about recent events, even if the majority view states that once again we'll never have a definitive "truth." That's not to say they shouldn't try to bring forth witnesses and help the story evolve. But I'll put out there what I think is the most likely point to get traction.
Now, it is not as if I'm the first to say that Martin Cotton II should have been taken to the hospital instead of the jail. But what I have to offer to the discussion is how Chief Nielson's words indict the officers involved for a judgment call the Chief can be pressed into questioning. It has already happened once, though it seems to me the impact has just slipped on by. What I'm talking about stems first from a question asked by another community member at the Town Hall Forum. Nielson was asked about a quote in the media in which he alleged that Martin Cotton II was on dangerous drugs. This allegation by Nielson was not based on direct observation or a toxicology report. Yet he defended it, as if it were almost self evident.
Following up on this question, I noted to the Chief that in defending his allegation, he was thereby repeating it, and also defining what could be considered a reasonable assumption of his officers on the scene. Nielson acknowledged the logic of my statement. I then went further to point out that if his officers could be expected to conclude that their suspect was in this condition and behaving violently and erratically, then the appropriate course of action anyone might expect of these officers is that they would take their arrestee to the hospital and not the jail. In response, Chief Nielson said, "That is a reasonable premise and I can't argue with that."
Nielson then deftly moved on to the next question. He gave this type of "agreement" in response to several other questions that would seem to have pegged him to a position he likely wouldn't otherwise volunteer to take. So when it comes to this pattern of officer-involved deaths, there is no shortage of emotion or allegations that look to have no real potential for resolution. What may just exist, in at least this one most recent death, is an admission from Chief Nielson that could completely define the rightness or wrongness of the actions of his officers, but which do not seem at all likely to stick unless the logic above is laid out and emphasized repeatedly by RCCW and others.
While I was writing this, Plastic Jackson at KSLG scheduled me for an interview Friday at 7pm.
Ain't we lucky we got 'em. Good Times.
Permalink:
http://wedonotconsent.blogspot.com/2007/08/keepin-your-head-above-water.html
Labels: Eureka Police Department, Garr Nielson, inherent uncertainty, Jon Matthews, KSLG, Martin Cotton II, Plastic Jackson, Report on Election Conditions, Voter Confidence Committee
