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March 21, 2006

Why I Fully Support Bush Censure

By Sen. Tom Harkin, Iowa
Tomharkin.com

March 16th, 2006

We have a President who likes to break things. He has broken the federal budget, running up $3 trillion in new debt. He has broken the Geneva Conventions, giving the green light to torture. He has repeatedly broken promises - and broken faith - with the American people. And now, worst of all, he has broken the law.

In brazen violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), he ordered the National Security Agency to conduct warrantless wiretaps of American citizens. And, despite getting caught red-handed, he refuses to stop.

Let's be clear: No American - and that must include the President - is above the law. And if we fail to hold Bush to account, then he will be confirmed in his conviction that he can pick and choose among the laws he wants to obey. This is profoundly dangerous to our democracy.

So it is time for Congress to stand up and say enough! That's why, this week, Senator Russ Feingold proposed a resolution to censure George W. Bush for breaking the FISA law. And that's why I fully support this resolution of censure.

Nothing is more important to me than the security of our country. Of course, we need to be listening to the terrorists' conversations. And sometimes there is not time to get a warrant. That's why the FISA law allows the President, when necessary, to wiretap first, and obtain a warrant afterward. But that's not acceptable to this above-the-law President. He rejects the idea that he should have to obtain a warrant before or after wiretapping.

We have an out-of-control President whose arrogant and, now, illegal behavior is running our country into the ditch. It's time to rein him in. And a fine place to start is by passing this resolution of censure. I hope that Senator Feingold's measure will be brought to the floor. And when it is, I will proudly vote yes.

Posted by mwblog at 10:04 AM | Comments (2)

March 14, 2006

What Parties & Candidates Must Do to Ensure Accurate Vote Counts

This is for political party leaders and candidates of any party:

http://utahcountvotes.org/detect-errors/whatPartiesCanDo.rtf

Without timely independent audits of vote counts and with county officials often refusing to publicly release or monitor their own vote count data, what would ensure vote count accuracy?

What Political Parties & Candidates Can, No Must, Do During Elections to Repair American Democracy

I. Guidelines for Observing Central Tabulation

http://www.verifiedvoting.org/article.php?id=5195

Tabulator Definition
The central tabulator is the central computer that tallies the votes and produces the final report for a given county or equivalent jurisdiction.

You should be at the central count facility when ballot materials begin to arrive from the polling places. If absentee ballots are processed in the same general area, you may be able to observe that process before the central tabulating processes begin. Get a comfortable seat and plan to stay until the wee hours. Interesting things happen at the end, when party observers are woozy and may be inattentive, so stay alert

Bring ID
Remember to take identification; you may be asked to show it before entering the central tabulating area.

If early voting is allowed in your area, the tabulating process will include the reporting and accumulation of vote totals of (a) early votes, (b) absentee ballots, (c) polling place votes, and finally (d) provisional ballots. Early votes and polling place votes will probably happen first, unless the absentee counting is finished by election night. Provisional ballots are checked first to make sure the voter was eligible to cast the ballot and then counted and added in as part of the final canvass of the vote totals. The canvass might not be completed for as long as 14 days.

Central Tabulation
Take notes on all your central tabulation observations and all responses to questions.

· If possible, observe the entire day of operations at the central election office. If the law in your state allows this, insist on it. Log anything out of the ordinary, and log the names of the relevant people.

· Ask questions about how absentee ballots and early voting ballots are handled.

· Find out who monitors the modem communications coming in from the precincts to the central tally computer. Is a phone line plugged into the central tabulator? If so, when? Does someone check the validity of the transmission before allowing it to be received?

· Ask if technicians have been required to take the same oath as poll workers to conduct a legal election. Monitor and log calls for assistance the election office receives from the precincts:

1. Which precinct did the call come from?

2. What is the problem?

3. Was a technician dispatched?

4. How is the technician dispatched?

5. Did the technician take replacement machines to the precinct?

6. How long did it take to resolve the problem?

· Log the names of all people operating the central tally computer. Observe what each one does by observing the screen.

· Log the names of the partisan observers.

· As poll workers bring the reports and memory cards back to election center, notice and log:

1. Do HQ Pollworkers check the seals when they receive the
envelopes containing the reports and the memory cards? What happens to the envelopes? Are they tracked?

2. Do HQ Poll worker register the number of memory cards indicated in handwriting on the envelope?

3. What happens to the Zero Total Reports and the End of Day Precinct Totals Report inside the envelopes? Are they removed, saved, logged? Are the totals tracked?

4. What happens to the memory cards after the HQ Poll worker breaks the seal? What recording does the HQ Poll Worker do? Are the cards counted (there should be one for every DRE)? By whom? How many times? What happens to the accumulator card containing the precinct totals?

5. Does the HQ poll worker check or verify the serial numbers or any other identifying information on the memory cards?

6. What happens if none of the cards in an envelope contains the accumulated totals? Is the accumulation process performed on a machine at HQ? Are all the cards from the precinct kept together?

7. Observe whether data from "accumulator" cards is uploaded to the central computer. Does someone track which precincts have been transmitted by modem and which are to be uploaded from the cards?

· Observe tabulator and room security. Take notes.

· Ask the name and employer of everyone who enters the tabulation room. Write it in your notebook. If you see vendor echnicians or "contract workers" touch the tabulator at all, make a note of the time and the name of the person. In some states this is a violation of the law.

· Ask where the modems are. (Not all counties use them.)

· Observe whether there is an infra-red wireless port on the central tabulator. If so, observe whether it is blinking and transmitting information or not.

· Use binoculars if needed, to observe the tabulator monitor screen in case you are not close enough to it. Write any error messages down in your notebook, noting the time. If the program suddenly disappears (program crash) or the computer crashes, note the time and file a public records request for the audit log. Call incidents in to the Election Protection Hotline at +1 866 OUR-VOTE.

· Carefully observe disk management.

· If any pre-opened disk is put into the tabulator, ask first that the disk be brought out and inserted into another computer to demonstrate that it has nothing on it.

1. Use a notebook to record the procedures for transferring interim vote totals to the county or state Web site. Do election officials recycle disks between the central tabulator and other computers? If so make a note of the time and the person doing so.

2. Is the Web upload computer networked? If so, ask or investigate the network to find out where the other networked computers are, observe who is sitting at them, write down names and employers.

· Write down the setup of the central tabulator. Take pictures. Where do the cables and wires lead? Ask about this. Are multiple tabulators networked together? If so, ask where the computer is that houses the final combined program. Make sure you can see it, and make a note of who touches every tabulator on the network.

· Watch to see if all polling places are uploaded into the central computer. Sometimes the trouble spots are held to the end, when observers are less vigilant. Sometimes they can't be uploaded at all.

[Thanks to Roxanne Jekot, Co-Founder of CountTheVote.org, Lillie Coney at the National Committee for Voting Integrity, the NAACP, and to BlackBoxVoting.org for contributions to the above section.]

NOTE: Because you cannot observe what goes on inside the central computer, memory cards, or over any network connections, vote count manipulation or miscounts could possibly occur even with the most diligent observations.

II. What Candidates Must Do If We Are to Repair U.S. Democratic Elections

Because every county in America currently publicly reports its election data in a way that hides the evidence of tampering, and no state monitors its own vote count data for accuracy, the most important thing all candidates must do, prior to conceding, if we are to repair our democracy, is to obtain the detailed vote count data for every election, race, and issue. Candidates must refuse to concede their elections, no matter how wide the reported vote margins, before first obtaining and analyzing the detailed vote count data for their own elections. In other words, candidates must demand to obtain their own unofficial and official reported vote counts broken out by precinct and by type of vote (absentee, early, provisional, mail-in, overseas, military, and Election Day). Otherwise insiders can pad votes for one candidate in one vote type, while simultaneously subtracting votes for another candidate in another vote type and yet hide the evidence.

It is not possible to ensure the future accuracy of U.S. Vote counts without the active assistance of candidates who run for office due to the lack of independent audits and the resistance by a many U.S. Election officials to publicly releasing the data which would allow vote miscounts to be detected and corrected. (See http://uscountvotes.org/ucvAnalysis/US/election_officials/Audits_Monitoring.pdf

Posted by mwblog at 10:02 AM | Comments (0)

March 01, 2006

AN IDEA WHOSE TIME HAS COME

by Marianne Williamson

It's that time again: a campaign year. All of a sudden all your political friends are calling you. You know why, and they know you know why. The system is so corrupt that the only way anybody can mount a successful campaign for the extraordinarily important job of guiding our country at what is arguably the most critical time in our history, is if they raise more money raise more money raise more money - and fast. While war and terror and disasters of every conceivable kind loom large around us, candidates have to spend God knows how many hours on the phone, and traveling, trying to do everything they possibly can to raise another buck. Unless they're independently wealthy, of course.

It is preposterous that in the United States today, we do not have publicly financed political campaigns. The cost to our democracy, and potentially to the fate of our country, is beyond measure. Anybody who has no access to cash, or the talent for raising it, would not have a chance at running for political office today. Is this what so many have fought and died for, and are fighting and dying for today? So that only those with access to money - regardless of whether or not they are the smartest and wisest among us - can make decisions in our name that affect the entire world?

Several years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that the right to give money to political candidates amounted to a right to free speech. Of course, this is the same Supreme Court that determined in 2000 that votes don't really matter all that much, so it's not exactly a shocker anymore when they come down on the side of insanity. But if we don't start figuratively yelling - from every rooftop, as loud as we can - that something has gone horribly wrong in this country, and that if we don't fix it then the most exquisite experiment in world history could go down the drain before our very eyes, then perhaps we don't even deserve to be the custodians of this experiment. I don't know how many hours of the History Channel anyone has to watch before recognizing that freedom isn't guaranteed. We need the very best and brightest that America has to offer, to be running for office and with relative ease. We need federally mandated hours of television made available, not for political ads, not for Madison Avenue to do its thing, but for brilliant Americans to have a chance to strut their stuff and give us their best ideas. For all our talk about campaign finance reform, even that is just an incremental effort. Campaigns shouldn't simply be less corrupted by money. They simply shouldn't be for sale.

As it is, we'll get through this season and then another one two years from now, with hundreds of millions of dollars that could and should be spent on other things, paying instead for political TV ads and all their related nonsense. What that will get us, most probably, is more of what we have now: political decisions that are way too green, and I don't mean environmental.

Publicly financed political campaigns. Say it, see how it feels and repeat it to your friends. Then repeat it some more, and some more, and some more. The only thing that will be stronger than the resistance to doing it is a country that decides it's really truly what we want.

Posted by mwblog at 03:27 PM | Comments (0)