La la la la la I told you so …
The thing about misinformation calls is that they are a popular suppression tool precisely because of the plausible deniability.
They inevitably happen every year in close races, suggesting that it isn’t just innocent mistakes. But any individual one could be an innocent mistake.
I say put the burden of proof on the one recording to call to make clear how the mistake was made. At least in the court of public opinion.
I apologize if this has come up before (haven’t read the entire thread, just bits and the latest page) but a lot of voter suppression talk on Thom Hartmann’s show today.
**John Nichols ** said he has seen plenty of evidence that if voting was honest, Florida would be a blue state.
Thom interviewed Brad Friedman regarding a software “patch” being put in OH voting machines…2 days before the election. have you heard of this?
*described as “uncertified ‘experimental’ software patches” being installed at the last minute on electronic vote tabulation systems in 39 Ohio counties which service more than 4 million voters Buckeye State voters.
I’ve also spoken to computer scientists and election integrity experts, in trying to make sense of all of this, though many of them seem to be scratching their heads as well. My own queries to the Sec. of State’s office have gone unanswered, as had Fitrakis’ and Bello’s before they published their initial story, begging the question as to why, if this software is as benign as Ohio officials are suggesting, they didn’t respond immediately to say as much. Furthermore, why did they keep the contract a secret? Why did they wait until just before the election to have this work done? And why did they feel it was appropriate to circumvent both federal and state testing and certification programs for the software in the bargain?
…
I’d like to have been able to learn much more before running anything on this at all, frankly. But the lack of time between now and Tuesday’s election — in which Ohio’s results are universally believed to be key to determining the next President of the United States — preclude that.
*
Its hard to keep up with the shit they are trying to pull in Ohio. Baldly, boldly, and with straight faces. They got a whole bunch of them, and those are just the ones we know about.
So, how this works is, if Obama wins Ohio, they will investigate and look for reasons why the vote wasn’t entirely legal. And if he loses they will just quietly move on.
And they are gonna get away with it. Flat out. Obama has to win Ohio by so much, none of this shit will matter. Beat the spread, so to speak.
I have a wide array of curse words available to me, some in several languages. They are entirely inadequate to express my feelings.
Same here, 'luci.
Excerpt from “How to Rig an Election”
They get more brazen with each election because they’ve gotten away with it so often before.
And no, there’s not a lick of evidence that Democrats are doing it “too.”
I’ve read Sun Wu. You’re a sucker. The idea of democracy, of rules, of integrity, is for losers. Right now I can’t believe anyone even commits to it.
The powerful will make their own reality, and not your vote, nor mine, nor the actual distribution of votes across the populace will mean anything, because they will write us out of existence. We’re being taken for a ride.
Cheaper and saner just to go back to absolute monarchy, let the shrieking talking heads scream about football–getting them away from government where there sportsman’s viewpoint only does harm–and let most people finally be free to be apolitical.
Sadly, staging a fascist revolution to build such a rights-free paradise would require those who would most benefit from it, those who are not deeply political and those who are not deeply politically savvy, to rebel, itself an extremely political act. Those most likely to fight a revolution will demand rights and participation. Thus countries tend to move toward democracy over time.
And yet democracy is itself a scam after a while. Too easy to falsify the votes, to fake the whole thing, while an oligarchy runs the show in reality. But the show gets louder even as it gets more irrelevant.
So I get to suffer through constant election campaigning, one campaign ending only for another to start, until the stress leads me to where I am tonight, where elections don’t even seem like a sensible thing anymore, where I can’t believe anyone lives this way, following the will of the people instead of just falsifying the votes like Khomeini. So here I am, preaching the Iron Law of Oligarchy, praying for a rough blond beast circled by indignant birds to overthrow the powers of the world, so angry and disillusioned I haven’t volunteered for Democrats this year because I might just scream how I want them all to die.
And it’s probably the temporary angst of the moment plunging me into such cynicism, but the moment has been weeks long, months I guess.
Really. I want it to stop.
Absolute monarchy sounds delightful.
Sorry. I’m threadshitting pretty hard. The stress blew my brain up weeks ago, and I realized a while back I just have to work on other things and get away from politics sometimes. But now it’s election eve, and looking at election threads doesn’t help anything but I seem to be deep into compulsive behavior right now.
I’ll go do something else now.
YES IT IS NO MATTER HOW YOU TRY TO DEFINE IT!!
Wow. A whole half a dozen voters. What is that, like…six? THEY ARE STEALING THE ELECTION!!! ELEVENTY THOUSAND!!!
Gimme a fucking break dude. You are jaded as fuck.
Well, that’s all that the reporter was able to find before deadline. Besides which, isn’t the whole case for voter ID based on the premise “it happens a lot that we don’t know about”? Well, how many misdirecting robocalls came from Flakes’s campaign that we don’t know about?
Yes, but he has reason to be. When the Secretary of State for Ohio, the guy in charge of overseeing the voting system, is actively ignoring court orders regarding voter eligibility and organising secret installations of unvetted software into the electronic voting machines, if you don’t think that just maybe something untoward is going on you’re either delusional or full of shit.
And he’ll get clean away with it, too. Its a great career move for a man unburdened by principle or scruple. He ain’t gonna be worrying about his campaign fund.
Husted is a tool and there is no defending him; I’m embarrassed to be from the same city as him.
What we clearly need here are some meddling kids!
Oh, no doubt, nothing to see here, move along…
Vote Early, Vote Often:
OK, I hadn’t heard about the court orders. At first blush I just assumed this was yet another overblown case of partisan finger-pointing. How in the world does he get away with ignoring court orders? Why hasn’t he been arrested for that?
Understandable. This whole thing is deep in the weeds for most observers. Very little sunshine has been cast upon it. And, if Obama totally creams Romney in Ohio, it won’t matter, it will most likely be quietly shuffled off.
However, if the voting tabulation (another can of worms I do not propose to open in this post) is tight enough so that provisional ballots become crucial, there will be a feeding frenzy of lawyers. An appalling prospect, to be sure. Unless one is is jaded as fuck. Dude.
That’s still a bigger impact than whatever Voter ID is supposed to protect us from.