We’re almost at Thanksgiving, and 2022 is right around the corner.
And yet - the Senate has still not passed the Freedom to Vote Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, or D.C. Statehood.
So, we are stepping up and showing Congress and the White House that failing to protect our elections and the right to vote is not an option. We must get these bills across the finish line now.
Guardian: "Alexander Hudson,... said: “The United States., the declines in civil liberties and checks on government indicate that there are serious problems with the fundamentals of democracy.”...The organisation’s secretary general, Kevin Casas-Zamora, said: “The visible deterioration of democracy in the United States, as seen in the increasing tendency to contest credible election results, the efforts to suppress participation (in elections), and the runaway polarisation ... is one of the most concerning developments.”
Brennan Center: "The alarming success of the election sabotage movement during the past year, along with the audaciousness of its leaders, should have Americans worried about the health of our democracy. It’s wort...h noting: legislatures come back for another swing of the bat in January. We haven’t hit bottom yet..federal legislative action is the only truly effective answer. The Freedom to Vote Act, currently pending in the Senate, would prevent most forms of election sabotage.
Some cybersecurity is better than none, but with the limited resources for election administration in most counties, the idea that our voting can be protected from cyberattack is a myth. But don’t give up- there is one way to protect our votes, Keep a secure chain of custody and count hand marked paper ballots by hand, with representatives of all parties observing. Many people believe paper ballots are being 100% audited by hand to confirm the machine count, but in most cases, they aren’t.
Votes counted by electronic voting machines can’t be protected. The DHS itself was a victim of the devastating Solarwind hack. Protecting from cyberattack is excruciatingly hard. But it’s not that hard to protect our vote count. Count by hand all the paper ballots (hand marked by the voter) to confirm the computerized vote count.
The Hill: “In the course of our careers, many of us have analyzed the threats posed by unstable democracies elsewhere, never imagining we would begin to see similar threats at home. Sadly, that moment has arrived,” the wrote. “We have strong democratic institutions and traditions, but they are being placed in severe jeopardy in the current climate. We call on you to meet this challenge squarely and put in place the defenses that will safeguard the integrity of our sacred democratic institutions.”
New York Times: "If you built a laboratory solely to concoct the most inept, opaque and self-dealing election board imaginable, you would have a hard time outdoing the real-life specimen currently functioning — or more often malfunctioning — in New York City...Alas, just as predictable as the board’s chronic incompetence is the refusal of elected officials to do anything about it. Why would they? Many of them are complicit in protecting the city’s twisted political machine that values insiders over voters and incumbency over democracy.
...The result is an election board that operates like a mafia without the guns. It is staffed with the friends, family members and other unqualified cronies of party bosses. It flouts city laws and actively resists serving the needs of voters in favor of a handful of political power brokers. Worst of all, it operates in an accountability-free zone where even the biggest bungles carry no consequences.”
WAPO "An army of poll watchers — many driven by GOP’s ‘election integrity’ push — turns out across Virginia...Poll watchers, or election observers, are distinct from election officers [poll workers]in that they are not allowed to assist voters in the polling place. As their names suggest, they only watch, while reporting any issues to election officers who can resolve them, or to party officials. Poll watchers are authorized by political parties or candidates, and up to three from each party can be in the room to watch the election unfold….Wheeler offered pointers on what to watch for: voting tallies that don’t match the number of voters checked in that day; anyone trying to influence voters; unauthorized people touching voting machines.”
"The 33 new election laws in 19 states will not fail. They are designed to replace the idea of democracy with a hierarchy in which a minority will determine our fate...And there it was: the replacement of the idea that all people are created equal with the idea that some people are better than others, and that those people, who truly understand God’s laws, should rule. “
"more than a dozen states are preparing to use the machines [Dominion ICX ] in some elections in the next year, including Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Illinois, Kansas, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Washington state
... the report details how a single hacker can easily develop malware and that could then be deployed to machines in private voting booths by people without technical skills..
... Halderman described how Dominion ICX voting machines can be reprogrammed to make particular candidates win by incorrectly recording a voter’s selections. And voters wouldn’t know their selections had changed, because the text on a printed ballot would still reflect their actual picks—while the QR code that actually gets scanned and tabulated by the state would reflect the altered choices.
COMMENT: A voting machine with QR codes and similar vulnerabilities is seeking approval in New York. Last year, the NYS Senate passed S309A that would ban such voting machines in New York. Let your member of the Assembly know that you oppose hybrid voting machines and support A1115A. Keep touchscreen voting machines with QR codes out of New York. Allegra Dengler
..."The destruction of democracy might not come until November 2024, but critical steps in that direction are happening now. In a little more than a year, it may become impossible to pass legislation to protect the electoral process in 2024. Now it is impossible only because anti-Trump Republicans, and even some Democrats, refuse to tinker with the filibuster.
Philadelphia Inquirer: "That means Finchem — not just a garden-variety Trumpist but a member of the extremist Oath Keepers who was on the Capitol grounds during the Jan. 6 insurrection — could be Arizona’s chief vote counter if and when the bleats of voter fraud and a stolen election again emerge from Mar-a-Lago in three years.
"Be very afraid.
…."A stunning report last week by the Reuters news service found that 10 of the 15 top Republicans running for secretary of state in five key battleground states — where the post, unlike Pennsylvania, is an elected position — “have either declared that the 2020 election was stolen or called for their state’s results to be invalidated or further investigated.” Several of these candidates have already been Trump-endorsed, including Arizona’s Finchem but also Georgia Congressman Jody Hice, who is running to get rid of Raffensperger and called Jan. 6 “our 1776 moment.”
...So while, yes, Pennsylvania’s governor’s race will be important for the usual reasons like education funding or the fate of fracking, this time around voters are essentially tasked with preserving America’s 245-year experience with democracy ... or not. We need to listen with great care to what former conservatives like Robert Kagan or Steve Schmidt are trying to tell us. The future of the United States, and its vital yet imperfect promises of liberty, are at the edge of a cliff, looking over the edge. We must seize this moment to pull it back.
“They did it in the dark of night,” she said. “Those systems have been compromised in the name of a so-called forensic audit.”...Boockvar’s successor decertified Fulton County’s equipment in July...Andino will soon begin as director of the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center, the federally backed operation, run by CIS, that helps state and local governments secure their voting-related IT systems and distributes threat intelligence to election officials and their cybersecurity colleagues.”
“I am appalled by this violation of my privacy,” said Dante de Blasio, a registered Democrat, via a spokesman for his father, the mayor. “My main concern is not that people will know who I voted for, but rather that the B.O.E. has repeatedly shown complete incompetence and still hasn’t been reformed by the state. Hundreds of my fellow voters have had their right to a private ballot violated by the B.O.E.’s blatant carelessness. Enough is enough."
Jonathan Simon "The 2020 election provided a trove of provocative data: disparities, anomalies, and bizarre patterns that more than exceeded what we, as pursuers of electoral forensics, have come to recognize as the norm. But none of the data supports former President Donald Trump’s claims, and virtually all of it points in the precise opposite direction: in both the presidential and critical down-ballot contests (US House, Senate, state legislatures), the red shift (when vote counts come out to the right of poll-based or other baselines) was egregious and pervasive. “
“Copies of Dominion Voting Systems softwares used for designing ballots, configuring voting machines and tallying results were distributed at an event this month in South Dakota organized by the MyPillow chief executive, Mike Lindell, a Trump ally who has made unsubstantiated claims about last year’s election….The release gives hackers a “practice environment” to probe for vulnerabilities and a road map to avoid defenses, Hursti said….The door is now wide open,” Hursti said. “The only question is, how do you sneak in the door?”
Denver Post:…" a Republican county clerk in Colorado has been accused of allowing unauthorized access to voting machine passwords that ended up on the social media account of a QAnon leader.”
Colorado Pol: What Did Mesa County’s Q-razy Clerk Do?...it is not at all inconceivable that Clerk Peters might have given an outside party passwords or the means to obtain them in order to prove the conspiracy theory she has already alleged involving Dominion Voting Systems...it’s another stunning case of Republicans wishing so hard for election fraud they have to do it themselves.”
Daily Beast: "A judge in a Georgia election security lawsuit is working to tamp down voting machine conspiracy theories. But sealing a court file could stoke the controversy even more.
...It’s the kind of report that could be weaponized by those looking to cast doubt on U.S. election results: a cybersecurity analysis that found flaws in Georgia’s voting machines and warns about the potential for future attacks. But a federal judge has sealed the report, and her attempt to shield the public from bad faith efforts to undermine the 2020 election could instead fuel the conspiracy theory dumpster fires—and keep the voting machine maker from figuring out how to fix it.