The Raven' s Blog, Web Log of Eric Ferguson: Second Half of November 2006 Archive

November 25
Following up from yesterday, Salon has followed the election fraud stories, and has an article specifically on the votes that went missing in the touchscreens in Sarasota County, Florida. Apparently the recount consisted of looking at the machines' first report again because that's all there is, and this "recount" was the reason for state officials, all Republicans, to certify the Republican as the winner. The good news is the voters managed to pass a county ballot measure requiring paper ballots in time for the 2008 election.

Salon also reported that other Florida counties using the same machines had the same problems with undervotes. The statistical oddity is that while other counties in the 13th district had a two percent undervote in that race, Sarasota had thirteen percent.

Though this race is the only one where the touchscreens are known to be the issue, the stress goes on known. There were reports elsewhere of these machines switching votes, and just like in 2004 the switch is consistently Democratic votes switching to Republican. But again, that's what was reported. If the machines malfunctioned in ways not obvious, or if they were hacked with more alacrity than the visible switching of votes, there is no way to know. There were of course lots of incidents of other sorts of cheating, like robo-calls and intimidation, and Salon has put together a well-named cheat sheet.

Despite the cheating, it was still a decisive win, and all the more so for the swamping needed to overcome the fraud, the disinformation, and the gerrymandering. Simon Jenkins in the Guardian put it well:

The ugly American mark two is dead. Overnight six years of glib European identification of "American" with rightwing fantasism is over. The gun-toting, pre-Darwinian Bushite, the tomahawk-wielding, Halliburton-loving, Beltway neocon calling abortion murder and torturing Arabs as "Islamofascists" has been laid to rest, and by a decision of the American people. Another McCarthy raised its head over the western horizon and has been slapped down. It is a good day for level-headed Americans.

Though I'm not sure I agree with the headline, "Republican defeat means the Iraqi insurgency has won." The acting president's strategy so far has worked great for the insurgents. I don't see why they would welcome a change.

November 24
Why has there been so little coverage in the major news media about the election fraud this year? Probably several causes, like the Democratic win is the big story and overshadows all else, plus the Democratic wins seem to belie the argument that fraud occurred. I also think back to how we heard for more about 2000 and 2004, when the presidency was at stake, than about 2002. In fact, some what we know about alleged fraud in 2002 has only recently come out. Even in the presidential years, it took months before we had a really complete picture. Let's also hope one of the causes for less coverage is that there really was less fraud. We can suspect some of the best fraud is held back for presidential years, but I would hope that all the efforts of the last six years, especially the last two, to expose and prevent the fraud has indeed cut down on it, for if it hasn't been reduced, that's discouraging. My personal impression is that the dirty tricks like robocalls are as bad as ever, but the actual funny vote counting was better, and the heavy Democratic vote overwhelmed a lot of the cheating. I repeat that this is an impression: I can't quantify it, but I expect quantifying will get easier. Now that we have not just subpoena power in Congress, but more state legislative chambers, more governors, attorneys general, and secretaries of state, investigations are coming.

For the moment though there are recounts, and the most interesting situation is in --- you'll never guess --- Florida. This is the race I wrote about previously, where earlier this week Florida's election officials declared the Republican the winner, and remarkably these officials are Republicans themselves. The Democratic candidate, Christine Jennings, who presumably would win if the votes from the Democratic areas of the district could be counted, is trying to get a recount or another election. A recount will be tough with touchscreens. I heard something about the chance of looking at images of the ballots. That's a long shot at best. Instead we have exhibit A of what's wrong with paperless voting. I heard anecdotally the Republican voters also saw their votes disappear form these particular machines, so maybe it was an honest malfunction, not fraud. However, those of us opposing these machines have said all along that if they have a problem, we'll never know, or least not be able to recover the accurate result. May I be very optimistic, and take her willingness to fight this as another sign the Democrats have developed a backbone? I will anyway. I also donated to her recount fund. You can too. Say, looking at the rest of that Yahoo story, isn't odd how all these tight races have the Republican ahead? And they're in states with histories of election problems? There might be nothing to that. I'm just noticing.

I also noticed exhibit A for the use of optical scanners with paper ballots. Joe Courtney, now known as "Landslide Joe", won the 2nd district of Connecticut by 91 in a recount made possible by the use of optical scanners.

So what is it worth to have accurate, auditable elections? Let's cut out the nonsense and just institute a national standard on optical scanners with random audits.

November 18
City Pages sent reporters to some election night parties, and some Republicans made some revealing statements. This one for example:

8:35 p.m.: In the Navigators bar on the hotel's ground floor, a group of five revelers expounds on race relations. "There's a difference," explains one of them. "It depends on what kind of blacks you're talking about. There's the light-skinned blacks and the dark-skinned blacks. And they're different. But you can't just say that."

Was the next sentence, "And we just don't get why they won't vote for us!"? Here's a similar gem:

12:44 a.m.A GOP partisan, frustrated by slow late-night returns from St. Louis County, says to no one in particular: "What are they? A bunch of Iron Range hicks?"

By odd coincidence, the iron range has a pronounced tendency to vote DFL (Democratic Farmer Labor Party), and calling people "hicks" hasn't improved matters. Also, lest anyone think the Republicans were oblivious to what was coming only on a national level, reading the whole article gives the impression they really didn't know how things were going to go. I'm sure there was the cheerleading, the bucking up of morale expected on election night and which we did too at the DFL party, but it seems they really refused to believe what was obvious for weeks if not months. Karl Rove was the poster boy for delusion when he told NPR that he had polls telling him different things than the public polls, and while the interviewer had his math, Rove claimed to have "the" math. Locally though, the state secretary of state grabbed that role by refusing to concede until 1:36 a.m. for a race that was clearly over as soon as precincts started reporting.

The delusional way they've governed seems less surprising now.

So why was gubernatorial candidate Mike Hatch the one statewide candidate not to win? It seems conclusive at this point. It wasn't the gaffes. Partly it was Tim Pawlenty's ability to get voters to split a ticket for him because they like him, and he did do better than other statewide Republicans, especially in his base in the southern suburbs. The other part though was Independence Party candidate Peter Hutchinson. The Independence Party doesn't like hearing that, as Jack Uldrich made clear, but it turns out that outside the metro area, Hatch did as well as the other DFL candidates for constitutional offices in a year where voters picked by party to an unusual degree. Hatch even did just fine in ethanol producing areas, indicating it wasn't Judi Dutcher's E85 gaffe or Hatch's reaction to press coverage of it. That's the conclusion of a study of election results by the Star Tribune, and a similar study by the Pioneer Press. Hutchinson's support, though only about 6.5%, came almost entirely from wealthier areas of the inner cities. These are areas that lean liberal and are usually safe for the DFL, as well as high turnout, but enough voted for Hutchinson that although Hatch won those areas handily, it wasn't the margin Democrats hope for in those precincts and which other DFL candidates received. That means Hutchinson's vote came out of Hatch's hide, and split the anti-Pawlenty vote.

So I ask the Independence Party, why? In race after race, you run candidates who are moderate to liberal, and appeal to potential DFL voters, effectively splitting the rational vote. You say you want Instant Runoff Voting (IRV), but so does the DFL. The one party that doesn't want it? The one you keep electing, the GOP. So the governor job stays with the guy who spent the trust funds, kicked uninsured people off MinnesotaCare, and won't fix the roads. The sixth district US House seat goes to a nut because IP candidate John Binkowski takes about 8% of the vote with liberal positions not significantly different from Patty Wetterling. Without him, that race becomes a squeaker.

It's not that I don't respect the right of anyone to run for office and anyone to vote for them. I supported Ralph Nader in 2000 because the Democrats had become Republican-lite and needed to come back to the base. However, I also knew Al Gore would win Minnesota. If I realized how awful Bush would be (which I regret I didn't figure out until the Florida recount) I would have pleaded with other Nader supporters in close states to support Gore (though I still think Florida would have been stolen regardless of the Nader votes). So what I'm suggesting is some reasonableness from the IP, and also the Greens. Run your candidates but, when we're in October and a candidate can't pick up support and clearly won't win, as Hutchinson never varied from 6-8%, give an endorsement of someone who can win and whom you can support, even if they aren't perfect.

"To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."
US Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who successfully prosecuted Nazis at Nuremberg for the crime of aggressive war, thereby establishing the precedent that starting a war is, in and of itself, a war crime.

"A refusal to look back inevitably means moving forward in blindness."
Philip Alston, the U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, on the resistance of the Obama administration to investigating human rights abuses by the Bush administration.

"Why is it that strong women are so often called bullies and ballbreakers, while strong, opinionated men are often called, simply, Justice Scalia."
Salon editor Joan Walsh, on the bigoted attacks on Sonia Sotomayor already on the day of her announcement.

"In Minnesota, Secretary of State Mark Ritchie has made military ballot protection a key priority of his Department. The result is that twice as many military ballots are actually cast, and half as many are rejected, as the national average in 2006."
The National Defense Committee, in an article on their web site praising Minnesota's efforts to encourage absentee voting by military personnel stationed overseas.

"We're seeing massive resistance to the cramdown proposal. That's a proposal to allow bankruptcy judges to reschedule a mortgage on a primary residence. They're fighting this thing tooth and nail. Now the fact is, the people fighting it are the last people who should get the ear of anyone. And it goes to show me they haven't really learned any lessons. A lot of these folks--large banks, Wall Street firms--they have the attitude that "Heads I win, tails you lose." No matter what happens, we always get ours."
Rep. Keith Ellison, on how the bailed out banks are fighting against bankruptcy reform.

''Scores of banks failed in the Great Depression as a result of unsound banking practices, and their failure only deepened the crisis,. Glass-Steagall was intended to protect our financial system by insulating commercial banking from other forms of risk. It was one of several stabilizers designed to keep a similar tragedy from recurring. Now Congress is about to repeal that economic stabilizer without putting any comparable safeguard in its place.''
The late --- and correct --- Paul Wellstone, expressing opposition to repealing the law that prevented financial corporations from entering other types of financial business, like preventing commercial banks from becoming investment banks. This repeal was a large part of making the (collapsing) conglomerates possible.

"The facts revealed reflect the way the U.S. government has consistently tried to cover up the truth of Binyam Mohamed's torture. He was being told he would never leave Guant�namo Bay unless he promised never to discuss his torture, and never sue either the Americans or the British to force disclosure of his mistreatment."
Reprieve Director Clive Stafford Smith, speaking about a British court's ruling that the Bush administration tried to get Mohamed to plead guilty to something, anything, and keep quiet about his treatment as a condition of release.

"We spend hours and hours and hours arguing over $10 million amendments on the floor of the Senate, but there has been no discussion about who has been receiving this $3 trillion."
Sen. Bernie Sanders. I-VT, on the mostly unreported spending by the Federal Reserve to prop up the big financial corporations.

"The AIG scandal is significant and has resonated so powerfully because it is a microscope that enables the public to see what and who has wreaked the destruction that threatens their security and future and, most important of all, to realize that these practices haven't ended and the perpetrators haven't been punished. The opposite is true: those who caused the crisis continue to exert control over what happens and continue to have huge amounts of public money transferred in order to enrich them."
Glenn Greenwald, explaining why the AIG bonus scandal is both symbolic and important.

"Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly."
Attorney General John Ashcroft, during a principals meeting about torture methods.

"There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed into an imminent ice age.

A review of the literature suggests that, to the contrary, greenhouse warming even then dominated scientists' thinking about the most important forces shaping Earth's climate on human time scales." Thomas Peterson of the National Climatic Data Center, who surveyed scientific research from 1965-1979 and showed that contrary to what climate change deniers keep asserting, there was no consensus on global cooling. That means the point that climate scientists must be wrong now because they were wrong then is itself based on a false assumption.

"We do not know where George Will is getting his information, but our data shows that on February 15, 1979, global sea ice area was 16.79 million sq. km and on February 15, 2009, global sea ice area was 15.45 million sq. km. Therefore, global sea ice levels are 1.34 million sq. km less in February 2009 than in February 1979. This decrease in sea ice area is roughly equal to the area of Texas, California, and Oklahoma combined.

It is disturbing that the Washington Post would publish such information without first checking the facts."
statement on the web site of University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center, responding to an assertion by global warming denier George Will that they said sea ice area is the same as 1979.

"It has often and confidently been asserted, that man's origin can never be known. But ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science."
Charles Darwin, whose 200th birthday is coming up on February 12.

"The thing I like most is it says you can get these complex traits evolving by a combination of unlikely events. That's just what creationists say can't happen."
evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, commenting on an experiment that was able to observe a mutation that changed one species into another.

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