Our group largely sat out the fight for/against HR 5036, Rep. Rush Holt's (D-NJ) "“Emergency Assistance for Secure Elections Act.”  Repeated experience has shown that lobbying efforts will not result in democratic electoral reform. Which is hardly a surprise. Why, after all, would we expect legislators who owe their status, income, and identity to the current system, however corrupt, to enact laws undermining that system? In the absence of a vast public groundswell, all the pressure points are applied by special interests.

And so it goes with Holt. Fervent Holt bill supporter, Kathy Dopp, who worked very hard to try to ensure adequate auditing provisions, reports on the results. 

From: Kathy Dopp <kathy.dopp@gmail.com>
Date: Sun, Mar 30, 2008 at 10:15 PM
Subject: HR 5036 Auditing provisions Gutted - No longer requires a valid check of unofficial results

Bad news.

I sat down to read HR5036 and found that its auditing provisions have been gutted and no longer require a valid audit of election results.

While the bill still has many excellent provisions, the two committees (House Admin and Technology) seem to have destroyed its election auditing provisions so that the bill no longer requires jurisdictions to conduct any valid checks of the accuracy of the unofficial vote counts in order to obtain funding for their "audits".

I.e. Now the invalid auditing procedures of Utah and Colorado (for two examples) which do not actually check the accuracy of the unofficial vote counts are now funded by the latest version HR5036 - providing no incentive to conduct valid audits.

For instance:

1. the audit units sampled are no longer required to be selected from a publicly released report of all auditable units (precincts or other units) i.e. no auditable public report of vote counts is required so that the audits can be trivially scammed like occurs now in Utah and several states which claim to do audits today but really never compare the results of manual counts with actual reported unofficial tallies, and

2. the States are now allowed to define virtually everything as relates to their audits, and

3. the audit report produced after the audit is also not even required to consist of a list of all unofficial vote counts used to tally the unofficial votes, the manual counts and the discrepancies i.e. the infamous EAC is now allowed to specify the format for the audit report and we know how incompetent the commissioners have been so far, and

4. there is a giant loophole now in the way absentee and provisional ballots are audited that allows precincts to be selected for election day and early audits - and then 12 days or so later, the same precincts can be used to audit absentee and provisional ballots so that the precincts for auditing even though these precincts would be known prior to even counting those provisional and absentee ballots.

This allows all provisional and absentee ballots to be miscounted in all unaudited precincts with complete impunity.  (These two stage audits are absolutely required by this bill's provisions because the bill requires that the audit must begin within 48 hours of polls closing and not all absentee and provisional ballots can be counted by then in most jurisdictions.) Needless to say, allowing all but 2% of all absentee and provisional ballots to be miscounted with impunity allows virtually any election to be fraudulently stolen.

5. The audit amount has been reduced from 3% to a sometimes insufficient overall 2%.

I could go on.  Many of the formerly strong audit provisions of the original HR5036 have been gutted in this version to permit sham auditsv which do almost nothing to ensure the accuracy of the November 2008 election outcomes.

This is very disappointing.

In addition there is an entire section (Section 2b) which has been added (and should be removed) that now funds the addition of ballot printers to DRE machines.

The funding of paper ballots, nontabulating ballot printers, emergency paper ballots, and manual counts is good, but the rest of the bill seems to have been severely gutted in committee.

This is by far the worst version of all the bills with respect to checking the accuracy of election results, including all the various versions of HR811 and HR5036.

Very sad.
Kathy

I’ve been in California this past week, mostly to participate in a small forum that filmmaker Dorothy Fadiman organized among a diverse group of election integrity activists, researchers and opinion leaders. Columnist Bob Koehler of Tribune Media Services also participated:

From: Koehler, Bob [mailto:BKoehler@Tribune.com]
Sent: Wednesday, March 26, 2008 2:38 PM
Subject: keep the republic

ROBERT C. KOEHLER

For release 3/27/08

KEEP THE REPUBLIC

By Robert C. Koehler

Tribune Media Services

The ground feels a little soft, but we’re going to stand it.

Premise one: Having a fair election — all votes counted, all who are eligible and want to vote allowed to vote — is far, far more important, even in 2008, than who wins.

Premise two: Fair elections are not a given. They never have been, but things are worse now than ever before because of a perfect storm, you might say, of factors that have converged in the new millennium: officialdom’s seduction by unsafe, high-tech voting systems; the seizure of power by a party of ruthless true believers who feel entitled to rule and will do anything to win; a polite, confused opposition party that won’t make a stink about raw injustice; and an arrogantly complacent media embedded in the political and economic status quo.

The result: Benjamin Franklin’s worst nightmare.

“Well, Doctor, what have we got — a Republic or a Monarchy?”

“A Republic, if you can keep it.”

As Franklin, who uttered those words in answer to a citizen’s query as he left the final session of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, saw with clarity, we don’t have an easy form of government. Rather, it’s a complex, unstable yoking of disparate forces, many with a blind urge to dominate. Only by keeping them in relative check do we maintain our relative freedom and, most importantly, our right to participate in our macro-destiny: that is, to have a say in, to help determine, the country’s direction.

Without an intense degree of citizen involvement at the structural level — down there amid the gears and cogs of universal enfranchisement — our government will soon default to something far simpler: one that is of, by and for whoever seizes power.

I know, just thinking about this is terrifying. The stakes are too high. We have no context for contemplating the possibility that the United States is anything but “the world’s greatest democracy,” which surely explains why most of the media, including a phalanx of progressive publications that ought to be on hair-trigger alert about vote suppression and manipulation, have ignored or dismissed the glaring danger signals.

These signals include, among much else: obscenely long lines in many African-American and student precincts on Election Day 2004; bogus voter challenges and purges; vote-flipping (“I pressed Kerry and Bush lit up”), weird vote totals (more votes counted than cast, undervote totals that defy common sense) and an array of other “glitches” in precincts that use electronic voting machines; and huge discrepancies between exit poll results and vote totals that, in other parts of the world, would instantly cast doubt on the validity of the election.

It all comes down to the first few words of Dorothy Fadiman’s about-to-be-released documentary, “Stealing America: Vote by Vote,” spoken by investigative journalist Greg Palast: “The nasty little secret of American democracy is that not all the votes get counted.”

It has been my privilege to be part of two new documentaries — Fadiman’s, and David Earnhardt’s “Uncounted: The New Math of American Elections,” which is currently in theaters and available on DVD — that focus on the disquieting irregularities (see above) of the 2004 and subsequent elections.

Both movies, by presenting the issue in Americans’ medium of choice, and by creating a context for the possibility of election fraud that transcends Chicken Little and reminds viewers of our nation’s long history of citizen struggle and vigilance, raise the hope that today’s crisis will resonate with a large segment of the public and lead to widespread anger and awareness . . . and maybe something that doesn’t go away. A demand for paper ballots, perhaps. A citizens’ movement.

Recognizing and capturing that “something” was, I think, the unstated goal of a recent two-day brainstorming session I attended in Palo Alto, Calif., that Fadiman organized among people long involved in the issue.

After a lot of anguished back-and-forth, we came out of it with a mission statement that was almost Zenlike in its quiet resonance: To encourage citizen ownership of transparent, participatory democracy.

The vision here, coiled in each word, is of a nation full of election monitors, demanding answers, standing tough when they are rebuffed or told, no, this information is not public (computer voting-machine source codes, exit poll data); or no, the public isn’t allowed here (vote-count premises); or sorry, we didn’t anticipate such a large turnout (not enough voting machines, not enough ballots).

“This really is the serious business of our lives,” said Ion Sancho, election supervisor of Leon County, Fla., a fair-elections hero and one of the participants. “My goal is waking people up. My tactic is to put myself in the middle of the road and say” — to anyone who would suppress or interfere with the vote — “hey, you’re going to have to hit me.”

These are just words unless you sign on with your life.

- - -

Robert Koehler, an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist, is an editor at Tribune Media Services and nationally syndicated writer. You can respond to this column at bkoehler@tribune.com or visit his Web site at commonwonders.com.

© 2008 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Thanks to Jon Deutsch for alerting us to this. As pointed out in SlashDot (a reputable source of information to the technical community), Sequoia seems to be claiming that no one can make a report about their equipment without their permission.   

Legal threat thwarts Union voting-machine check

Union County (NJ) backed off its plans yesterday to have a Princeton University computer scientist inspect electronic voting machines where errors occurred in the presidential primary tallies.

Sequoia Voting Systems, the manufacturer of New Jersey's voting machines, threatened to sue the county if it allowed Princeton professor Edward Felten to conduct an independent study of the machines.

A Sequoia executive, Edwin Smith, put Union County Clerk Joanne Rajoppi on notice that an independent analysis would violate the licensing agreement between his firm and the county. In a terse two-page letter, Smith also argued the voting machine software is a Sequoia "trade secret" and cannot be handed over to any third-party.

Last week, Rajoppi had persuaded the statewide clerks' association to hire Felten, who made national headlines two years ago when he demonstrated how a computer virus could alter the result on Diebold voting machines.

The Constitutional Officers Association of New Jersey called for the independent review to insure the integrity of the election process. Sequoia maintained the errors, which were documented in at least five counties, occurred due to mistakes by poll workers.

The firm, which is based in Colorado, examined machines in Middlesex County, and concluded that poll workers had pushed the wrong buttons on the control panels, resulting in errors in the numbers of ballots cast. But officials found it odd that such an error never occurred before and the clerks' association wanted further testing.

On the advice of the county's attorneys, however, Rajoppi said she must forgo all plans for independent analysis.

"We're not going to proceed and invite a lawsuit," said Norman Albert, first deputy counsel in Union County.

Union County's stance upset Penny Venetis, a Rutgers University law professor representing a group of activists trying to have electronic voting machines scrapped.

"We shouldn't have a corporation dictating how elections are run in the state," Venetis said. "If an elected official believes there was an anomaly and the matter has to be investigated, then the official should be able to consult with computer experts without interference."

Rajoppi uncovered the error when she was double-checking the results from the Feb. 5 presidential primary. On a handful of machines, she found the number of Democrats and Republicans casting ballots did not match when the cartridge printouts from the machines were compared against the paper-tape backup inside the devices. Bergen, Gloucester, Middlesex and Mercer county officials later identified the same errors.

The clerk said yesterday she is "disappointed we cannot go forward with some type of independent study."

John Carbone, an attorney representing the constitutional officers' association, said, "We don't have access to the machines, so we can't do anything."

While the county clerks must certify the election results, the voting machines are controlled and maintained by the board of elections in each county.

Rajoppi said she is concerned over the upcoming June primary where council races and party committee seats are often decided by one or two votes. She said the situation could result in lawsuits from candidates in close elections.

The Union County clerk said she intends to write to the state Attorney General's Office again in hopes of convincing the state to call for an independent study. The attorney general oversees the election process.

David Wald, a spokesman for the Attorney General's Office, said at least 10 counties, including the five where errors were found, have been trying to verify the explanation Sequoia gave that poll workers caused the errors. He said Sequoia recommended putting a hard plastic cover over the control panel to prevent poll workers from inadvertently hitting buttons that could cause the problem.

Diane C. Walsh may be reached at dwalsh@starledger.com or at (732) 404-8087.http://www.nj.com/news/ledger/jersey/index.ssf?/base/news-9/1205818545270600.xml&coll=1

Hello all. I’m giving a presentation tomorrow afternoon (Tuesday 1:30 pm) to an AP Government class (that is, a class of high school seniors taking a course for college credit). It's a new theme -- asking students to understand US political myth, and some new material, especially on Why it Matters and What to do. Any comments would be most appreciated.

Here is some of the material I'll cover:  US Political Myth - presentation 00.doc (49.50 kb)

The basic theme is seeing through the myths. Here are my slides, AP Gov class 080318.ppt (1.48 mb) although i don't really plan to use them. My plan is to just give a 10 minute talk on elections Can be Stolen, Have Been, and Will continue to be. And just fly through the slides to show them that there is an abundance of evidence and analysis behind these conclusions, even though we don't have time to go into that in this short session. Rather, I'll try to focus on the why this is important, and leave time for What Students can do. These final slides, 57-63, are new, and i've been uncomfortable before talking about this. So any comments here would be esepcailly helpful.

Thanks, Steve

* If you just want these last few slides, here they are:  AP Gov class 080318 WhatMatter What To Do.ppt (56.00 kb)

* Handed out by the teacher in advance of my visit: RFK Was the 2004 Election Stolen w pics.pdf (1.31 mb), Freeman & Bleifuss (2006) Preface.pdf (174.91 kb)

According to the NY Times, (Breaking News 9:25 AM ET): NY Governor Elliot Spitzer is expected to resign this morning.

Even if he is only contemplating resignation, the response is so far out of proportion to the crime that the only serious question is: What are we not being told?

The “shock” and demands for his resignation would have been embarrassing blow-hard buffoonery in a Victorian society. In ours, it's also a fatuous reminder of just how irrelevant the public interest, indeed the public, is to journalists, public officials, and the whole of politics. With its incredibly misleading headline and story leads on the issue, the NY Times shows its colors, in what must be some serious Democratic divide.

Of course Spitzer is a hyporcrite (he has prosecuted such "rings"), but he even did it the "right way," very discreetly, not like Clinton. 

So who reported him and why?

Harpers reports that during the Bush Administration, the Justice Department has opened 5.6 cases against Democrats for every one involving a Republican, and that even cases opened against Republicans are in fact only part of a broader pattern of going after Democrats. About this case, Scott Horton of Harpers writes:

The prosecution is opened under the White-Slave Traffic Act of 1910. You read that correctly. The statute itself is highly disreputable, and most of the high-profile cases brought under it were politically motivated and grossly abusive. Here are a few:

• Heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson was the first man prosecuted under the act — for having an affair with Lucille Cameron, whom he later married. The prosecution was manifestly an effort “to get” Johnson, who at the time was the most famous African-American. (All of this is developed well in Ken Burns’s film “Unforgiveable Blackness”).
• University of Chicago sociologist William I. Thomas was prosecuted for having an affair with an officer’s wife in France. Thomas was targeted because of his Bohemian social and his radical political views.
• In 1944 Charles Chaplin was prosecuted for having an affair with actress Joan Barry. The prosecution again provided cover for a politically motivated effort to drive Chaplin out of the country.
• Canadian author Elizabeth Smart was arrested and charged in 1940 while crossing the border with the British poet George Barker.

This is clearly a politically motivated attack. Government investigators are obligated to investigate crimes, not people, but according to According to ABC news, the whole investigation of the prostitution ring itself was triggered by an investigation of Spitzer:

The federal investigation of a New York prostitution ring was triggered by Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s suspicious money transfers, initially leading agents to believe Spitzer was hiding bribes, according to federal officials. It was only months later that the IRS and the FBI determined that Spitzer wasn’t hiding bribes but payments to a company called QAT, what prosecutors say is a prostitution operation operating under the name of the Emperors Club. …

The suspicious financial activity was initially reported by a bank to the IRS which, under direction from the Justice Department, brought in the FBI’s Public Corruption Squad. “We had no interest at all in the prostitution ring until the thing with Spitzer led us to learn about it,” said one Justice Department official.

The New York Times alert (and corresponding headline and article lead),

> The New York Times
> Monday, March 10, 2008 -- 1:57 PM ET
> -----
> Spitzer Is Linked to Prostitution Ring
> 
> Gov. Eliot Spitzer has informed his most senior administration
> officials that he had been involved in a prostitution ring, an
> administration official said this morning.

is an affront to journalism. "Linked to"? What, was he running it? How many such affronts can the Times commit and still maintain their status as the nation's leading newspaper? It's a sorry state in which not one of hundreds of supposedly free press newspapers can offer a powerful alternative perspective and serious competition.

"Who wanted Spitzer out?" and "Why?" are the questions that journalists and investigators ought to be asking. Spitzer was likely doing something right, going after someone powerful. And had to be brought down one way or another.

                Last week, as I was watching what could be watched of the crucial March 4^th Democratic primary elections and downloading for analysis such data as was made publicly available, a hilarious scene kept coming unbidden to mind. The scene is from Guys and Dolls and it takes place somewhere in the sewer system of New York, where Nathan Detroit’s floating crap game has found a temporary and rather sarcastically colorful and well-lit home.

                Big Julie, a scar-faced high-roller in from Chicago to “shoot crap,” is down on his luck and out about 10 Gs.  Nathan (Frank Sinatra) says it’s time to go home, but Big Julie is not the kind of mug to go gentle into that good night without his 10 Gs, plus interest. So he challenges Nathan to roll him personally for the dough and Nathan (putting up cash to Big Julie’s “marker” and, to narrow down his choices somewhat, at gunpoint) accepts.  

Big Julie, to change his luck, is going to use his own dice. The trouble (for Nathan at least) is that the dice don’t have any spots; they’ve worn off.  But, not to worry, Big Julie remembers where they were. 

The results (“Hah! Seven! I win. . . .Hah! Snake Eyes! You lose”) are, shall we say, predictable—though Nathan does manage to win when Big Julie rolls him for $1—and Nathan kisses off  his last few grand with a resignation worthy of Gore, Kerry, a host of other candidates who would not appear on Karl Rove’s A-list, and the Democratic Party as a whole.

                The scene is hilarious, but Tuesday night was not. Nor was New Hampshire, nor 2006, nor 2004, nor 2002, nor any election in America since the vote counting went wholesale into the darkness of proprietary cyberspace and the spots were rubbed off the dice, leaving the equipment vendors, with their avowed partisan proclivities and their secret computer code and memory cards, to tell us who won (“Hah! Seven!”) and who lost (“Hah! Snake Eyes!”).

                Before proceeding to analyze yet another evening of bizarre numerical happenings, I want to suggest that we look at some of the occurrences in our New Millenium elections as if they hailed not from our own beloved Beacon of Democracy but from Vladimir Putin’s Russia—from a place, that is, where we have learned to discount the official story as the typical cover job of a pretend democracy. We will find—as we might in Russia, or Kenya, or Ukraine—a parade of numbers and patterns that don’t add up, don’t fit the official story. And all we have to assure us that our democracy and our nation are not being subverted are code and memory cards we are never permitted to see, providing  us with very shiny and precise-looking vote totals that may or may not have any correspondence to the votes actually cast—in other words, a pair of Big Julie’s blank dice.

                The Democratic primaries held Tuesday shared with the New Hampshire primary the distinction of being do-or-die contests for candidate Clinton. It was effectively conceded by the Clinton campaign that losses back in New Hampshire in January and in Texas or Ohio last week would have spelled curtains for her candidacy. There were four primaries held on March 4th and, leaving aside the delegate-poor and noncompetitive contest in Vermont, there  were New Hampshiresque—which is to say somewhere between suspicious and stunning—developments in each of them.  Taking them in alphabetical order:

                The numerical story in Ohio was the old familiar one of exit poll-vote count disparity. Without examining any specific incidents or allegations of foul play, we are confronted with an initial exit poll (EP), posted shortly after poll closing, showing a 3% Clinton margin (51.1% to 47.9%) and a final votecount (VC) showing a 10% Clinton margin (54.3% to 44.0%). This disparity is outside the EP’s margin of error (MOE) even allowing for the “cluster effect.”  The VC is, moreover, a significant departure from a compendium of pre-election polls (PEP), showing Obama gaining ground and approaching equality (http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/election2008/poll-tracker.htm).  

Viewed in isolation, Ohio could be explained as a late Clinton surge that caught the pre-election pollsters on the hop. Primaries are indeed more fluid and volatile as elections go, and there is the crossover voting phenomenon to be considered. But Ohio takes its place among a parade of contests in important states in the 2008 nomination battle in which a substantial EP-VC disparity worked in Clinton’s favor: New Hampshire obviously, but also Massachusetts, Illinois, New Jersey, Arkansas, Arizona, California, and now Ohio and, as we will see, Texas and Rhode Island. In contrast, we have observed no battleground states with an EP-VC disparity working in the other direction. As anyone who has spent any time in the countryside of Ohio (or NH, MA, IL, NJ, AR, AZ, CA, TX or RI for that matter) can tell you, when all the cows are facing in one direction, there’s a reason for it (it’s going to rain).

Given the directionality of the disparities, it is also worth noting that we have received no assurance that the first posted EP of the evening has not in fact already been partially adjusted toward conformity with the incoming VC, a process which continues in several steps throughout the evening until virtual full conformity with the final VC is achieved. Edison/Mitofsky, which performs and processes the EPs for the media consortium known as the National Election Pool (NEP), acknowledges that the adjustment process begins with “Quick Counts,” which are available from selected precincts and early voting tabulations immediately upon poll closing. Especially in instances where the first EP posting is delayed by more than a few minutes after poll closing, there exists ample opportunity to begin the process of adjustment, which of course has the effect of minimizing the observable EP-VC disparity.

                There’s not a whole lot to say about Rhode Island other than if exit polls are this far off, why bother exit polling? And if vote counts are this far off, why bother voting?

The EP-VC disparity in RI was 14.1%; that is, the exit poll posted after poll closing had Clinton up 4.1% (51.6% to 47.5%) over Obama, and the official vote count had Clinton up 18.2% (58.8% to 40.6%). This is far outside the most generous calculation of the EP's MOE, and on a par with the similarly perplexing 15.5% disparity favoring Clinton in Massachusetts on Super Tuesday.

                Now since EP-VC disparities of suspect, if not outright stunning, magnitude have become commonplace in the era of computerized vote tabulation, it is clear enough that something is not happening according to Hoyle. What that something is has been settled on by the mainstream media and all analysts under contract to such: since we dare not question the vote counts, the exit polls must be off again. . .and again . . .and again. In fact it is now established that the exit polls are always off (recently joined by the pre-election polls, especially in the wake of New Hampshire 2008) and no longer worthy of our attention, because they just keep on disagreeing with the vote counts—pretty much always in the same direction—and we dare not question the vote counts. . . .

And so the circular argument goes, by now repeated with enough reassuring smiles to take on the polished finish of fact. Except if they really cared to find the truth, the logic of the denialists would puncture, like an overinflated balloon, with one prick of a pin, and all would agree that without first investigating and verifying the vote counts—without, that is, putting the spots back on the dice—no one can conclude that all those polls are “off.”

                The striking phenomenon in Texas was the magnitude not of the EP-VC disparity (it was a relatively modest 4%, in the usual direction, but withheld from the public until more than an hour after poll closing, allowing ample opportunity for extensive adjustment toward conformity with the in-coming vote count) but of the early voting (EV) vs. at-precinct voting (APV) disparity, which was of staggering proportions that at first seemed to defy explanation.

                The earliest returns posted on network websites showed a total of approximately 740,000 votes cast in the Democratic primary with 0% of precincts reporting. This then was the early/absentee vote tally, which in most states is pre-counted and available for release immediately upon poll closing. Obama’s margin at that point was 436,034 to 303,276 for Clinton, or 59% to 41%. By the time the counting was done the next morning, Clinton had a 51% to 48% victory, a whopping 21% margin reversal.

                What was even more stunning, however, was that Clinton had caught up to Obama before even a quarter of the precincts had reported: with 23% of the precincts reporting (and almost exactly  as many APVs as EVs counted), the count stood at Obama 711,759, Clinton 711,183 (49%-49%), a dead heat. To catch up so quickly and produce those numbers, Clinton had to win the APV in that quarter of Texas precincts by 59% to 41%, an exact reversal of the EV Obama landslide. Judging by the county-level results posted, that APV Clinton landslide came predominantly from the rural areas of the state.

                So what we saw until that point were essentially equal and opposite landslides, as if we were observing two not only separate but radically divergent electorates, one that chose to vote early and one that chose to go to the polls. Ordinarily explanations for a divergence of such magnitude, particularly in intra-party contests, would be found only in such time-specific phenomena as late-breaking gaffes, scandals, debate blowouts and the like. But there was no such occurrence.  The early voting period inTexas extends from 17 days to 4 days prior to the election. During this period the average of 13 pre-election polls was Clinton 45.6%, Obama 46.7%. In the three days before the election, after the early voting period had ended, the average of eight polls was Clinton 46.8%, Obama 46.1%, a very modest change and certainly not the 21% mega-reversal displayed by the EV and APV vote counts.

                Since ordinary political dynamics fail to explain the bizarre Texas numbers, we look to the extraordinary. There has been much made in the March 4^th post-mortem period of the impact of crossover voting, specifically Republican voters exhorted by Rush Limbaugh and other lesser-known leaders, to hold their noses and vote in the Democratic primary for Clinton.

                To digress just a bit from our analysis of the March 4 numbers, the Limbaugh appeal brings into the open the motive and strategy that go a long way to explaining virtually all of the bizarre disparities and anomalies that have beset at least the Democratic side of the 2008 primary season.  It has for some time been quite apparent that the goal of Republican strategists, finally exposed in Limbaugh’s rather desperate public exhortation, has been to make sure the Democratic nomination process is as drawn out, bitter, procedural, and ugly as possible, culminating in a brutal battle involving superdelegates and credentialing, one that will turn off (to say the least) the public and leave festering wounds in the party itself. If the goal had been simply to have Clinton win, that could have been easily achieved through cross-over voting and/or rigging--remember that Obama won something like a dozen contests in a row, most of which could have been pushed far enough in Clinton's favor to give her a decisive delegate edge.  This wasn't done. What was done instead was to revive Clinton's campaign (it appears by rigging) when she was on life-support in NH, keep her within striking distance on Super Tuesday, let Obama gain popularity and momentum, then revive Clinton again on March 4, just when the Democrats nationally were getting comfortable with Obama as their candidate (again see http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/election2008/poll-tracker.htm).  Now it will get really ugly and whoever emerges as the nominee will have been undermined enough--so the story will go, anyway--to manage to 'lose' to McCain; i.e., either Clinton or Obama will have accumulated plenty of plausible defeatability. And the story of Democratic 'civil war' (as the MSM is already gleefully framing it) and disarray may even be good enough to 'explain' how they failed to capitalize on the enormous structural and dynamic advantages they hold on the Congressional side, setting the stage for currently unimaginable Republican gains in Congress in November.

Perhaps crossover voting accounts for both the magnitude of the Clinton victory in Ohio and the miraculous reversal of Obama’s early voting margin in Texas. Or perhaps it was crossover voting and some computer voting (that is, voting by computers) for good measure. Is there any way to know?  It does not take all that much imagination to see Clinton’s successive resuscitations as Karl Rove's specialty of the house, his apotheosis as conscienceless strategist: to go into 'retirement' and apparent seclusion, give scholarly and apparently appealing speeches from above it all on the lecture circuit, and meanwhile find the exact alchemic strategy to turn a pile of rusty Republican political scrap metal into gold. But strategy is one thing and rigging something else entirely. Or is it?

Of course a “fit” is not tantamount to proof. But when you have a multi-year parade of numerical anomalies combined with unexpected outcomes that a brilliant and apparently conscienceless strategist would bring about if he could, must it not at least shake the blind faith that Americans, cued by their opinion leaders, continue to place in the honesty of their black-box electoral system? Isn’t it time to stop rolling for our nation’s future with blank dice?

CNN reports: 

"With 100 percent of precincts reporting, and 99.7 percent of the vote counted, Medvedev -- President Vladimir Putin's hand-picked successor -- held 70.2 percent of the vote, the Central Election Commission reported.

But Golos, a Russian vote monitoring group, says it has received allegations of multiple voting papers, falsified names on electoral registers, the stuffing of ballot boxes and electoral observers and media being barred from polling stations, AP added.

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the continent's top election watchdog, refused to monitor the balloting because of what it called severe restrictions on its observers by the Russian government. Putin insisted last month that Russia has "fully implemented" all of its commitments to the OSCE."

The Moscow Times explains how some of the fraud is perpetrated:

"Most fraud occurs when election officials compile lists of voters, including people who are not eligible to vote in their district," Golos head Lilia Shibanova said.

Observers at polling stations simply cannot distinguish repeat voters -- who visit numerous polling stations to cast ballots for a candidate backed by authorities -- from real voters, Shibanova said."

The Moscow Times piece contains more examples of fraud and intimidation, and is worth a look.

The leader of Russia's Communist Party has announced he will go to court to contest the election results.