Supremes encourage election rigging

Allowing corporations to engage in elections, and now allowing gerrymandering.

A deeply divided Supreme Court ruled Thursday that federal courts may not intervene to block even the most partisan election maps drawn by state lawmakers, a decision that allows such gerrymandering to continue unabated.

The 5-4 opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts and joined by the court's other conservatives said partisan election maps drawn by North Carolina Republicans and Maryland Democrats are constitutional despite their one-sided nature.

[...]

[C]hief justice [John Roberts] said the challengers from North Carolina and Maryland asked for “an unprecedented expansion of judicial power” that would have broad consequences. “There will be no end to the litigation,” he said.

Associate Justice Elena Kagan decried the ruling on behalf of the court's four liberals. "Of all the times to abandon the court's duty to declare the law, this was not the one," she said. "The practices challenged in these cases imperil our system of government."

[...]

In relatively "purple" North Carolina, where President Barack Obama won in 2008 but lost in 2012, Republicans drew themselves a 10-3 advantage in Congress. In more liberal Maryland, Democrats gave their party a disproportionate, 7-1 majority.

The court had declined to intervene in similar cases five times before, most recently last year, when the justices refused to decide partisan gerrymandering challenges in Wisconsin and Maryland.

[...]

For the past decade, Democrats have been the bigger losers in gerrymandering fights. Republicans seized power in many states in the 2010 midterm elections, giving them control over the redistricting process. Democrats are at a disadvantage entering the 2020 elections, which will determine who draws the next decade's state and congressional lines in most states.

  USA Today

Because Republicans can't win if they don't cheat.





...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

When you think he can't get any worse - Part 2

Bingo.  Listen up.

Not to mention what he might do if he's poised to lose.  I should say "when".


...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Coming soon to a country near you

Senate bill to require paper ballots

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and a group of 12 other senators introduced a bill Wednesday to mandate the use of paper ballots in U.S. elections and also ban all internet, Wi-Fi and mobile connections to voting machines in order to limit the potential for cyber interference.

The legislation would also give the Department of Homeland Security the power to set minimum cybersecurity standards for U.S. voting machines, authorize a one-time $500 million grant program for states to buy ballot-scanning machines to count paper ballots and require states to conduct risk-limiting audits of all federal elections in order to detect any cyber hacks.

  The Hill

The Republicans have blocked every other election protection bill introduced. No need to imaginge they'll go for this one.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Reminder to Texans - and everybody on voting machines

Check them carefully.

Voting machines are unreliable

Let me guess which party.



Whatever.

UPDATE:

Voters "misled" in Missouri

Because they can't win if they don't cheat.

The Missouri Republican party sent mailers with incorrect information about due dates for absentee ballots to 10,000 voters in the state, the party’s executive director said Friday.

Ray Bozarth acknowledged the mistake to The Kansas City Star on Friday, saying that a miscommunication between the party and its vendor caused the false info to be printed on the mailers. Bozarth did not name the vendor or explain how the miscommunication occurred.

Bozarth told the newspaper that the group sent mail-in ballots to likely Republican voters as part of its efforts to get people to vote in this year's midterm elections.

A photo of the mailer that was shared with The Star showed that the mailer encouraged individuals to return their mail-in ballots “today.” It also said the ballots were required to be returned by 5 p.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 30, according to the paper.

The newspaper notes that ballots are due on Election Day and that requests for mail-in ballots aren't required until Oct. 31.

  The Hill

Obviously that was no mistake. They just figured they could get away with it.  Now that they got caught, they're going to send out new mailers.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Florida still fucking with voters

This state is probably the number one voter suppression and vote rigging state in the union, and has been for at least 20 years.



...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Rigging an election - Part 2

In a website published before r00tz Asylum, the youth section of Def Con, organizers indicated that students would attempt to hack exact duplicates of state election websites, referring to them as “replicas” or “exact clones.” (The language was scaled back after the conference to simply say “clones.”)

Instead, students were working with look-alikes created for the event that had vulnerabilities they were coached to find. Organizers provided them with cheat sheets, and adults walked the students through the challenges they would encounter.

  ProPublica

I hate it when people do this kind of shit. We really do have serious problems with our election systems, including the machines. Don't give people a way to dismiss that by phonying up something. Assholes.

I posted about this story from DefCon earlier, and I've updated it to include this correction.  The rest of that post about machine vulnerabilities to rigging still stands.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Rigging an election

Now that we think Russia hacks into our elections, many of us are upset.  Maybe it's time we looked at our voting system itself and its liabilities.  The idea of voting machine vulnerability has been around as long as voting machines, and other than a few voices in the wilderness, we've simply gone along with the program.

Sometime read Greg Palast's 2002 book, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, if you haven't.  Among other things, it deals with the 2000 Florida election scams purging voter rolls and using Diebold machines.

Anybody remember this 2004 testimony by a computer programmer who says Republican Congressman Tom Feeney asked him to create a program to rig machines in Florida in 2000 to be able to change results, and explaining how to do it?

The programmer, Clint Curtis, says that one reason to suspect voting machine rigging is if the exit polls are very different from the election results, something that was true of Trump's victory.  And the excuse for that, which I thought was pretty darn lame at the time, was that people didn't want to admit they voted for Trump.  

Of course there are other problems with our system, including gerrymandered districts, super delegates, restrictive debate requirements, winner-take-all, and campaign finance. 

Maybe we're focusing too much on who's the candidate, and not paying enough attention to the system itself.  

Not maybe. 

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 8/27:

In a website published before r00tz Asylum, the youth section of Def Con, organizers indicated that students would attempt to hack exact duplicates of state election websites, referring to them as “replicas” or “exact clones.” (The language was scaled back after the conference to simply say “clones.”)

Instead, students were working with look-alikes created for the event that had vulnerabilities they were coached to find. Organizers provided them with cheat sheets, and adults walked the students through the challenges they would encounter.

  ProPublica

I hate it when people do this kind of shit. We really do have serious problems with our election systems, including the machines. Don't give people a way to dismiss that by phonying up something. Assholes.