Marcy Wheeler says succinctly one of the things I’ve been yammering about since last November but apparently not connecting either with Democrats or the Democratic establishment:
That’s all the more true given the investment Democrats have made in the Russian narrative. If Russia tampering with our vote is so important, then why is Republicans doing the same, much more aggressively and effectively, not worth the same effort?
Marcy Wheeler, emptywheel: Democrats need a plan for voter protection
It is the fact that so many people are so complacent about Republicans stealing votes and so worked up about whatever it is the Russians actually did do, if our benighted intelligence agencies ever deign to tell us peons, that is the important reality of 2016. That it is getting worse even as Chuck Schumer drones on and Nancy Pelosi plans for 2018 is beyond worrying.
Kris Kobach seeks to have state secretaries of state and boards of elections provide him with a database of personal information on every registered voter in the US, including the last four digits of their Social Security number. Welcome to Stasiland. I’m surprised he didn’t ask that state vital records cross-link to each voter’s mother’s maiden name.
Now I’m going to pull an Arthur Gilroy on ya: Wake the fuck up!!!
at the moment, both major parties are operating from a myth. Trumpsters believe that five million invalid votes were cast for HRC, and Clintonistas believe that Putin/Russia hacked into county and state election systems to give Trump a win in several states.
Good on the state SOS telling Kobach to go fly a kite. He knows that there’s no legal basis for his demand. Not that the state SOS generally has custody of and maintains those records.
In regard to the Voter Integrity Commission request, I especially enjoyed the response from Mississippi’s SOS Delbert Hosemann: “They can go jump in the Gulf of Mexico and Mississippi is a great State to launch from.”
Digby. From the Mika & Joe spat with Trump it’s clearer that:
Some quibbles:
Correct that Trump is managing his personal PR, but it’s more than that. He’s also massaging his own ego that can’t handle objective reality about him. Thus, he went ballistic from the reports of his smaller inauguration crowd size.
On: He doesn’t seem to know that this [personal PR management] is not the job of president. Pre-1953, it was part of the job, and not all subsequent presidents fully relinquished it to the staff/associates pro-team.
WRT – We’ve been lucky to have had mostly reasonably sane, if not entirely competent, presidents. I don’t know if we’ve ever had one who was both mentally unstable and intellectually limited like this one.. Since Reagan and GWB did do any of their own PR management and were only seen in stage managed appearances, evidence to support that claim doesn’t exist. It may be more correct to state that We’ve been lucky to have had mostly reasonably sane and/or not entirely incompetent senior WH teams. Some less sane than others and some more incompetent than others. However, probably fair to say that the aggregate level of competence in the Trump administration is low enough that it may be unique. Crazier? Tough call.
Finally on And the dynamic that put him in the office…, she misses the mark. Crass mass marketing, celebrity idealization, and commercialism put him in office. Two products: one sold a lot better in CA and therefore, in the aggregate and nationally better than the other. But one sold better in several key markets.
You haven’t seen at close hand the shenanigans that have been appearing in election administration during the past cycle.
This is the first time in forever that my county (whose election administrator is effectively GOP in a Democratic County) has had a complaint about election integrity. This last year there was not only a complaint but and investigation into possible election tampering in which a delay (expected usually) had been triggered by several foul-ups in the automated voter registration system accessed online from polling places. Fortunately someone insisted on paper backups at the polling places.
No doubt none of the caged voters the GOP identified and tried to purged discovered when they arrived that they were ineligible to vote and had to fill out a provisional ballot.
Do that enough places. Assert no major problems in enough places and you subtly flip the geography. It is possible to do that by, uh, 30,000 votes in four strategic states. Suppress the blue areas; suppress the blue voters in the red areas. Don’t even have to change the precinct totals. Or rig the voting machines.
And the assumption so far is that there are no GOP-affiliated consulting firms that can hack voter registration offices. An no possibility of hiding that hacking through international spoofing.
Attribution of hacking is difficult. So is finding credible evidence of voter suppression. Nonetheless, the Voter Integrity Project is wanting to get personal identifiable information on individual voters, that in their hands would if leaked be subject to identity theft (selective identity theft?), financial attacks, and yet more personally identified information in the dark side of the web.
Assuming a clean win on a better marginal marketing plan sorta is giving plaudits for weirdness after massive failure in conventional campaign terms (the popular vote). Yes, too many high-paid consultants act as delivering the popular in and of itself ripples down to the electoral vote. They might still be right, but how can we know given the attacks of the fair election infrastructure of the US.
“There’s a reason no other country in the world has adopted it.”
Russia. And most if not all Parliamentary systems. PM has total power as long as he keeps his party supporting him. USA has checks. They make it hard to do things, but sometimes you want it to be hard to do things. McConnell is removing a lot of the checks.
Put away the jr/sr high school government textbook. That’s not how it works. There are still some checks on Congress and the POTUS by the federal courts — usually very slow — but at the SC level more checks on Democrats than Republicans.
Congress has long since ceded most of its power to the WH. All they seem to have retained is the power to hold partisan show trials they call hearings.
Heather Digby Parton makes you say “What Digby sez” again:
Actually it is not Digby but my fellow North Carolinian, Tom Sullivan.
Read his post here. Very clarifying:
Tom Sullivan, Hullabaloo: “Go jump in the Gulf of Mexico”
Documented? I’d like to see links to the documentation. Not allegations, documentation.
Sullivan is talking about the usual documentation cited. There was interference; I’m waiting for evidence that it was Russian instead on some Trump-boosting contractor.
And I’m talking specifically about “Russian interference”.
So this is something I actually know about, having been part of legal protection efforts for over a decade.
And when I read stuff like this, my reaction is always the same: Win the election.
What I and others do certainly can help. Asking questions about cyber security certainly makes sense.
But there is no alternative to winning the election. That means work. Organized efforts to make sure people have ID’s so they vote. Reviews of registration information to make sure they are not subject to potential cross-check flags.
News flash: the Democratic Party has 95% of what Kobach wants. It has the names, addresses and party registration of every voter in the US.
It’s not like these problems are insolvable.
There is no alternative to winning the election; that’s true.
But each cycle puts one additional barrier in place that provides the excuse for the folks who know better but can’t win the election.
The problems are not insoluble when there is the will to solve them, which 4 election cycles have shown is true only for the easy turf.
Kobach is a cybersecurity risk much more than the Democratic Party and state parties. And we’ve already seen where they are. I don’t trust Kobach to try and protect the personally identifiable information that he is asking for.
He is going to use the same type of cross-check software used for vote caging to try and identify the 3 million illegal voters that Trump keeps talking about. But because of the algorithms in that software, he will turn out 200 legal voters for every 1 illegal voter he might find. This is a problem, but having identity thefts off of his database is a bigger risk.
Unless the state Dems here can extract a few moments from the General Assembly shenanigans, I don’t know how and when the prep for 2018 is going to occur.
What are the barriers? Get people an ID and get them registered.
It’s just not that hard.
If people were willing to do the work.
Florida – that is a bit different given the felon disenfranchisement. There is a ballot referendum on that – win it and the state becomes Democratic.
But for the most part:
Why you would truth the Parties more than Kobach is beyond me. The DNC security on the voter file was so bad the Sanders people were able to read Clinton’s canvass results. You think they have a clue about security?
I wouldn’t trust any of them. You can buy virtually all of this information anyway if you are a political campaign of a nonprofit.
Kobach is obviously up to no good.
But I suspect most people don’t know how much of their information is public.
Last four digits of their Social Security number coupled to their personal identification is hardly what most people would consider to be public. This shows how complacent we have become about computer security and the government and commercial failure to take it seriously.
It also shows the fallacy of a state seeking to have easy access to personally identifiable information through backdoors. And software manufacturers who are too compliant with that request and unwilling to tell the state why strong encryption is necessary for computer security.