Last Wednesday, I found myself roaming through the idyllic, lilac-bedecked streets of Harvard in an attempt to find a talk on election fraud. I eventually found the building (the Cambridge Society of Friends, on Longfellow Park). Chairs were arranged in a circle. The evening, it turned out, was also a regular meeting of the Boston-Cambridge Alliance for Democracy. The host, a white-haired pony-tailed man holding a microphone, was talking about an upcoming trip to Venezuela and the "Gandhi Truth-Force Launch", which would combine 45 minutes of Gandhi readings with 45 minutes of discussion. Such events are not exactly my style, and I found myself mentally withdrawing from the others in the room. But the lovely spring weather urged me to suspend my judgments.
The microphone was passed around the room and people were invited to explain what brought them there. Finally, it was time for the main event. There were three speakers, Jonathan Simon (whom I will refer to as "JS"), Nancy Tobi ("NT"), and Sally Castleman ("SC"), who have, together with someone in California, founded an umbrella group called the Election Defense Alliance, designed to coordinate communication between the many election integrity groups that have already been founded. If you're interested in supporting them, here's a
link. (Personal note 1: I'm hoping to work with them in the future. Personal note 2: In my own attempt to organize information, I have posted tables of election integrity organizations on
dKosopedia. I'm hoping to add yet more election integrity information (for instance, a description of legislative history and information on candidates who have taken a strong stance on election integrity) to the dKosopedia. If you're interested, go right to the "Voting Rights" link on the front page of the dKosopedia and add information [which will require dKosopedia registration], or contact me. See my profile for my contact information.)
JS introduced NT, vice-chair of Democracy for New Hampshire. Her theme was that in election integrity as elsewhere, community organization was the key to true progressive success, because we all longed for community attachment, and we all possessed it innately. Whenever national organizations or national politicians were involved, their back-room compromises undid any progress. For example:
- The 1971 Federal Election Campaign Act stopped people from walking into Nixon's office with bags of cash, but it spawned the Federal Elections Committee, which trumped state and local control over finance and killed a 75-year-old tradition in New Hamphire.
- The 1993 National Registration Act ("Motor Voter Act") resulted in a huge bureaucratic morass, filled with corruption, and leading to more people registering than are of voting age.
- The 2002 Help America Vote Act ("HAVA") resulted in increased electronic "black box" voting. It also brought in the Election Assistance Commission, which is presidentially appointed, with four commissioners who report only to the President. The candidates should go through a congressional vetting, but we've seen how that goes, especially with recess appointments. Also, the EAC supposedly only has advisory capacity, but she doesn't believe that that is the case in real life.
She saw Rep. Holt's H.R. 550 as yet another step in this sad tradition and criticized Verified Voting and MoveOn for supporting it. While she liked his original bill [H.R. 2239], she does not like the current version. It contains language making the EAC a permanent commission, and further strengthens its power by allowing it to conduct random audits throughout the country, possibly preempting state rights.
I asked her whether it wasn't true that Federal power sometimes served to curb local corruption, as it did in the South (during the Reconstruction and Civil Rights Act years). She admitted that that was true, but she still felt that, overall, our republic depends upon decentralized power. (While that may be true, I'll insert here that I remain unpersuaded by her argument. I think cos (not Kos!) has done a good job of addressing the criticism of H.R. 550 brought by NT and by Bev Harris in his April 13 diary. I don't intend to get into that argument here. But I do want to mention that much as I found the mindset of the "Gandhi-ists" different from mine, her embrace of community organization and rejection of national organization and parties felt foreign to me.)
At this point, JS spoke. I had heard him speak twice before (in November 2004 and June 2005). On those occasions, he spoke about how he had downloaded raw exit poll data on Election Day 2004 that had disproved the scenario of a Bush victory. In fact, there had been a specific point when the same data that had previously pointed to a Kerry victory were suddenly being weighted to fit the scenario of a Bush victory. I must say that those two speeches are among the most depressing and enervating I have ever heard -- enervating not only because of the content, but because JS himself was so clearly tired. But there was something that drew me to go hear him again. And he actually helped me articulate what it was.
In JS's words, there are many things wrong in this country, and they tie together (including 9/11). Yet everything looks normal, with people rollerblading and biking outside. To suspect otherwise is to suffer a constant cognitive dissonance, where one part of your head sees another world where the Department of Justice is trying to figure out how to rig elections.
(But, I found myself inserting silently, trying to live in the "everything's fine" world involves a different kind of cognitive dissonance for those who know that everything is not fine. So basically, it comes down to which kind of dissonance you can tolerate, and which you can't.)
I'm going to put the rest of JS's words into a blockquote to make them easier to read.
The NSA has been forced to reveal that they have phone records since October 2001 or so. You see that they're using them to punish leakers. This is a fascist takeover of the country. It seems to have its epicenter in the Republican Party, but the Democrats are not providing much more opposition than the Social Democrats did during Hitler's takeover. We don't know why. One very obvious thing is that we're an old democracy. We have this "take-it-for-granted-itis", and people are not very disturbed about disenfranchisement. Exit poll discrepancies that called for a new election in Ukraine were ignored here, with the media leading the chorus. It's a tough crowd, a tough audience. We [in this room] pretty much agree about the problems that face us, but we're a small group.
After the 2000 election, I went down to DC to protest. Protestors outnumbered the celebrants 20 to 1. But it was very clear where the media were coming from and how strong the power of suppression was. In 2002, we sat and watched election anomalies regarding Max Cleland, Mondale, Hagel, and other weird things. For some reason, there was an exit poll blackout. The information still exists, but was never made public. Blinding the eye that might have said "What happened?" The right gained power then, and the right gained power again later.
At this point, JS introduced the phrase "Capable of repetition, but evading review." (I looked it up afterwards to help me understand it, and discovered that the phrase was used in Roe v. Wade. The argument was made that Roe's attempt to seek a remedy through the legal system for an unwanted pregnancy was moot because Roe was no longer pregnant by the time the case came to trial. However, the counterargument won the day: the suit had merit because unwanted pregnancies would recur among the set of all women in the country, even though a particular pregnancy might be over before the pertinent trial came to a close. By the same token, the argument is frequently made that focusing on possible election fraud is pointless once a winner is decided [sometimes worded as, "Stop whining about Ohio 2004 and start thinking about the 2006 elections"]. We make the counterargument that election fraud will continue to recur unless we have the persistence to investigate it even after the "statue of limitations" for a particular case has run out. This is the only way we can prevent it in the future.)
JS again:
So there was an immediate post-electoral "What went wrong?" Then most people went back home. Show's over. They went back to what they were doing. The rest of us keep getting sucked in, doing more. The funny thing about freedom is that you have it up until the moment you lose it. The fact that we're free to meet in the open is encouraging, but shouldn't be too damn encouraging, since we may not have that freedom for long.
It's not about designing a perfect election system. Elections don't take place in a laboratory. But even granting that, it was discouraging to see Kerry just jump off the swift boat and concede. It's hard to challenge when you know that you've lost the popular vote. We had January 6 and Barbara Boxer said her thing, and every other Democrat said nothing. He was in the gallery. He's sorry he didn't join the woman who loudly protested and was arrested. He doesn't look at that day as a victory, since we're further behind now.
Among the groups working on election integrity, there are those who support the bill H.R. 550, and those who find it frightening. There are those who believe that only hand-counted paper ballots are acceptable, and there are those who think that since there are only two more elections where we'll have any ability to vote we need to accept H.R. 550 in the short term since we won't get anything better.
(A point I want to insert: in fact, I think H.R. 550 is well-suited to that goal because it sets a floor of minimum election integrity and doesn't preclude anything better. See cos's diary.)
JS again:
No one has the right answer. But there's a lot of complication to it. We work best when we manage to set aside the extraneous agenda: whether there's a man or woman on the committee, whether a given remark was made by a member of the group or an "outsider".
I'm not an organizer, and have had to do what's most difficult for me. I would have a much easier time charging the barricades. But we have to get beyond talking to each other. We need a critical mass. At some point, there needs to be a popular uprising. The conventional mechanisms of politics are not likely to pull us through. This is hard for an American to swallow. We have to say "It can happen here. It has happened here." Before you know it, you're in a place where you're not familiar.
Starbucks is like a reference point -- something you recognize. Underneath that, there's quicksand. It's a very uncomfortable place. We want to make other people uncomfortable. We want to go out and ruin people's day. I mean, ours is already ruined, so we have nothing to lose. We tend to say, "Excuse me. I don't want to ruin your day, but could I speak to you for five minutes about exit polling?" A year ago, it was much harder. We didn't have the other freight train of surveillance coming down this parallel track. Now it's a naked display of power. Bush nominated Hayden for the CIA! How much more baldfaced can you get about that? As a poker player, you don't really go all in unless you have wildcards, aces up your sleeve. This guy keeps going all in, and keeps on winning. How are they going to back that up?
Who thinks 2006 is going to be more secure than 2004? [No hands are raised.] While we've been working with election officials and writing letters, they've been shoving DREs in. In 2006, 85% of the votes will be counted by computer in a black-box mode. The exit polls which could have been an escape mechanism in 2004 did not function that way. A duck is a duck is a duck, and all of a sudden it's a goose. There was a glitch pattern of 95-5, where 95% of the glitches favored Bush, 5% favored Kerry. We think the software people were bad riggers and actually allowed people to glimpse that the machines were voting for Bush when the voter had selected Kerry.
Now there's a campaign to show that exit polls are notoriously unreliable. Not only were exit polls not used successfully in 2004, they were discredited in the process. There's a convention of Academy of Public Researchers in Montreal. I'm not going -- too exhausted. This time, they're not going to leave any unadjusted data around for people like me to mess with. What can we do? We can do independent exit polls. We can form an independent polling consortium. Get 10 million bucks and do this. Do parallel elections, either anonymously or nonanonymously. Enough people who said they voted for someone can prove that at least that many people voted. However, it doesn't work by percent, so it's not a panacea. We can perform interactive surveys. Controversial? Yes. Accurate? Yes. Still gaining acceptance.
A Holt audit selects precincts chosen randomly and hand-counts them whole, comparing them with machine counts.
A "Simon audit": proportionally, count at every precinct the same proportion of ballots. 99.9% means that you're only going to get one out of every thousand false alarms. When the differential exceeds the margin of error, you know 99 out of a hundred times that didn't happen by chance. In a state like Ohio, you would have to count 5 ballots per precinct. It won't happen in 2006 -- don't get your hopes up. But it should. There's a way of randomizing ballots and counting them. Then you're home by eleven o'clock. But we won't see it in 2006.
We need a response. A way of radically analyzing this data, grasping the significance, getting the message out, and having people do something. People have to respond. We'll try to help organize parallel elections. Acting as monitors, although when computers are in use, monitoring doesn't accomplish much.
Probably more important is just talk. Over the watercooler, on the bus, in bed. Talk. It's viral. Viral marketing. It can be through the Internet, or it can be through communities. And we do have communities. We're about five years behind those who are trying to take over our government. When there are enormous forces at play, forces of initimidation, forces of communication control. Rove, Cheney, Bush are not people who say "I have power today, but you can have it tomorrow." These are sick, sick people. And they don't intend to play nice, ever.
There is a resistance beginning to bubble up, and that's encouraging. It's not like a year ago. You can ask Nathan Hale, Gandhi, what kind of struggle this is going to be. It's probably not going to be comfortable, and we need to make sure people know that. Gandhi and his people faced imprisonment. Live free or die -- it's a horrible slogan, but that was a reality at one point. The reality of our world is that we have to choose between a dentist appointment and social activism.
Sally, and I have founded the Election Defense Alliance along with someone in California [Dan Ashby]. It's not fun, but they really felt it was necessary. I will say one more thing. The Election Defense Alliance's job is to facilitate communication between groups, coordinate, make sure they're not reinventing the wheel. If you've prepared the media so they know what's coming, you at least have a chance of not seeing the cycle repeated.
My belief, and this is personal, is that there's going to have to be an uprising. Critical masses come about in an exponential way. All of a sudden, whoomp, there it is. I don't go back all the way to McCarthy, but almost. He argues with his 90-year-old mother, who says it was worse then. The unprecedented nature of the events happening now are scary, but they also provide opportunity. In this ferment, dismay, disturbance, there is an opportunity if you're alert to step up and say there's something better than what's being shoved down our throats.
Audience member: We shouldn't forget that we can vote for pro-election-integrity candidates. I'm working for John Bonifaz, who's running for Secretary of State. He won't let electronic voting machines come into this state. It's a movement to bring awareness. I'd like to think there's an intermediate step other than taking on the White House with our pitchforks. [She distributes flyers for Bonifaz.]
JS: At some point, if Massachusetts doesn't secede, there might be trouble. Who'd ever think that we'd be talking states' rights? Jonathan supports 85% of what Bonifaz is for. Massachusetts is an island in terms of where the country is going. Jonathan disagrees with what Nancy said about power residing at local level. Federal government is in a position to seize power, and it's important to work on both fronts. At some point, there is going to be a resistance in this country. Localities, municipalities, people on one side, NSA on the other. That fight could go either way. To that extent, what we do in that arena is important as well. Vermont is another candidate for being a beacon. You CAN hand-count votes.
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SC:
There are well over a hundred grassroots groups. Many have talked at conferences or on e-mail groups about having better coalition building amongst the groups, but it hasn't happened until now. We need to be much more effective and have much more impact. What Election Defense Alliance is aiming to be is a coordinating body of people at different levels. Boston-Cambridge AFD, for instance. Sign on as participants. The work will be done at the local level but will bubble up so that ideas can be exchanged. Then people can share educational materials.
We want to take more strategic approaches. Initially, because election of 2006 is so close, we were going to focus on monitoring and rapid response for 2006 election.
We don't have a logo yet. We can accept tax-deductible contributions. The donations through the International Humanities Center are tax-deductible.
It's possible that the AFD could be one of the bodies of the EDA, if its charter permits it.
There are lots of ways to participate. We need a lot of people working together.
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Audience member: Sally, neither you nor Jonathan has spoken to the issue of the removal of the right to vote that has been implemented by companies such as ChoicePoint. He was under the impression that that was at least equally important.
Answer: There are many ways to focus: campaign finance, other dirty tricks. Our main focus is on electronic fraud, and on the state and local level. We don't intend to work for any federal legislation. We want to work on the covert disenfranchisement. It's one thing the mainstream media have reported on. But there's zero information on electronic fraud.
JS: There's almost zero information. Wall Street Journal article about buyers' remorse, and so on. The problem is that this is pre-election stuff. There probably will be some media stuff about the election. But you have to look at what happens the day after the election.
What makes things a bit less covert in registration denial cases is that people are told they can't vote. THere are some other groups that are working on this. We have a task force on it.
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Audience member: People who are not already immersed need to figure out where to start. Hoping that website will highlight different sites that are very specific. John Bonifaz could represent a beacon. But he needs to get x% of the number of delegates in June. How many will be needed to get him on the ballot in November? We need to get very concrete.
SC: Yes, we hope that the website will have very concrete information.
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Audience member: Formal request: some of the articles written by council members show that we're not as up to speed as we should be. We're being inundated with so many fraudulent electronic things that we're becoming Luddite. Need a vision about where we're working.
SC: I hear two things in what you said. One: You would like to energize your own alliance, and you'd like us to come back when we have a very full house. Two: We need to be clear about where we're going, and we do agree that we want to go to hand-counted paper ballots.
JS: Personally, I would like to see hand-counted paper ballots for every race. If we need to separate some races from others, then we should do that. If we have 50 different races, with 9 different languages, it's not that easy. It's a lot easier in a parliamentary democracy. When you approach election officials with the idea that you want the computers out, you'll get a broken nose because the door slams in your face so hard. When is a compromise a sellout? Would like to see us taking three or four days to count votes. DOesn't eliminate fraud, but makes it retail rather than wholesale. Currently, there is proprietary silence about machines. At least, we'd like to see hand-counted ballots for Federal races. Congress, Senate, Presidency. That should not be so hard to hand-count in total. However, that is beyond most election boards. The crisis mentality hasn't hit yet. IF there's a way to make a computer system secure -- and that's a big if -- we should do that in the short term. If you have an effective hand-count protocol, you might not get the door slammed in your face on that one. Picture of basically octogenarians counting ballots until four in the morning, so this is a very slippery ground. At some point, compromise becomes sellout. This requires subtlety.
Audience member: Do we have tips for effective voting? Absentee ballot? Registered as a Democrat, or not? Are these tactics important? Are you thinking about them?
SC: That's the kind of thing that local groups will know. It may vary from state to state. That's why we're not telling people what to do.
JS: Early voting will be about 25% of the vote. The more different kinds of voting you have, the easier it is to hide the cards. In NM, FL, this gave another category that could be hidden. Central tabulator could be making things up. This is where the local people come in.
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SC: Wears a "Ban the Machine" button all the time. It's her form of education.
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Audience member: How will you work with candidates?
SC: We will work with some candidates. We'll make contact and say "If we have rapid response in time, do not concede until you hear from us."
We're asking people to dig deep soon and give money to them that they would be giving to a candidate or party instead.
Audience member: We should tell candidates we won't give money to them until they tackle electronic fraud.
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Question: Are there critical states?
JS: We're looking at critical races. Some of that is changing as we go. It's much quicker to set up interactive surveys than it is to set up exit polls. Some races are not competitive, but a lot more have come into play.
As Cheney and company have become more entrenched, it becomes harder and harder to displace them.
States: OH, FL. In early stages of making those identifications. But you can look at Cook Report and find out what they are.
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Statement: There are political leaders who are looking for the support of an electorate. Jay Kaufman [MA state representative] got it, and we need to know who the leaders who have got it. Bernie Sanders is terribly important to support. He has the integrity to get it.
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And that was the evening. Please consider supporting the Election Defense Alliance.