How much faith do you have in election integrity in Florida?
Problems with voting in Florida are nothing new. The state of Florida, after all, brought terms like "hanging chad" and "pregnant chad" into the election lexicon back in 2000. Floridians were blamed for the Bush-Gore fiasco when Secretary Of State Katherine Harris stopped the vote count, and were forever branded as somewhat "ballot challenged" when large numbers of voters punched in Pat Buchanan on their ballots by accident.
Locally Florida now faces redistricting and a battle over voting amendments that's being waged against voters who were in favor of them by legislators who aren't, with town hall meetings where those elected officials won't speak for fear of tipping their hand.
We also have a millionaire governor who bought his way into office and since winning he's waged his own war against the citizens that put him there, along with those who didn't. With a whopping 29 percent approval rating that's bound to sink further to record lows, Rick Scott has managed to anger even tried and true "conservative" voters who up until his recent move to go ahead with the $1.28 billion SunRail project that will cost Florida taxpayers $651.6 million, were big fans of Gov. "Run The State Like A Business." In spite of his low approval ratings and his penchant for killing jobs instead of creating them as promised, cutting benefits for homeless veterans, teachers, the poor and the elderly just to name a few, he's apparently oblivious to his own unpopularity.
Beaming with confidence after spending a long weekend with the Koch Bros. in Colorado, where he attended a summit with other Republican governors that he tried, and failed, to keep a secret from voters, (he later claimed this was on "personal time") he announced that he most definitely plans to run for re-election when his first term is up. While that statement may have shocked some, given the track record of this governor who seems intent on destroying the state of Florida, and is well on his way after just six months in office, how about this one:
"Governors make good presidents historically because they've had to make tough choices."
No doubt the "tough choices" Scott has made when it comes to cutting taxes for big businesses while slashing everything else if it benefits actual people in Florida helped him pass the Republican and tea party "purity" tests, and put him in a favorable light with the likes of the Koch Bros.
Mission accomplished.
Given all this, not to mention campaign finance laws gone wild with the Citizens United Supreme Court decision that says corporations (like those owned by the Koch Bros.) are considered "people" when it comes to undisclosed donations, it brings us back to my original question:
How much faith do you have in election integrity in Florida?
If your answer is "not much," you're certainly not alone. If you find past election history in Florida a bit unsettling, (or nation wide for that matter) this latest development is unlikely to change that.
It seems that a hacker who uses Twitter obtained parts of the Florida voting database which has been subsequently posted to Paste2. It appears that the hacker in question wanted to show that voting fraud can easily happen today and dumped parts of the Florida database to prove it. From the comments of the release:
"So, this is a little ironic. Here is inside details of Florida voting systems. Now.. who still believes voting isn’t rigged? If the United States Government can’t even keep their ballot systems secure, why trust them at all? FAIL!"
The content was posted to PasteBin (same content) while Abhaxas tweeted, “Who believes voting isn’t tampered with?”
Republicans are famous for making claims about "rampant voter fraud" when in fact voter fraud is virtually non-existent, and they do so in order to enact strict election laws, like they've just done right here in Florida, and in other states as well. Oddly enough, the subject of fixing elections is rarely mentioned by Republicans, and whispers of "stolen elections" only come up when Democrats win. I say "whispered" because rarely are those claims ever pursued, and for good reason.
So how hard would it be to "fix" an election? To tamper with votes? You can't control everything in an election. Or can you? When your party is out of favor and woefully unpopular, desperate times call for desperate measures. For evidence of that, one need look no further than Wisconsin. The GOP has been in pursuit of a permanent Republican majority for years and they won't stop until they get it. They don't spend their time in office on policy or "creating jobs, jobs, jobs!" They spend their time in office looking for ways to game the elections and working on strategies to gain power and keep it. Change the election laws, the campaign finance laws, break the unions, squeeze the middle class and give tax breaks to the rich. This from the self-proclaimed "patriots" who don't want to pay taxes.
Given all that, what's to stop someone from hacking into a voter database and tinkering with the numbers?
Very little, apparently. We're halfway there.
Cross Posted At Beach Peanuts