Accountability

Last night I saw a flurry of emails blanket my inbox with a series of "unbelieavable", "still in shock" and the not so occasional "I'm angry".

I had spent most of the afternoon trying to sort out my thoughts fast enough for an Op/Ed, and I would always come back to the misgivings I've had since he took office a little over a year ago. That Eliot Spitzer's problem and weakness has always been his success because he never really needed anything other than a vote from you or me to get elected.

Eliot Spitzer didn't really need a million New Yorkers giving $5 or $10 donations to his campaign to get elected. He never needed to learn how to get people out on the streets to support his campaign to get him elected. He never needed to swallow his pride and shut up and take criticism from his own base in order to gain political influence. And he certainly never had to pound the pavement and get people out on election day to make sure people would get out of their homes and offices to cast a vote.

"The power to end the war is in the people's voices, not in Congress' ability to fund the war".
John Edwards

I just got off a conference call between John Edwards and several members of the blogosphere.

John Edwards has just launched an initiative to end the war in Iraq. With Support The Troops, End The War, Edwards is asking Americans to reclaim patriotism from the Bush Administration on this Memorial Day by holding events all across the country that show We The People's support of the troops by demanding an end of the war :

Take Action May 26th, 27th, 28th
As citizens, we honor and support our troops for their service and sacrifice.

As Americans, we are blessed by that sacrifice and support, which keeps us safe and keeps us strong.

As patriots, we call on our government to support our troops in the most important way it can - by ending this war and bringing them home.

This Memorial Day weekend, we will all take responsibility for the country we love and the men and women who protect it. We will volunteer, we will pray, and we will speak out. Each of us has a responsibility to act, a duty to our troops and to each other. Support the troops. End the war.

In the Q&A Arianna Huffington asked if he was going to ask other Democrats in Congress to put pressure on those who didn't vote against Bush's veto. He said that, indeed, that was part of the strategy of this call to action. He has been running ads in DC focused on members of Congress; yet the second veto makes it clear that unless the American people take the war into their own hands, we will continue to have the political push and pull going on between Congress and the White House.

Press Release after the jump

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This year I have received more invitations to inauguration parties than I can count. Couldn't make any of them. Well, I could have made Hakeem Jeffries' Brooklyn party, but I didn't think it quite appropriate.

Last night, though, I got just the slightest taste of the energy that must permeate such parties. Last night was the annual Independent Neighborhood Democrats party, this year hosted by District Leader Jo Anne Simon. Two of our local Congress Critters were there and the excitement they were giving off was palpable!

IND throws a good party. They are dessert parties held at 5:30 PM, leading to essentially dessert coming before dinner for us, but awkward timing aside, everything was great! Good turnout, good food and good energy.

For those who have followed my past posts on IND you know that this year was a very divisive one. The NY-11 Congressional primary divided the club pretty much in three and led to some very heated arguements and late night balloting for endorsements (Note to IND: instant runoff voting really works and makes voting far more efficient so that those of us with small children can get home at a reasonable time!).

Members of all three factions were there last night (though none of the candidates who sparked the battles) all amicably eating and anticipating a good year. Shows how we can come together after the storm and move on. They even seem to have forgiven me my kiss-and-tell blogging about the endoresement meetings!

It's an article of faith among many Progressive activists that electronic voting machines are a thing of evil, that these machines are somehow programmed to steal votes from Democrats, and that any and all Democratic election losses are directly attributable to this electronic menace. And who knows, this contention may very well be accurate.

The problem with this perception is the same as that afflicting the arguments of so-called "Intelligent Design" advocates, namely that faith-based assumptions rest on thin evidentiary reeds. Despite what is alleged to be a massive, nationwide and ongoing fraud that would constitute a federal crime, no successful court case has yet been brought, let alone litigated successfully, that would support the assertions of the Dieboldistas. Now, this may be because everyone is in on the conspiracy; but the more natural conclusion, and one more in line with Occam's Razor, is that this vast conspiracy does not exist. The test may very well be the litigation underway over the contested results in Fl-13. But as things stand today, the verified-voting crowd is setting up an argument which is essentially not falsifiable – "votes are being stolen in ways we can't see or verify", and that should, in my mind, offend the reality-based community.

My personal argument with the Dieboldistas is this: there is, as noted, a bit of a disparity between the fervor with which they advance their claims, and the underlying evidentiary record; and more importantly, by engaging in a small-bore faith-based conspiracy theory, they're discrediting and hindering a realization that should be manifest to everyone, namely that our system of elections is deeply and perhaps irredeemably flawed. I'd go further and say that the Diebold crowd, by positing fraud as the proximate cause of every problem with the electoral process, weakens the case that must be made for fixing the system itself. Ironically, they argue for fraud in exactly the same way that, as noted, advocates of "Intelligent Design" argue for their designer, as the root default cause that explains everything. Tin foil hats are fashionable across the political spectrum, it seems.

Americans woke up and realized their government had been lying to them for 6 years. They saw the depth of Republican lies and corruption and they voted accordingly.

The Republicans forgot a very important lesson:

“You may fool all the people some of the time, you can even fool some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all the time.”

--Abraham Lincoln, the best Republican President

Hacking Democracy on Google Video

UPDATE!
A major hat tip to Prometheus6.

Our own Michael is upset that I have published these because he feels they will scare people away from voting. I see the issue differently : Better to go armed with a heavy dose of skepticism and information than to go blinding trusting the current system to protect your right to vote.

What do you think?

This is not a reason not to vote. This is a reason for you, as a citizen, to protect your right to vote and be counted.

If you are going to have a Diebold machine, I honestly feel you should find out if you can go with a paper ballot. Why? Computer engineers not only have demonstrated how easy it is to hack Diebold Voting Machines; they also demonstrated how it's possible to do so without leaving a trace.

Here are the main findings of their experiment :

1. Malicious software running on a single voting machine can steal votes with little if any risk of detection. The malicious software can modify all of the records, audit logs, and counters kept by the voting machine, so that even careful forensic examination of these records will find nothing amiss. We have constructed demonstration software that carries out this vote-stealing attack.

2. Anyone who has physical access to a voting machine, or to a memory card that will later be inserted into a machine, can install said malicious software using a simple method that takes as little as one minute. In practice, poll workers and others often have unsupervised access to the machines.

3. AccuVote-TS machines are susceptible to voting-machine viruses — computer viruses that can spread malicious software automatically and invisibly from machine to machine during normal pre- and post-election activity. We have constructed a demonstration virus that spreads in this way, installing our demonstration vote-stealing program on every machine it infects.

4. While some of these problems can be eliminated by improving Diebold's software, others cannot be remedied without replacing the machines' hardware. Changes to election procedures would also be required to ensure security.