Politics Random, Random

[ti-amie]

Will Trump Force Principled Conservatives to Start Their Own Party? I Hope So
American politics will be shaped by the influence of the monarch of Mar-a-Lago.

By Thomas L. Friedman
Opinion Columnist

Dec. 22, 2020

As the Trump presidency heads into the sunset, kicking and screaming, one of the most important questions that will shape American politics at the local, state and national levels is this: Can Donald Trump maintain his iron grip over the Republican Party when he is out of office?

This is what we know for sure: He damn well intends to try and is amassing a pile of cash to do so. And here is what I predict: If Trump keeps delegitimizing Joe Biden’s presidency and demanding loyalty for his extreme behavior, the G.O.P. could fully fracture — splitting between principled Republicans and unprincipled Republicans. Trump then might have done America the greatest favor possible: stimulating the birth of a new principled conservative party.

Santa, if you’re listening, that’s what I want for Christmas!

Wishful thinking? Maybe. But here’s why it’s not entirely fanciful: If Trump refuses to ever acknowledge Biden’s victory and keeps roasting those Republicans who do — and who “collaborate” with the new administration — something is going to crack.

There will be increasing pressure on the principled Republicans — people like Mitt Romney, Lisa Murkowski and the judges, election officials and state legislators who put country before party and refused to buckle under Trump’s demands — to break away and start their own conservative party.

If that happens, the unprincipled Trump Republicans — like the 126 House members who joined with the Texas attorney general in a shameful Supreme Court case to nullify Biden’s victory — could have a harder time winning office. That would be a good thing in its own right.

More important, even if just a few principled conservatives came together and created a kind of third party in Congress, they could be kingmakers. With the Senate so finely balanced, moderates on each side have significant leverage.

We just saw that with the relief bill negotiations, which Trump, on cue, is now threatening to undo. It was the bipartisan House Problem Solvers Caucus — coalesced by the centrist movement No Labels — and an informal bipartisan group of senators that produced the deal from the bottom up.

Imagine Biden’s center-left Democrats and principled center-right conservatives working together on fixes for infrastructure, immigration, Obamacare or climate — without Trump around to disrupt any progress.

Wishful thinking? Maybe. But one thing I learned covering the Middle East is that there is only one reliable thing about extremists — they don’t know when to stop. So, in the end, they almost always go over the cliff, taking a lot of people with them.

Donald Trump is a political extremist. He does not stop at red lights. He does not abide by norms, ethics or the truth. As a result, his huge disinformation campaign against Biden’s election, and his attacks on Republican officeholders and right-wing media that won’t parrot his lies and conspiracy theories, is already fracturing the party at the state level in places like Georgia and Arizona.

It’s drawing a sharp distinction between principled Republicans who chose to put their constitutional obligations before Trump’s interests and the unprincipled ones who either are too cowardly to speak up or eagerly hopped into the Trump clown car to secure his blessings for their next election.

Think of two recent images. The first is of the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, on Dec. 15 briskly walking past a CNN reporter who was asking him a simple question: Would he acknowledge that Joe Biden was the president-elect? McCarthy was too cowardly or too unprincipled to answer.

If you’re a Republican lawmaker, do you really want to spend the next four years running away from CNN every time you’re asked to opine about the latest demented thing Donald Trump has said or done — because you’re afraid that he’ll launch a primary attack against you with his devoted base if you show integrity?

The contrasting image is of Arizona’s Republican governor, Doug Ducey. It’s Dec. 1 and Ducey is literally signing the papers certifying his state’s election results and officially awarding Biden its 11 electors — ignoring Trump’s baseless claims of voter fraud in Arizona.

Ducey’s cellphone rings, but it is no ordinary ringtone. It is “Hail to the Chief,” a ringtone Ducey installed in July so that he would never miss a call from Trump. But this time Ducey simply takes the phone out of his pocket, silences it, puts it aside and goes on signing the papers.

According to a report in The Hill, “Trump later called into a hearing with state Republicans that was happening during the certification” and “tore into Ducey,” declaring, “Arizona will not forget what Ducey just did.” Trump was right, but not in the way he predicted.

On Saturday, CNN described the civil war that has broken out in Arizona: “G.O.P. party leaders and elected officials who’ve gone all-in for Trump, backed by right-wing media, have relentlessly attacked those who can’t bring themselves to go along with the lame-duck president’s refusal to concede. To be sure, similar splits exist across the G.O.P. nationwide. But the infighting in Arizona offers a clear picture of why some Republicans fear that if Trump continues stirring up and directing his followers once he’s out of office, the party may cripple itself at the state and local level.”

The story added: “‘Some Republicans have decided to file for divorce from reality, facts be damned,’ said Barrett Marson, a publicist who worked for Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey’s political action committee. … Perhaps most notable in the subsequent salvos was a tweet from the governor’s chief of staff, Daniel Scarpinato, to ‘Freedom Caucus’ chair Rep. Andy Biggs calling him nuts and ending, ‘Enjoy your time as a permanent resident of Crazytown.’”

To be sure, calling Ducey a “principled Republican” is a low bar, considering that he had no problem backing Trump all the way until now. Unlike other Trump-friendly Republicans, though, he was ready to draw a constitutional redline he would not cross.

But every day that goes by Trump shows us that as his power decreases, he surrounds himself with more and more unprincipled crackpots, who fan his delusions and propose more and more extreme actions, like Michael Flynn’s neofascist suggestion of declaring martial law and rerunning the election in some states Trump lost.

Therefore, the stress that Trump creates will surely get only worse after he leaves the White House, when, to stay relevant, he’ll need to say ever more extreme things that keep his base — now fully marinated in his conspiracy theories — energized and ready to attack any principled Republican who deviates from Trump. Also, all those Fox News commentators who prostituted themselves to Trump (and their ratings), helping to make his extreme base even more extreme, can’t stop now. They’ll lose their audience.

They’re all extremists who can’t stop, and principled conservatives understand that. Listen to Evan McMullin, the former C.I.A. operations officer and later chief policy director for the House Republican Conference, who resigned in 2016 to run for president as an independent:

“Even though Mr. Trump has been defeated, there is still no home for Republicans committed to representative government, truth and the rule of law, nor is one likely to emerge anytime soon,” wrote McMullin in this newspaper. “So what’s next for Republicans who reject their party’s attempts to incinerate the Constitution in the service of one man’s authoritarian power grabs? … The answer is that we must further develop an intellectual and political home, for now, outside of any party. From there, we can continue working with other Americans to defeat Mr. Trump’s heirs, help offer unifying leadership to the country and, if the Republican Party continues on its current path, launch a party to challenge it directly.”

Call me mad, but my gut tells me that when Trump is just the monarch of Mar-a-Lago — just spewing venom — some Republicans will say “enough.” Somewhere in there a new party of principled conservatives might just get born.

Wishful thinking? Maybe. But what a blessing that would be for America.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/22/opin ... party.html

[ponchi101]

Friedman is certainly the writer I like to read the most that I disagree the most with.
And here he is displaying the same pattern that I always have issues with: endless optimism. The reality is that the GOP is dead. It is a cult party, and the person of cult is Tiny. When you have 85% plus republicans still voting for this mafia don, you simply have to accept it: the party has no values any more. No criminal activity is too serious as long as you hold on to power. No insult to anybody is too gross or un-dignifying if you hold on to power. No comment, no position, no clear sign of incompetence is too big if you hold on to power.
Tiny really has a lot of people right where he wants them: one word from him and they lose, automatically, 45% of the vote of any state, city, county or geographical structure they are running for. And vice versa. He anoints them with voters, or he takes them away.
Right now, any GOP'ers that leave the party will be even less successful than the Tea Party (remember when they were the crazy ones? How naïve we all were). Be a GOP'er and leave Tiny, and you are basically an independent with no traction.
The sole way the GOP can even begin to figure a return to normalcy is if he goes away, politically. Otherwise, he simply will be the most destructive force the USA has known. 50 tweets a day to smear Biden will be a good day. Expect that for the next 4 years.

[Kirkus]

It'll be fascinating to see how the GOP evolves following the rise of Trump. I think a split would see Democrats taking power at every level. It's simple math. If the GOP splits in half we have 50% Dem, 25% GOP1, 25% GOP2. Simplified, I understand. But I'll bet it's not far off.

Works for me.

[ti-amie]

America’s largest (and arguably most problematic) voting machine vendor is ES&S, not Dominion Voting
Jennifer Cohn
2 days ago·14 min read

In September 2020, a Texas examiner’s report said there was a “ bug” in ES&S’s hash verification script. What happened after is unknown.

By Jennifer Cohn
12/21/20
First, a cautionary note. Close partisan associations and corruption involving voting machine vendors are inappropriate, and significant discrepancies between polling and official outcomes are unnerving and fair game for reporting, as are voting-system vulnerabilities and the many electronic “glitches” that occur in elections. But they do not prove fraud. Moreover, we cannot typically prove that election outcomes are wrong without conducting robust manual audits using hand marked paper ballots (with an exception for voters with disabilities). This is why the Democrats proposed the SAFE Act, which would have required robust manual audits for all federal races this year and banned most of the touchscreen voting machines currently in use. It also would have banned internet connectivity to voting systems. But the GOP killed the SAFE Act. Republicans nonetheless have the audacity to complain after the election about lack of security and transparency, knowing full well that they are primarily responsible for these problems, that they did better (not worse) than polls predicted, and that they went out of their way to block manual recounts in the presidential elections of 2000 and 2016.

Meanwhile, Republicans have directed their belated election-security ire almost exclusively at Dominion Voting. They have conspicuously given short shrift to America’s largest and arguably most corrupt voting machine vendor, Election Systems & Software, LLC (ES&S), whose systems in Texas had a software “bug” as of September 2020 that could in theory have enabled ES&S or others to install unauthorized software. (For unknown reasons, the Texas Secretary of State waited until December to post the September report.) The GOP’s apparent blind spot for this and other problems involving ES&S is curious. Before the GOP began screaming “Dominion, Dominion, Dominion,” most of the negative press about the elections industry in the U.S. had for years focused on ES&S. And for good reason.

ES&S, which was previously called American Information Systems (AIS), was founded in the 1970’s by two brothers, Bob and Todd Urosevich, in Omaha, Nebraska. According to Mother Jones, ES&S received its initial financing from the families of Religious Right activist billionaires Howard Ahmanson, Jr. and Nelson Bunker Hunt. Ahmanson and Hunt were both heavy contributors to the Chalcedon Foundation, Christian Reconstruction’s main think tank. According to ABC News, Hunt also co-founded a secretive networking group for the Religious Right and right-wing billionaires called the Council for National Policy (CNP) to which Ahmanson belonged as well.

Based on the CNP’s 2014 directory (published by the Southern Poverty Law Center) and reporting in the New Yorker, recent CNP members include Kelly Anne Conway, Steve Bannon, and the Mercers, all alumna of the now defunct data analytics firm called Cambridge Analytica, which infamously accessed voters’ personal Facebook data without their permission on behalf of the 2016 Trump campaign.

According to the CNP’s 2014 vision statement, the group’s goal is to “reestablish” what it calls “religious and economic liberty” under the US Constitution by 2020. I wrote an article about the CNP here: https://extranewsfeed.com/americas-tali ... 65f1754ca4.
From 1992 until 1996, ES&S’s chairman was Chuck Hagel, a Republican, who resigned from ES&S a few days before announcing his intent to run for the U.S. senate. During the campaign, Hagel courted the Religious Right by declaring that he opposed abortion even in the case of rape and incest. Polls from three days before the election called the race a “dead heat,” but Hagel “trounced” his opponent by “fifteen points.” His opponent did not seek a recount.

Hagel was the first Republican to win a Nebraska senate race since 1972. According to the Daily Kos, Hagel “miraculously won virtually every demographic group in the state, including large African American communities that had never previously voted Republican.” Nebraska officials reportedly told The Hill that “machines made by AIS [Hagel’s company] probably tallied 85 percent votes cast in the 1996 vote.”

To this day, ES&S is controlled in whole or part by the McCarthy Group, a private equity firm whose chairman, Mike McCarthy, was Hagel’s campaign treasurer. McCarthy is a also a member of ES&S’s board of directors.

In 2006, in Sarasota, Florida, touchscreen voting machines supplied by ES&S showed that “More than 18,000 voters…, or 13 percent of those who went to the polls,” had declined to vote in a hotly contested Congressional race...” By contrast, “only 2 percent of voters in one neighboring county within the same House district and 5 percent in another skipped the Congressional race…”

More than 100 voters told the campaign of Democrat Christine Jennings, who officially lost by just 373 votes, that “their votes for her did not show up on the summary screen at the end of the touchscreen voting process, and that they had to re-enter them.” Jennings’s attorneys said they “feared that not everyone had noticed the problem or realized that they could re-enter the vote.” The firestorm over these “vanishing votes” caused Florida to eventually ban touchscreen voting (except for voters with disabilities) and switch to paper ballots and scanners (although Florida still does not conduct or require manual election audits).

The same year, Debra Bowen, who was California’s Secretary of State at the time, sued ES&S for selling at least five California counties a version of its AutoMark ballot marking system that hadn’t yet been tested or certified for use in the state or the country. Bowen said at the time that ES&S had “ignored the law over and over again and it got caught…” ES&S later paid $3.25 million to settle the case.

Also in 2007, a team of researchers at the University of Pennsylvania Department of Computer Science found “numerous exploitable vulnerabilities in nearly every component” of ES&S’s optical scanners (for counting paper ballots) and direct record electronic (DRE, usually touchscreen) voting machines.

The same year, Jennifer Brunner, who was Ohio’s Secretary of State at the time, commissioned an analysis called the Everest report, which also found significant vulnerabilities in ES&S systems. The report concluded that those vulnerabilities “demonstrate the capability for attackers to execute arbitrary code on many of the components given access to them. Further, specific scenarios were identified where attackers who successfully gained access to the systems and exploited identified vulnerabilities could likely impact the results of elections.”

In 2008, during the Republican presidential primary in Cochise, Arizona, an ES&S “computer glitch” caused Mitt Romney to be erroneously declared victorious over John McCain (an error that was later corrected). After the election, Cochise county election officer, Tom Schelling, stated that “t was a cumulative (computer) error that just kept adding the results for five polling places every time new figures were added.”

Several days before the 2012 election, Ohio attorney Bob Fitrakis learned that Ohio Secretary of State John Husted had quietly allowed ES&S to install uncertified patches on ES&S machines in thirty-nine of Ohio’s eighty-eight counties. Although the court refused to grant relief so close to the election, she told Fitrakis she would be happy to revisit the case after the election if he returned. He apparently found it unnecessary when Barack Obama defeated Mitt Romney.

Beginning in 2015, ES&S began quietly installing wireless modems in precinct ballot scanners in some counties in swing states such as Florida and Michigan. At some point, it added them in some counties in Wisconsin, Illinois, and beyond. As reported by Kim Zetter earlier this year, these modems connect both the scanners and the receiving end systems to the internet, but officials claimed otherwise. ES&S systems containing modems were never certified by the Election Assistance Commission, but ES&S falsely implied to its customers that they were, as further reported by Zetter this year.

It was on ES&S’s watch that 127,000 votes vanished from Diebold machines in predominantly African American precincts in Georgia during the 2018 midterm elections, as reported in the Root. (By then, the Department of Justice had forced ES&S to dissolve Diebold, its subsidiary, on anti-trust grounds, but ES&S had kept most of its contracts.) Likewise, votes from predominantly African American precincts in Memphis vanished from Diebold machines serviced and maintained by ES&S in 2015, as initially reported in Bloomberg. Neither situation was ever explained.

Since 2013, ES&S has donated $30,000 to the Republican State Leadership Committee whose mission is to elect Republicans to state office. It may also have donated to the Democratic corollary of RSLC, but I’ve been unable to confirm this. A few years ago, ES&S donated to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R), who then killed proposed election-security legislation.

ES&S has also provided secret donations and other gifts to state and county election officials who, in the past few years, have then chosen ES&S’s insecure new touchscreen systems for use by most in-person voters.

By choosing these new ES&S touchscreen systems, which are called ballot marking devices, officials ignored the advice of election-security experts who recommended hand marked paper ballots instead. In Northampton County, Pennsylvania, where an ES&S representative had assured election officials that “miscalibration” would not be an issue with its new touchscreens (“Scouts honor,” he said), dozens of the county’s new ES&S touchscreens were miscalibrated during an election in 2019. Similar problems occurred in neighboring Philadelphia, whose decision makers (which included a Democrat and a Republican) had each received donations from ES&S lobbyists before choosing the system. I compiled much of the national news regarding ES&S corruption and its new touchscreen voting machines here: https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/12/1 ... democracy/.

This article by Greg Gordon at McClatchy exposed ES&S’s corrupt advisory board for county and state officials — including officials in South Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas, and New York — which recently disbanded due to the media fallout from Gordon’s piece. http://www.mcclatchydc.com/latest-news/ ... 58729.html. One former board member was South Carolina’s election director Marci Andino. In 2018, South Carolina reported that “Andino had accepted nearly $20,000 in expenses during her decade as an adviser for ... [ES&S].” The state went on to buy new ES&S systems for use throughout the state.

In 2018, as reported by Zetter, ES&S finally admitted, despite prior denials that it had installed remote access software in election management systems (which include county tabulators that compile precinct totals) sold between 2000 and 2006. ES&S later told NPR that it had 300 remote-access customers. It refused, however, to identify those customers. It claims the software has been removed but won’t say when it was removed.

The same year, “NBC News examined publicly available online shipping records for ES&S for the past five years and found that many parts, including electronics and tablets, were made in China and the Philippines, raising concerns about technology theft or sabotage.” Although ES&S often boasts that it is an American company, its central scanners are designed by a German company called Datawin.

Earlier this year, as first reported by Zetter and then by NBC News, a team of researchers led by Kevin Skoglund discovered that thirty-five of ES&S’s receiving-end systems had been left online for months and, in some cases, perhaps years. This included the swing states of Michigan, Florida, and Wisconsin.

Most recently, a “bug” identified in a September 2020 Texas examiner’s report involving ES&S’s “hash verification script” could have allowed ES&S to install (without detection) unauthorized software in its DS200, DS850, DS450, ExpressVote & ExpressVote XL voting systems.



I do not know whether or not this occurred (installation of unauthorized software) or how many states and how many elections were potentially impacted by this bug. But the equipment listed in the Texas report is used throughout the U.S. There is no indication on the Texas Secretary of State’s website as to how, if at all, this bug was addressed. I have submitted a public records request seeking answers. If there was a certified update addressing this bug, I have been unable to find any reference to it on the Election Assistance Commission’s website.

Meanwhile, for many years, America’s second largest voting machine vendor was Global Election Systems (later called Diebold Election Systems and then Premier Election Systems). Global was related to ES&S in that Bob Urosevich, who co-founded ES&S with his brother Todd, joined Global in 1997 and was named president of the company in September 2000, while Todd remained at ES&S as a vice president.

In September 2000, with Bob Urosevich at the helm, Global bought an election company for $4 million from a convicted embezzler named Jeffrey Dean whose crimes involved sophisticated computer tampering, a discovery made by Black Box Voting author Bev Harris. An SEC filing obtained by Harris shows that, as a result of the acquisition, Dean became Global’s largest shareholder. Dean was also a Global vice president where he oversaw computer programming. A few months after he joined Global, a convicted cocaine trafficker who he met in prison, John Elder, joined the company to oversee the printing of paper ballots and punch cards for several states. This, too, was discovered and first reported by Harris.

It was a Global machine that inexplicably subtracted 16,000 votes from Al Gore’s vote total in 2000 in Volusia County, Florida, an election that Bush reportedly won by just 537 votes in Florida. A Republican whistle-blower named Clint Curtis later testified to the House Judiciary Committee that Representative Tom Feeney, a former running mate of Florida Governor Jeb Bush, had asked him to design a vote-flipping program for that election. He passed a polygraph. But although some House Democrats took him seriously, the media did not. His claim could not be independently corroborated because too much time had passed, and the software was proprietary anyway.

In 2002, Global was acquired by ATM manufacturer Diebold, Inc. and changed its name to Diebold Election Systems. Although Diebold claimed to have parted ways with Jeffrey Dean, Bev Harris obtained internal Diebold memos, which showed that Dean had maintained a consulting relationship with the company.

P1

[ti-amie]

P2

The first state to deploy touchscreens statewide was Georgia, which chose Diebold as its vendor. That election resulted in several poll-defying Republican wins, including Saxby Chambliss’s defeat of Max Cleland, who was a popular incumbent and war hero. I wrote extensively about that election here:

Diebold, Inc.’s chief executive officer, Walden O’Dell, was a member of Bush’s Rangers and Pioneers, which the New York Times described as “an elite group of loyalists who have raised at least $100,000 each for the 2004 race.” In 2003, O’ Dell achieved infamy for sending a letter to other potential donors in which he stated that he was “‘committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year…’”

In 2004, a team of test hackers in Maryland from RABA Technologies “was able to remotely upload, download, and execute files with full system administrator privileges. Results could be modified at will, including changing votes from precincts.” The team was reportedly “able to change votes and exit the system without a trace of their visit.”
The same year, Diebold received negative publicity for installing uncertified software in seventeen California counties.

In May 2007, Florida State University’s Security and Assurance in Information Technology (SAIT) laboratory “released a scathing report in which they describe a glitch in Diebold’s optical-scan firmware that enabled a ‘type of vote manipulation if an adversary can introduce an unofficial memory card into an active terminal prior to an election. Such a card can be preprogrammed to essentially swap the electronically tabulated votes of two candidates or reroute all of one candidate’s votes to a different candidate.”
In 2009, ES&S acquired Diebold, making the relationship between the two companies official and giving ES&S control of approximately 70 percent of the market.

When Senator Chuck Schumer (D) caught wind of the acquisition, he asked the Department of Justice’s anti-trust division to investigate.

In 2010, the DOJ forced ES&S to dissolve Diebold and sell some of Diebold’s assets because the combined company had accounted for 70% of US election equipment. That year, a Canadian company called Dominion Voting bought Diebold’s intellectual property rights and warehoused equipment.

According to a 2017 analysis by the Wharton Business School, ES&S now accounts for about 44 percent of US election equipment, and Dominion 37 percent. But these numbers may mislead. The analysis placed all Diebold equipment in the Dominion column because Dominion purchased all of Diebold’s intellectual property rights. ES&S, however, retained most of Diebold’s servicing and maintenance contracts, which is where most of the control over elections comes from.



This Verified Voting map from a few years ago shows in orange all states that use ES&S election equipment in at least some counties — either precinct machines or central count scanners. (Georgia has since switched to Dominion, perhaps due to the vanishing black votes scandal with ES&S/Diebold in 2018.) As you can see, ES&S’s influence over U.S. elections is staggering. (I would provide an updated map but the last time I checked, Verified Voting’s tool no longer included this function. I believe the only major change is Georgia’s switch to Dominion from ES&S.)



Which raises the question again. Why are Republicans ignoring ES&S? Texas’s corrupt attorney general, Ken Paxton, recently went so far as to try (unsuccessfully) to overturn other states’ elections.Meanwhile, he has ignored that ES&S voting systems in his own state had a security “bug” as of September 2020 that could in theory have allowed the installation of unauthorized software.

As noted, the Texas Secretary of State’s website has thus far not reported on how, if at all, this “bug” was addressed. Perhaps this is something that deserves our attention.
You can identify what voting machine vendor is used in your county by using Verified Voting’s Verifier tool. Please note, however, that I believe the Verifier (like the Wharton report) puts all Diebold equipment in Dominion’s column because Dominion has the intellectual property rights, even though ES&S kept the servicing and maintenance contracts for most Diebold systems, and the contracts are what gives a vendor control.

This Brennan Center Voting System Failure Database is an excellent resource for more examples of voting-machine problems.
This report by Fair Fight Action regarding ES&S is very comprehensive and helpful as well. It appears that Fair Fight Action is continually updating it.

[ponchi101]

Sweden can vote with machines. Canada. Germany. Japan. Maybe Switzerland.
Nobody else.
And my understanding is that Canada does it manually. As do the Netherlands and plenty of others.

And, of course: UBUNTU is open software. it is very, very good (I have never seen it fail) but still, it is open.

[ponchi101]

It'll be fascinating to see how the GOP evolves following the rise of Trump. I think a split would see Democrats taking power at every level. It's simple math. If the GOP splits in half we have 50% Dem, 25% GOP1, 25% GOP2. Simplified, I understand. But I'll bet it's not far off.

Works for me.

Which is why they will not split. They understand it too. And you come back to a question of power.
And yes, it would probably be the salvation of your country.

[ti-amie]

Kyle Griffin
@kylegriffin1
Breaking: Lawyers representing Dominion Voting Systems have sent letters to conservative media personalities, the White House and Trump's personal attorney, warning that litigation related to their false claims about the company is "imminent."

https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/24/politics ... index.html

Dominion CEO John Poulos confirmed that the company would be taking legal action against several individuals "promoting lies and amplifying those lies ... on various media platforms since Election Day."

[ti-amie]

Adam Klasfeld @KlasfeldReports
INBOX:

Senator Ron Wyden statement—

“Jobless benefits for 12 million workers lapse today because Donald Trump is throwing a tantrum. Jobless workers will have no income to pay the rent due in five days. The stakes couldn’t be higher."

[ti-amie]

Thom Hartmann @Thom_Hartmann

It's time to bring paper-ballot voting - like in every other advanced democracy - back to America and kick out those who've privatized our vote. We've voted 100% on paper and by mail here in Oregon for 20+ years and it works very well.
@jennycohn1

[Togtdyalttai]

Thom Hartmann @Thom_Hartmann

It's time to bring paper-ballot voting - like in every other advanced democracy - back to America and kick out those who've privatized our vote. We've voted 100% on paper and by mail here in Oregon for 20+ years and it works very well.
@jennycohn1

Paper-ballot voting is absolutely the way to go, but it really needs better branding. Supporting something that uses more paper makes my brain spin a bit because of environmental messaging. Also, Politico updated their interactive map of which states use paper ballots recently:

https://www.politico.com/interactives/2 ... -machines/

There are essentially nine states which don't fully use paper ballots now: Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Texas. Oklahoma and Texas are the only ones where the vast majority of counties aren't in the process of switching.

[ti-amie]

I was today years old when I learned this.

Hijacking the electoral college: The plot to deny JFK the presidency 60 years ago


John F. Kennedy, right, is sworn in as the 35th president by Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, left, on Jan. 20, 1961. Attending are, at the first row, former president Dwight D. Eisenhower, left, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, second from right, and former vice president Richard M. Nixon. (STF/AFP via Getty Images)

By Ronald G. Shafer
Dec. 13, 2020 at 7:00 a.m. EST

It was a bitter, close election, and there were furious allegations of fraud.

After Democrat John F. Kennedy barely beat Republican Richard M. Nixon in the 1960 election, a coalition of opponents plotted to deny him the presidency in the electoral college. Most were White, conservative electors from the south who opposed the young Massachusetts senator’s liberal policies, especially his support for civil rights for Black Americans.

If these electors had succeeded, segregationist Democratic Sen. Harry Byrd of Virginia would have been elected president. His vice president would have been Republican Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona. Both men had nothing to do with the idea.

On Monday, the electoral college will meet to ratify the victory of Democrat Joe Biden over President Trump, who has refused to concede. Some Trump backers are pressing states to release electors pledged for Biden. At least 33 states prohibit such “faithless” electors, and most other states void switched votes.

The 1960 presidential election set off a political storm, much like this year’s contest. Kennedy wound up winning by only about 113,000 votes out of 69 million cast.

Republicans suspected voter fraud in 11 states and filed suit in two of them, Texas and Illinois, which Kennedy won by fewer than 9,000 votes. The suit in Illinois charged that the Democratic stronghold of Cook County had dug up Kennedy voters from the cemeteries of Chicago.

Judges threw out both suits. So the action moved to the electoral college. Nixon took no part in the vote challenges and told a reporter that “our country cannot afford the agony of a constitutional crisis.”

Immediately after the 1960 election, electors from Alabama and Mississippi agreed not to cast their votes for Kennedy, who had won both states. All of Mississippi’s eight electors and six of Alabama’s 11 electors were unpledged. The electors lobbied their counterparts in the electoral college to follow their lead.

Organizers of the movement came up with a three-point “Plan To Give the South a Partial Vote in the Affairs of the Nation.”

Plan A was for electors from 11 southern states to use their clout to persuade Kennedy to stop U.S. aid to Communist countries and to support “states’ rights,” a code for resisting racial integration.

If Kennedy refused, the electors would move to Plan B: a resolution calling for “reversing the position of candidates” in the election. That is, Vice President-elect Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas would be president, and Kennedy would be vice president.

Finally, there was Plan C: Republican electors from all 50 states would be invited to meet in Chicago to pick a president from a list of “outstanding southern men.” Among the choices were Byrd, segregationist governors Orval Faubus of Arkansas and Ross Barnett of Mississippi, and Georgia Sen. Richard Russell.

The goal was to have electors elect the president within the electoral college, said Lea Harris, a Democratic lawyer in Alabama. If that failed, as “a last resort” the electors would seek to switch enough votes to keep Kennedy from getting the 269 electoral votes needed for election and throw the race into the House of Representatives.

This had happened twice before in U.S. history. In 1800, the House picked Thomas Jefferson as president over Aaron Burr when the electoral college vote ended in a tie. In 1825, the House chose John Quincy Adams over Andrew Jackson, who had won the popular vote.

Over the years, there have been only about 165 “faithless” electors. This summer, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the rights of states to reject the votes of such electors.

The rebel southern electors wrote Republican electors urging them to switch their votes from Nixon. Republican Henry Irwin of Oklahoma, a pledged Nixon elector opposed to what he called Kennedy’s “socialist-labor” views, was receptive. It soon “became apparent to a shrewd observer that a possibility existed to deny the presidency to Kennedy,” he said later.

Irwin sent telegrams to 218 Republican electors urging them to switch from Nixon to Byrd. He also wrote all the GOP state chairmen. He got about 40 replies, but no commitments. “Feel obligated to Nixon,” one Kansas elector responded.

Oklahoma’s Republican Party chairman blasted Irwin’s scheme. “He apparently feels his opinion is superior to the judgment of one-half million Oklahoma voters who chose Richard Nixon,” the chairman said.

The rebellion spread in the South. Mississippi Gov. Barnett wrote electors in southern states urging them to cast their votes for Byrd and Goldwater. In Alabama, the Mobile Press declared in an editorial that “Southerners deeply concerned over racial mixing should lift their voices in an appeal to all their presidential electors.”

Efforts to release electors to vote for whomever they wished sprung up in Texas, Louisiana, Georgia, Virginia and South Carolina. “This had been a real threat,” JFK biographer Theodore Sorensen wrote later.

Two weeks before the electoral college vote, organizer Harris predicted that Kennedy wouldn’t receive enough votes to be elected. The White Citizens Council newspaper in Mississippi assured its readers that a southerner would win the presidency.

The rebel yells of revolt ended in a whimper, however. No part of the southern “plan” was ever carried out. Most electors felt morally obligated to cast their votes based on their state’s election results.

One South Carolina elector for Kennedy said he ignored numerous “crackpot” requests to change his vote, including an offer from the “Flying Tigers Rights Party” to give him stock in a company in the Philippines.

Kennedy won 303 electoral college votes to Nixon’s 219. Byrd got only 15 votes, one from Oklahoma’s Irwin and 14 from the Alabama and Mississippi electors. All 14 electors voted for South Carolina Democratic Sen. Strom Thurmond for vice president.

After the overwhelming defeat, the Alabama electors complained that Southerners could have controlled the election, but “their sycophantic political leaders failed them miserably.”

Ironically, as vice president, it fell to Nixon to announce the electoral college vote and his own defeat in early January in the House chamber. After starting alphabetically with the first votes from Alabama for Byrd, Nixon dryly remarked, “The gentleman from Virginia is now in the lead.”

Later that year, the Senate conducted hearings into proposals to revamp the electoral college. The system needed to be “brought out of the horse and buggy era and into the jet age,” said Sen. Mike Mansfield (D-Montana).

Sixty years later, the horse and buggy version is still up and running.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/ ... jfk-trump/

[ponchi101]

Indeed, never heard of that before.
But how surprising that it was the GOP that could not accept the popular vote. The party of integrity and decency. Who would have thought.

[ti-amie]

Alex Isenstadt @politicoalex
McConnell held a conference call with Senate Republicans this morning in which he pressed Hawley multiple times to explain his plans to object to the Electoral College. McConnell was met with silence, per multiple people familiar with the call. Turns out Hawley wasn’t present

McConnell has expressed concern that GOP senators up for re-election in ‘22 will be forced to take a vote on a seemingly pointless endeavor that will imperil them either in a general or primary election

Hawley has launched a small dollar fundraising push around his move. He sent out an email this afternoon asking donors to “stand” with him. Contributions go to Hawley’s campaign account

Jonathan Swan @jonathanvswan

Sources with direct knowledge tell me Hawley sent an email to Republican Senators after this call, explaining himself and sharing his press release from the day before. Lots of angst inside the conference.

[ti-amie]

Sahil Kapur @sahilkapur

McConnell blasts the CASH Act as "socialism for rich people," citing the fact that some of the aid covers families with kids who make around $300K. Schumer says that's a fabricated "excuse" because McConnell had no problem with non-targeted tax cuts that went to the rich.

Schumer makes McConnell an offer: Allow a vote on the House-passed CASH Act and he'll support a vote on Section 230, a voter fraud commission and "whatever right-wing conspiracy you'd like," even one that looks into whether Brad Raffensperger "has a brother named Ron."