Black Box Voting : HCPB, Holt, and Bradblog: Dancing with the Dark Side... or not?

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HCPB, Holt, and Bradblog: Dancing wit...

Black Box Voting » General discussion » HCPB, Holt, and Bradblog: Dancing with the Dark Side... or not?

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Udar Koschka
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: The_zapkitty

Post Number: 88
Registered: 2-2007

Best of Black Box?
Votes: 1 (A keeper?)

Posted on Thursday, April 2, 2009 - 4:01 am:

This is more general purpose than Holt specific so I'm placing it here to start with.

An interesting take on hand counted paper ballots and its supporters by Brad in the comments on this post over at Bradblog... and a cry of "Where are the HCPB supporters?!"

http://www.bradblog.com/?p=7031

... can a rush of HCPB supporters to Registrars all over the country provide the needed pressure to fix Holt's (still bad) bill?

And would it matter? Or will the bill yet again mysteriously mutate to counter anything good done by adding more problems elsewhere?

(The 1-step-forward-2-steps-back mutations have already started for this cycle, by the way. Just ask VotersUnited.)

Still, how is HCPB organization fairing? There seem to be a lot more converts to the idea than there was before... but is there any active organizing?

Does BBV have active interests in this area?

Other organizations?

And what about Brad's request for pilot projects?

Joel Morine
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Erased

Post Number: 282
Registered: 1-2008

Best of Black Box?
Votes: 1 (A keeper?)

Posted on Thursday, April 2, 2009 - 6:20 am:

Thank you for pointing this out, Udar.

To give credit where credit is due,
Holt did get one thing right with his bill.
The name...
Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2009
...states its purposes.

I often get the feeling this is a form of in-house humor on Capital Hill:
names for bills that are literally accurate as to purpose,
while the bills are primped in the news as larger reforms.
Here, the fix (according to the people who game the system)
for a system gamed with multiple fraud options
is to address the fact that voters have lost confidence in the system's too self-evident gaminess.
The operators' goal isn't to eliminate gaminess,
but rather to disguise the reek, so as to restore the marks' confidence.
The victims' trust in the game makes the con smoother, easier, shinier and more efficient to operate.

"Increased Accessibility" is even more elegant...and here is where the capital hill humor kicks in --
Whose increased accessibility to what?
The election fraud industry's illegal accessibility was excellent in this last election cycle; but too visibly evident.
So let's increase that accessibility by limiting its visibility --
or legalize gamers' offstage accessibility
so SOS's and election officials don't have to break laws and then lose sleep over downstream legal liability?

Were the election-fraud industry's bill-writers laughing in their martinis when they proposed that part of the title?

Transparency, accountability, verifiable audit trails, certifiable accuracy? Good luck on that.
But let's give credit where due, they didn't pretend any of that was in the bill by hinting at it in the title.

The Holt bill is clearly a candidate for an added chapter in a future revised edition of NaomiKlein's Shock Doctrine. A "cure" that accelerates the disease creating further need for a next cure to further accelerate the disease? (As are the bailout precedents.)

----------

... can a rush of HCPB supporters to Registrars all over the country provide the needed pressure to fix Holt's (still bad) bill?

And would it matter? Or will the bill yet again mysteriously mutate to counter anything good done by adding more problems elsewhere?

That last sentence is elegantly stated, sir,
and I feel as if I can guarantee that rhetorical question's statement of agenda even at this remote distance from their stomping grounds.

-------

I had to wonder at the tone of Bradblog's opening in that article...
It sounds as if Bradblog's prior article and lobbying was sole source of these new revisions in the bill?

Makes me appreciate the tone of this site all the more;
with apologies for doing what I do that degrades that tone however much--
offering comments like these before taking time to read the revisions in the bill.
For the sake of my own transparency--
I'm commenting from expectations based on past experience...
and grateful once again that so many better qualified people here
do a more real job of digging into the details point by point.

V. Kurt Bellman
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Formerelecdir

Post Number: 2911
Registered: 4-2006

Best of Black Box?
Votes: 2 (A keeper?)

Posted on Thursday, April 2, 2009 - 7:26 am:

An answer:

"... can a rush of HCPB supporters to Registrars all over the country provide the needed pressure to fix Holt's (still bad) bill? "

NO! Registars are the "mushrooms" in all of this. (They are kept in the dark and fed you-know-what.) If you want to lobby regarding the Holt bill, you must lobby the members of the relevant Congressional committee and their staffs. In fact, reaching the key staff may be more fruitful than "working" the member.

==========================================
http://kurtspeak.blogspot.com
(some relevant to subjects here, most not)

Udar Koschka
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: The_zapkitty

Post Number: 89
Registered: 2-2007

Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?)

Posted on Thursday, April 2, 2009 - 11:18 am:

Er... there seems to have been a misunderstanding, Kurt :-)

I think the idea was that the actuality of HCPB pilot projects springing up all over the U.S. would enable activists such as Brad to bring more effective pressure to bear on the Holt bill, not that the Registrars etc should be lobbied directly about the bill.

And local election officials would indeed be a key to such HCPB pilot projects, right?

But yes, lobbying the Registrars et al about congressional legislation would not be as effective as lobbying Congress... after all, that's what the Beltway is all about.

V. Kurt Bellman
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Formerelecdir

Post Number: 2912
Registered: 4-2006

Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?)

Posted on Thursday, April 2, 2009 - 12:08 pm:

Udar,

Yep. To the extent that pilot projects are springing up, then yes, fine, registrars will ikely crow about their successes (if they have them) to anyone who will listen.

Are they really springing up? Or are they limited to low-density population areas? I'd love to see SOME urban area give it a shot. And until it can be "road tested" in an urban area, it's missing a key component. Not everywhere can do what "Mayberry RFD" can do.

==========================================
http://kurtspeak.blogspot.com
(some relevant to subjects here, most not)

Udar Koschka
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: The_zapkitty

Post Number: 90
Registered: 2-2007

Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?)

Posted on Thursday, April 2, 2009 - 1:51 pm:

Kurt asked: "Are they really springing up?"

That's the question from Brad: Where are they?

Interest seems to have increased as people realize what's been happening, but is that interest widespread enough to start organizing projects yet?

And where there is interest will the local officials try to spike it? If so how can they be talked into it?

Surely they have urban areas in the Vermont and New Hampshire? :-)

Elsewhere in the world urban populations are successfully canvassed, but adaptions of such to U.S. requirements are not going to be a snap.

Living at the end of 10 miles of gravel road from a town that makes Mayberry look cosmopolitan doesn't put me in a great position for urban research and for some reason they took my drivers license away when I lost my sight ;)

(I miss the city...)

Well Brad started on this when someone insisted on the banning of e-tabulation in Holt's latest and so I'll see how far it'll go.

If I mix it in with watching Holt game the hell out of the election integrity community again I might keep my sanity... I might...

V. Kurt Bellman
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Formerelecdir

Post Number: 2913
Registered: 4-2006

Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?)

Posted on Friday, April 3, 2009 - 4:55 am:

Well, Udar,

In the sense I meant "urban", not much in New Hampshire, and nothing I can think of in Vermont, qualifies. I'm talking about a racially, economically and culturally diverse urban area with local sub-communities that may or may not need special electoral services.

Showing that a bunch of uniformly Caucasian English-speaking college-degree holding suburbanites can hold a genteel and fair HCPB election is hardly the challenge, is it? Testing that you can hold one well in a place that most people only see in TV crime drama settings - now THAT'S the acid test.

Trying to hold it together while a Dominican and a Mexican native argue over the fine points of the Spanish on the ballot while a whole extended family of Vietnamese voters from 12 different precincts all come in to vote together at the same polling site - that's the real world of election problems, Udar.

All the while a Black Panther Party member is outside the polling site with a billy club preventing imagined white supremacists from supressing the vote while 15 TV news cameras are being shoved in the Black Panther's face.

==========================================
http://kurtspeak.blogspot.com
(some relevant to subjects here, most not)

Udar Koschka
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: The_zapkitty

Post Number: 91
Registered: 2-2007

Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?)

Posted on Saturday, April 4, 2009 - 12:52 am:

Hmmm... yeah, I miss the city too :-)

Now what, if anything, did any of that have to do with hand-counting the ballots? Nothing :-)

All that's over with before the count ever starts.

Any and all of those individuals may observe and record the count, space permitting, but they may not interfere with the count except to report suspected problems to election officials. Reports that are automatically part of the public record whether genuine, imagined, or spurious.

If they want to be more involved with the counting process they can volunteer to join the pool of counters for the next election.

Now there are vulnerabilities, of course, but it'll be up to the actual design of the ballot counting process to forestall any bad actors from the worst of their efforts at monkey-wrenching that process... and building in transparency and citizen oversight from the start will go a long way towards preventing funny business.

As long as people are made aware that they are in charge of their elections again, that is.

Catherine Ansbro
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Catherine_a

Post Number: 5500
Registered: 12-2004

Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?)

Posted on Saturday, April 4, 2009 - 2:55 am:

I do not see urban areas as an impediment. Locate precincts well in advance so as to have enough space to accommodate counters & observers. Hire enough counters to do the job, depending on the number of voters & the number of races and ballot issues. (Hiring counters for paper ballots costs less than paying the expenses that accompany electronic machines.)

Precincts that have become too large should be split up.

It's not rocket science, it's "just" a matter of having the political will. The fact that it's awkward now doesn't mean it has to be that way forever into the future.

In Ireland while we have far fewer races/ballot issues compared to most US elections, our PR-STV elections (with ranked preferences of sometimes more than 20 candidates) is easily 20-100 times more complex to count. Yet this is done reliably and accurately with full public observation even in dense urban areas.

Samuel Scharff
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Abacus

Post Number: 137
Registered: 8-2005

Best of Black Box?
Votes: 1 (A keeper?)

Posted on Sunday, April 5, 2009 - 4:43 pm:

Kurt - 4/2

�I'd love to see SOME urban area give it a shot. And until it can be "road tested" in an urban area, it's missing a key component.�

King County, including Seattle; election for Governor, 2004
[I�ve posted this before but thought it should be mentioned in this thread for readers who may have missed it.]

In 2004 here in Washington State we had an election for Governor which made headlines everywhere for the extraordinarily close result. The election was conducted with hand-marked paper ballots and opscan machines. [primarily; * State-wide, Gregoire won by about 130 votes after a hand recount of more than 2.8 million ballots. It was finally settled in Court. *

Here is how it looked in King County, in which Seattle is located.

We had 594,000 absentees� ballots and 305,000 polling place ballots, about 900,000 total here.

===Begin clips *

My team of three sorted and counted 5,544 votes during a nine-hour shift. We agreed unanimously - the Republican, the Democrat and I, the county worker - about who should get every one of those votes.

Each ballot was counted by the Republican appointee: McClellan, 21, a recent University of Washington grad who applied to be the Rossi family nanny and got this job because her brother-in-law works for the campaign.

Then the same stacks were counted by the Democratic appointee: John Reese, 53, a Seattle pro-Palestinian activist who said he was "way left of liberal; I guess I'd call myself a radical."

They kept their counts secret and gave them to me. If the numbers matched, we reported the results and resealed the box. If they differed, we started over. If the second counts still didn't agree, we were instructed to return the box to be given to a new team.

The system of checks and double-checks didn't stop there. If our tallies for a precinct varied by even one vote from the machine recount, another team would later reopen the box and count the entire precinct by hand again.

...With all the recent news about uncounted votes and ballots being found in the side pockets of precinct machines, I expected a slipshod operation. I was completely wrong.

I am now convinced that in the counting of votes, humans are unquestionably superior to machines.

..."I'm so impressed with this system," McClellan said. "It's near impossible to corrupt, and it seems much more sensitive than a machine count. All the criticisms I hear about what we're doing are wrong."

Reese agreed. "I don't have much faith in the American political system, but I have faith in what we're doing here," he said. "I would put people counting over machine counting any time."

...those critics who are blasting the manual recount on the face of it don't know what
they're talking about. Such as former Gov. Dan Evans: "Can you imagine 300 newly hired, ill-trained, overworked people counting by hand with people looking over their shoulders and getting accurate counts? It's ludicrous."

I can do more than imagine it, governor. I saw it with my own eyes.

===End clips

Note, also, that the losing Republicans challenged the process and the findings through the courts. After losing at the Appellate level they found no basis for going on and gave up. And know that they are as gnarly and well-funded a crew as you�ll find anywhere [not to say that our Dems are angels].

[The recount took about five weeks, as I remember.]

The earlier posts also included information from a Caltech-MIT study..��The central finding of this investigation is that manually counted paper ballots have the lowest average incidence of spoiled, uncounted, and unmarked ballots, followed closely by lever machines and optically scanned ballots. Punchcard methods and systems using direct recording electronic devices (DREs) had significantly higher average rates of spoiled, uncounted, and unmarked ballots than any of the other systems.� *

Canada, Sweden, Germany, Italy and other nations, all around the globe, hand count paper ballots routinely.

Canada�s Paper Ballot System *

Summary numbers:
Registered voters - 21,243,473
Number of polling stations - 60,728
Average of registered voters per station (minimum of 250 per precinct) - 350
Total ballots cast - 12,997,185
Average ballots cast per polling station - 214
Ballots rejected - 139,412 or 1.1% -
Voter turn-out - 61.2%

Within four hours after the last polls closed in Canada's parliamentary election, officials had hand-counted virtually every one of nearly 13 million paper ballots.

===
Consider also this report from Calgary and Edmonton: � Calgary, population 1,000,000, where ballots are counted by hand; and Edmonton, population 700,000, which uses opscan systems. In the last two elections [but maybe not always], Calgary totals came in earlier than Edmonton�s.
Costs: Calgary, $2/voter; Edmondton: $7/voter.

Finally, though not directly relevant to urban elections, it�s interesting to see what a hcpb process can do. This is from Nancy Tobi, re New Hampshire: �Nationally, the average number of ballots processed in any polling place in the country is under 1000. But New Hampshire towns hand count up to 3,600 ballots on any given Election Night -- and at less cost than it takes to operate a single voting machine. The costs of printing paper ballots, hiring local community hand counters, and even bringing in a specialized manager, if need be, are much lower than the investment in computerized voting equipment requiring continual upgrades, maintenance, and specialized storage space.

�New Hampshire's ballots are among the most complex ballots in the nation, because we have the largest citizen legislature and many multi-member districts. But we still manage to hand count 3 to 4 times the national average of ballots in any given polling place, and wrap up the counting to announce our results on Election Night.�

===
* Endnotes
Three WA counties had DREs as well as opscan systems used for both polling place and absentee voting. Some aspects of the results were interesting; and there was a court case [Snohomish County]. But none of this is really relevant to our present concerns.

�Tedious hand recount begins,�
Seattle Post-intelligencer 12/9/04
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/203043_governor09xx.html?searchpagefrom=1&se archdiff=11

�Counter for a day finds few bugs in recount process�
Seattle Times 12/18/04 Danny Westneat
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002123626_danny18.html
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1304053/posts

[D. Westneat is a very well-regarded long-time staffer for the Seattle Times.]

�Voting Inside-Outside the Box�
League of Women Voters of Washington State Committee - telecon with Pierre Blain, a spokesman for Elections Canada.
http://www.canoe.ca/CNEWSUSElection0011/28_canadianelection-ap.html
http://www.elections.ca/loi/ref/CEA-LEC_e.pdf

�Judge upholds Gregoire's election; Rossi won't appeal�
Seattle Post-Intelligencer 6/6/05
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/227307_judgerules06ww.html

�Residual Votes Attributable to Technology - An Assessment of the Reliability of Existing Voting Equipment�
The Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project 3/30/01
http://www.hss.caltech.edu/%7Evoting/CalTech_MIT_Report_Version2.pdf

Automated vote count 'too costly'
Sun [Calgary] 2007-10-17 03:03:05 MST
http://calsun.canoe.ca/News/Alberta/2007/10/17/4582641-sun.html

Hands-on Elections: A complete handbook
www.democracyfornewhampshire.com Nancy Tobi

Abacus

Udar Koschka
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: The_zapkitty

Post Number: 92
Registered: 2-2007

Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?)

Posted on Sunday, April 5, 2009 - 10:38 pm:

It's not a mystery. When you utilize humans you're leveraging multiple units of the most advanced Artificial Intelligence system on the planet.

(Think you're a natural intelligence? Explain your grades in school :-)

)

And you're keeping those systems honest by pitting them against each other while using tokens of information (the ballots) that are easily and readily perceived by all of the competing units.

The alternative is to use the simple, crude mechanical AI's you find in current EVM's... which suffer from the dual vulnerabilities of both hiding the tokens (and thus the counting process) from humans and yet not standing a chance in hell of outthinking a human determined to game the election.

There never was a contest, really... but getting the switchover to HCPB adopted will not be easy and it seems certain that a variety of different interests will quietly do their best to derail the process or at least contaminate it in their favor.

And some will fight it not so quietly.

If only that damned HAVA money had gone into researching accurate elections instead of going into the wallets of Diebold etc.

Joel Morine
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Erased

Post Number: 284
Registered: 1-2008

Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?)

Posted on Monday, April 6, 2009 - 1:23 pm:

Samuel,
Thanks for re-posting that.

Kurt,
With all sincere appreciation for yr comments, info & viewpt...
statements like...
All the while a Black Panther Party member is outside the polling site with a billy club preventing imagined white supremacists from supressing the vote while 15 TV news cameras are being shoved in the Black Panther's face.
...detract from yr point.

Yes, I recall there was a report of something akin to that in Phila in past election, but still...
it was an eg cherry-picked (first by news media, now by you) for its usefulness as a most extremely egregious case.

Nor are white supremacists "imagined" just because none showed up to confront an extreme eg of paranoia that was shooting itself in the foot -- & (arguably) providing fuel for white supremacist agendas.

The contrast between
uniformly Caucasian English-speaking college-degree holding suburbanites
and
all those Dominicans, Mexicans, Vietnamese & paranoid BlackPanther
is structured in a way that
(1) invites a view of yr views re: race that is inconsistent with the ?1000+? other posts of yrs that I've read these past years, &
(2) adds no strength to yr argument, which might be stronger if the right-angle (seeming) addition of race to the topic didn't muddy the waters w/ how folk felt abt that 2nd issue.

Stated differently, folk passing as "white" in their own heads (I've still never seen white nor black skin) are every bit as capable of making a confusing hassle in a polling place as any group of confused arguing browner foreigners.

Yes, I realize language, not race, was the pt of yr eg...
I'm addressing my pt to the implicit flavor & shape of the remarks, which fit a standard past pattern used by mediocre hacks that IMO is well beneath yr typical excellence here.

V. Kurt Bellman
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Formerelecdir

Post Number: 2917
Registered: 4-2006

Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?)

Posted on Tuesday, April 7, 2009 - 5:54 am:

Joel:

The point is that urban locales create or are afflicted with, depending on your view, unique issues of access that more suburban and rural areas frequently do not suffer from. "Diversity" is a double-edged sword, with both benefits and challenges to overcome especially in the electoral realm, and especially if you want to use HCPB.

Remember, Los Angeles County is required to print ballots and all election publications in 8 languages. That is what I call at least a "challenge" in paper elections.

And Joel, like the sound of it or not, but I ran a county election operation of 181 precincts, only 48 of which were in the urban city, but those 48 created a majority of my "incidents" that needed central office response. That's just an unfortunate fact.

I don't know what it is - a less educated electorate, higher running passions, that's where the out-of-state lawyers went to camp out outside polling sites. Maybe a combination of all the above. That's where completely irresponsible groups like ACORN operated, maybe. I'm sorry also if you don;t like this opinion, but ACORN is a menace. Nothing will move me off of THAT view. I've lived with them face to face, not just reading about them in news articles.

==========================================
Sometimes, every once in a while, the real reason "your side" lost an election is because more people really DID vote for the "other guy", hard as that may be to fathom.

Bev Harris
Board Administrator
Username: Admin

Post Number: 10434
Registered: 12-2004

Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?)

Posted on Tuesday, April 7, 2009 - 11:57 am:

Kurt,

Just to clarify, the multi-language ballots have the candidate's names in our own alphabet as well, so there is not a problem with hand counting them. I think the point you were making is that the logistics of calculating the number of ballots and printing them is very challenging, which is correct, but not a reason to eliminate voter-marked paper ballots.

This probably belongs in another thread, but I would very much like to hear more about your experiences with ACORN & friends. When you say they are a "menace", do you believe the organization itself tries to stuff the voting list, or that the organization's management and practices are sufficiently sloppy that it puts the integrity of the voting list at risk through bad quality control processes? I don't see how ACORN has anything at all to do with hand counting or paper ballots, however.

V. Kurt Bellman
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Formerelecdir

Post Number: 2918
Registered: 4-2006

Best of Black Box?
Votes: 5 (A keeper?)

Posted on Tuesday, April 7, 2009 - 1:12 pm:

Bev,

Allow me to be sufficiently precise about my view of ACORN before you move this elsewhere, which is actually a good idea.

ACORN has very little to do with hand counting or paper ballots, but VERY MUCH to do with the panoply of urban electoral problems, because it is their sole focus from what I have observed.

I believe it is abundantly clear to the point of irrefutability that they are guilty of AT LEAST gross sloppiness. I say "at least" because they have exhibited NO willingness or interest in tailoring their operations to the peculiarities of individual state laws. They try to operate under a quasi-federal umbrella that is specious at best, and they move operatives wholesale from state to state without hesitation or feeling a need to research state statutes.

I do believe they attempt to stuff the voting list, and would so testify in a court of law. The evidence is overwhelming. I believe 100% that their "we are the ones having the fraud committed UPON US" is a brilliantly contrived plausible deniability ploy. They are doing NOTHING to rectify it over many, many years.

That said, there is NO evidence that they have attempted outright voter fraud, merely registration fraud. The analogy I would draw is they are planting "unarmed land mines". No one will be harmed by an unarmed land mine, but they are laying out there capable of being armed later, if and when someone decides to do it. But perhaps worse than that, those false voter records are "debris" that waste public resources.

Further, ACORN is inherently dishonest. They claim to be "non-partisan". Then why was Commonwealth Court here in Harrisburg loaded with DOZENS of ACORN backers in their case here last fall wearing t-shirts emblazoned with "ACORN for OBAMA" in a court of law? Non-partisan my backside!

Not that there's that much wrong with partisanship. Just be honest about it, or would that dry up their funding streams?

At the VERY MINIMUM, ACORN degrades the quality of voter files, which are used for things beyond just voting. My city, the City of Reading, PA, has well over 50,000 voter registrations in it. Given the number of non-citizens we know are there, and the number of children in the schools, and the total population, there simply CANNOT BE 50,000 eligible voters in that city. It simply is not possible. And the number of non-citizens that I PERSONALLY know of whose names I found on the voter roles is ASTONISHING!

I believe ACORN accomplishes this because ACORN'S normal modus operandi is to fill out the form FOR a registrant, never actually giving them the opportunity to read the form and its instructions about citizenship for themselves. They admitted in a public meeting here they never let the registrant handle the form except to sign it.

My personal belief is that ACORN is a brilliantly designed special-purpose organized crime syndicate for election and voter registration criminal activity, and those who have found themselves in the role of apologists for ACORN are dupes at best, and accessories at worst. And in that I include our Commander in Chief.

Bev Harris
Board Administrator
Username: Admin

Post Number: 10435
Registered: 12-2004

Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?)

Posted on Tuesday, April 7, 2009 - 1:53 pm:

Absolutely brilliant, insightful post Kurt. This completes a missing link for me. When the time is right -- not too long, I think -- I will elaborate with a full main blog item.

Joel Morine
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Erased

Post Number: 285
Registered: 1-2008

Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?)

Posted on Tuesday, April 7, 2009 - 2:44 pm:

Kurt,
I made a very specific pt re: a flavor of innuendo to how one specific post was structured, that I felt belittled yr pt. I didn't even disagree with the pt you were making.

I think the way you've stated it in yr followup post verifies what I said.
None of which argued anything about ACORN, nor the pts you made re: added complexities in some environs, which I haven't/don't disagree(d) with.

Appreciate yr re-stating the case...and I also found yr statements re: ACORN interesting.

Is it fair to say that it isn't only ACORN that
I believe 100% that their "we are the ones having the fraud committed UPON US" is a brilliantly contrived plausible deniability ploy. ??
... and likewise for yr comments re "laying unarmed land mines" -- a fine analogy.

BTW, I logged in today to remove the post my comments were in. I felt the need to say it once to you, but that having been done, it adds nothing here, is too personally directed at a pt that IMO is not consonant with how I feel abt the vast majority of yr posts.

Joel Morine
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Erased

Post Number: 286
Registered: 1-2008

Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?)

Posted on Tuesday, April 7, 2009 - 2:46 pm:

I stand corrected. I thought the notebook with the "X" thru it implied an ability to delete our own posts that we don't seem to have.

No harm to that given the round of clarifying disclaimers.

V. Kurt Bellman
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Formerelecdir

Post Number: 2919
Registered: 4-2006

Best of Black Box?
Votes: 4 (A keeper?)

Posted on Tuesday, April 7, 2009 - 4:49 pm:

Joel,

Yes, I think your point about ACORN not being the only bad actor is this arena is spot on. So far, this has been MOSTLY, but not exclusively, the realm of organizations with a leftward leaning agenda. AND I think this is key - many ACORN types believe that they are righting a wrong. I disagree. The "greater good" they seek (universal suffrage), while laudable as a goal, is contrary to present law as they practice it. The rectification of that is a ripe public policy debate (Should the law be the way it is?), but their attempts at "self help" need to be rejected in the meantime.

That said, I fear for the next chapter. One thing history has proven to me is that once a Pandora's Box of misdeeds gets opened, SOMEONE on the right will "up the ante" and raise it to an art form. If registration hijinks become the "new frontier", it's gonna get UGLY!

For better or worse, in politics there's one unspoken but dearly held philosophy that gets used extensively - "We have to do what we do just to even the playing field from what the other guys are doing."

If there's another right wing response coming to counter the misdeeds of ACORN types and their brethren, I get afraid just thinking about it.

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Posted on Thursday, May 21, 2009 - 2:22 pm:

I could be wrong, but I still believe that ACORN is an issue-oriented rather than a partisan organization, and that if Obama hadn't pretended to support their issues and McCain had, they'd have been wearing ACORN FOR MCCAIN t-shirts. They do appear to be on the left, but since neither of the two major political parties are on the left (the left tends to be against wars of aggression, against corporate bailouts, and in favor of socialized medicine, but neither major party takes any of these positions), I think they'd be grateful for any support for their issues from either major party or its candidates.

Even if ACORN was actually flooding the system with bogus registration applications, what would stop them from gaming the system in the opposite direction, by discarding as "bogus," registration applications from people who do not appear to support their issues? I have to wonder about Pennsylvania's policy of not requiring that ALL registrations (including bogus ones) be submitted to elections officials, compared to other states that require that all registrations be submitted with the bogus ones flagged.

I suspect there might be good reason for requiring that all registration applications be turned in so that the elections officials can sift through them and pick any bogus registration applications out of the "submitted as valid" pile, and pick any valid registration applications out of the "flagged as bogus" pile.

Many partisan groups gather registration applications and I'm not sure they'd be the best ones to decide which ones are valid and which aren't.

Of course since elections officials are often partisan themselves, I'm not sure that elections officials are the best ones to do this either.

As with everything else in an electoral process, just as with the process of counting votes, I believe that the registration process should also be subject to public oversight, and that the more public oversight there is, the better chance of getting things right.

Given Kurt's extreme antagonism towards ACORN, without public oversight, how can I be sure that marks on a registration application were placed there by people gathering forms for ACORN, or were placed there after the forms had been submitted, by an election official with great hostility towards ACORN, who wanted to blame it on them? The more extreme partisanship there is, the more necessary public oversight becomes.

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Posted on Friday, October 2, 2009 - 6:09 am:

Todd,

Look around, sir. Even our founder here, the great Bev Harris (no neocon, for sure) has found ACORN quite troubling on many levels.

Helping the poor is no justification for lawlessness. In Pennsylvania, ACORN is under a complete "cease and desist" order for all activities (from this Democratic state government) for lawless status and activities. They are official persona non grata here.

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Posted on Friday, October 2, 2009 - 7:25 am:

I work for the Democratic Caucus of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, and I am assigned to the office of one of the busier and most respected Committee Chairman as a Legislative Research Analyst.

I used to do all kinds of advocacy here. I don't do it any more. I've changed my particpatory role to pointing out the landmines faced by those without a thorough understanding of how the legislative process actually works.

Is that a "downer" or "buzzkill" for newbies with all kinds of you-know-what and vinegar? Yeah, I guess it is. But it's information they need.

There is NOTHING easy about this task. It's some of the toughest issue advocacy work you will ever do. You need to internalize that fact. There are right now zero (0) votes in this General Assembly for the kinds of things you're talking about, ZERO. And that includes some very devout liberals/progressives/leftists, several of whom are close personal friends, even though I'm a "blue dog". You need 102 to pass a bill.

Good luck.

Oh, the "zero" status IS because of the practical technical difficulties of legislation as much as ideology.

And giving up my blog was a condition of my employment with the House, sir.

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Posted on Friday, October 2, 2009 - 7:39 am:

I was never paid a dime to do ANYTHING here, nor is anyone. I'm not even sure Bev draws a salary.

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Posted on Friday, October 2, 2009 - 7:50 am:

So stating views is "trying to manipulate the conversation" now? Ask Bev. I am a VALUED participant with valuable insights.

And sir, go back and read. No threats. One warning. Where is all this hostility coming from? This is NOT a political ideology site. There are TONS of those. This site is politocally neutral, as Bev will be glad to confirm.

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Posted on Friday, October 2, 2009 - 9:04 am:

Todd,

When I say "work", I mean this issue IS "work", HARD work. It's no breeze. This is hard issue advocacy work for anyone who cares about elections. It's no picnic. Losses are more common than wins.

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Posted on Friday, October 2, 2009 - 9:45 am:

How do you mean? I'm not sure I'm getting your drift. Maybe it's my health situation. I'm not intentionally being obtuse here.

What can I do for you? I'm pointing out that these issues (elections) have powerful forces arrayed against the reform movement, some of them key constituencies of the more progressive party, OTHER THAN corporate interests, although they're out there, too.

One of the most eye-opening things I've seen in my short tenure with legislators is just how much being a donor counts in terms of getting access. It's a shame, and a scandal, but "it is what it is."

Getting a toehold to even be heard is an EXTREMELY tough exercise. Being an angry activist sign carrier type is a recipe for being ignored and dismissed, IN MY EXPERIENCE. I see it daily. We're the last state without a budget. Protests are legion here. Another angle is unfortunately needed, especially in states with a more "moderate" socio-political tradition.

Not everywhere is California. Do NOT ever underestimate the influence of traditions in legislative practice and the details of the conduct of elections in the various states. There are WIDELY disparate traditions that are deeply engrained in these states' various cultures.

I've never yet seen even one legislator take an appointment with a sign carrier. Everyone is in business attire I see going into legislative offices.

Fair? Reasonable? Perhaps not. But it's true.

Getting into the ancient history of Bev's advocacy would be tedious here. Her focus has morphed away from the machines per se to the larger issue of transparency and public oversight. She is becoming, IN MY OPINION, far more effective with the new focus. It's a harder argument to counter without sounding pretty scary. Who can afford to be seen as against public transparency and oversight, after all?

But being against going to paper ballots is a position MANY MANY are comfortable with. That's just the facts. High tech gear gets the benefit of the "Oooh, Shiiiiney!" effect. Being against technology is bad politics in many places. You need an end run. Transparency might be it.

There is value in incrementalism rather than "swinging for the fences" EXCEPT PERHAPS at the federal level. Congress is loathe to fix recent bills if they have flaws, due to huge workloads. But in states, trying to do "it all" at once is a bad strategy. The more a bill does, the more opposition it attracts, unless it is a project of leadership.

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Posted on Friday, October 2, 2009 - 9:35 pm:

All posts by Trent Wittenbach, calling himself Tood G Smith while doing his latest trolling, have been removed.

Kurt is a valued member of our forums.

Trent Wittenbach is a troll and a disruptor. And Trent, I have been occupied with an immediate family member in serious surgery this week and do not appreciate your taking advantage of this stressful time to spam the forums.

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Posted on Friday, October 2, 2009 - 11:56 pm:

Good on you, Bev! Thanks

Abacus

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Posted on Saturday, October 3, 2009 - 4:10 pm:

Compliments again, Bev, with thanks.
Likewise, to Kurt.

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Posted on Sunday, October 4, 2009 - 4:30 pm:

I truly wish the Trents of the world could stick to the issues and stop attacking people. Trent represents a completely valid point of view, especially in some locales. (okay, not s'much mine, but c'est la vie)

For clarification of posts I made but now lacking context due to other deletions, in case there is any misunderstanding, I now work as a Research Analyst for the PA House on a committee that does NOT handle election legislation, but I am on a friendly basis with legislators from both sides of the aisle, some of whom ARE on the relevant committee of jurisdiction that handles election bills. There are none seriously pending.

But if there were, it would be a violation of ethics for me to use my position to OFFICIALLY lobby any member on those bills. But I have "off the record" conversations with them socially. They are smart people and know what they think of bills without my help. They also know of my experience and I will answer any questions they come to me with. BUT ethics demands that they do the asking.

It would ALSO be ethically difficult to keep up my former blog. I am here to serve, not make policy, although my research activities do often inform and affect policy decisions. I am a "down the middle" technocrat who gives the most unspun, unbiased data a human is likely to be able to create. I am the "bean counter" that both caucuses trust for financial number-crunching, although I do work for the Democrats. They pay me and they direct what I'm working on. My committee chairman, partly because of the wonderful type of man he is, and partly because our committee handles bills that are seldom partisanly "hot", openly shares my work with the Republicans.

That's his prerogative.

I feel I need to back away from telling election reformers what I think (most of you know) of policy issues too. What I WILL still comment on are practical issues of tactics and effectiveness comments.

You can't possibly understand how a state legislature TRULY works until you see it everyday. It's not what ANYONE thinks. It's far more honorable, yet stuck in more quirky "habits" and "quaint institutions" than outsiders could ever imagine.

The coolest experience I have had since getting here was calling the Chambers of the Chief Justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court for some information from his staff on the makeup of a committee he had appointed, and the Chief Justice got on the phone himself and talked with me for 15 minutes or so. I was star-struck but he quickly put me at ease with some jokes at my boss's expense. It was a highlight for me.

Oh, and lobbyists do have HUGE influence, because they represent easily quantifiable constituencies, like the Fraternal Order of Police, the Attorney General's office, or even the ACLU. Without professional lobbyists and legislative liaisons, legislatures would be chaos.

But the main thing that gets attention from the general public are old-fashioned snail mail letters with a postage stamp on them. Nothing, NOTHING, has more impact from the public. Twenty letters on a given topic beats 100 sign carriers with a bullhorn any day.

Oh yes, and bills. The average length of a piece of legislation (aside from budgets and other stuff that HAS TO BE big) is about 2 pages. The biggest I've seen was a little over 200. I can't imagine Congress with bills 1000+ pages!

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Posted on Sunday, October 4, 2009 - 6:55 pm:

Kurt...

Excellent!

Thank you

Abacus

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Posted on Tuesday, October 6, 2009 - 3:19 pm:

Appreciate the update and perspectives, Kurt.
Pleased to hear you're so aptly niched.

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Posted on Thursday, October 8, 2009 - 7:54 am:

TROLL ALERT!

By the way, "being" a Democrat means that is how you are registered on your voter registration, nothing more, nothing less. It's a label, period. It defines in which primary I may vote. Since 2000, I have been in each major party several times.

My boss is a "Blue Dog" Democrat in his 17th term in office. He is in some ways even more conservative than I am, and has always been. True liberals tend to not do well in his district, as a few progressive Congressional contenders have discovered. Many culturally conservative Roman Catholic Democrats. They split tickets immensely.

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Posted on Friday, October 9, 2009 - 6:06 am:

Trent,

I have never filed even a single lawsuit, or participated in helping another person prepare one (I have done both be the plaintiff, and help another do the research to be a plaintiff) that was dismissed for being frivolous. I've disqualified candidates, most recently of the Green Party, with my efforts, yes, and that had ticked some of them off. But I won that case, so it can't be frivolous, can it? I can be expected to show up again in 2010 if I can challenge another candidate I oppose, IF I have standing (not easy).

I have done or helped in about 20 petition challenges, and been an expert witness in perhaps 40 others, and not one was dismissed as frivolous. Of the ones I filed personally, I won all but one, and the one I lost I lost because I got the total of valid signatures down to the minimum number but lost the case by one signature. I knew I had a tough case there. I had to bat 1.000, but I took a shot. I only batted .950.

Go back in history, Trent, and look at 2008's returns. If all Republicans from recent years had STAYED Republicans, in registration and vote, we'd be looking at President McCain.

"Core beliefs" of the parties change. So do its registrants. I am proud to call myself (apt in PA) an Arlen Specter Democrat.

In fact, I find myself in favor of actually SINGLE PAYER health reform, because my recent health care experiences have led me to the point that I distrust the health insurance cartel. I clearly don't fit in the current Republican party. Heck, I've never even BEEN in a white Southern Baptist church, so how could I? Those ARE the rules of entry now, right? But I STILL find the current resident of the White House unacceptable on MOST policy grounds. Based on the votes in the 2008 Democratic primary in PA, that puts me in the majority of Democrats here.

This ain't Obama's Democratic Party in THIS state, and ESPECIALLY my PART of this state. James Carville fairly accurately, if snarkily, described Pennsylvania as Philly and Pittsburgh with Alabama in between. I live apparently in the Alabama part.

My boss represents himself as what he is - a conservative Democrat. He has electorally CRUSHED both Republicans AND Democratic "progressives". He matches the prevailing political opinion in his district PERFECTLY. 17 straight wins. Impressive.

There are several Democratic Blue Dogs who chair important committees in this state. They are FAR more effective than the "progressives" are in THEIR committees.

There once was a Democratic Party that included Presidents Truman and Kennedy, and even was once the home of Ronald Reagan before he became disillusioned with what the party had become. I'm part of the building movement to bring THAT Democratic Party back into fashion, and throw the current band of leftists in control of the party onto the party's historical scrapheap. If we don't get rid of their influence, the voters will get rid of OURS. This is still a centrist nation.

I will FOREVER reregister into whichever party has not lost touch with the center. The two major parties are apparently alternately in love with their radical fringes, to their own peril. Yet they persist. In 1993, the Democrats overplayed their hand and got their butts handed to them in 1994. Right now, they're in mid-process of doing it again.

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Posted on Friday, October 9, 2009 - 8:42 am:

In case anyone is wondering, Kurt is not talking with an imaginary friend. I am deleting spam posts from Trent Wittenbach, who consistently violates our policies by using false names and launching personal attacks. Paid troll? I'm beginning to wonder. Delete delete delete.

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Posted on Friday, October 9, 2009 - 10:01 am:

Leftists in control of the Democratic party? I'm part of the building movement to bring back the Democratic Party that included Presidents Truman and Kennedy, and which Ronald Reagan left because he disagreed with it, and throw the current band of centrists and conservatives in control of the party onto the party's historical scrapheap.

Really. What you claim you are trying to do is literally the opposite of what I am trying to do (and yes, I am a registered Democrat and member of my local town committee).

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Posted on Friday, October 9, 2009 - 10:07 am:

Well Bob, that's fine, have at it. But know that IF you succeed, you will have created a marginalized and discredited party in the meantime, that has next to no impact on public policy, except in small regional pockets, kind of like the Republicans of today. Much like the Canadian Conservatives of the late 80's and early 90's.

Ideological purity is a recipe for disaster, IMHO. The key is coalition building and embracing the center. IF you succeed in creating the type of Democratic Party you desire, they will NEVER be electable in places like Pennsylvania statewide. The only way to run statewide here is to be AGGRESSIVELY moderate.

Following clowns like Howard Dean is suicidal.

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Posted on Friday, October 9, 2009 - 10:55 am:

Kurt's comments re: health care remind me of a gentleman I met canvassing for NYPIRG in mid80s. He was an engineer who'd retired as CEO of his own engineering company with a solid nest egg, and his retrospective self-description was lifelong very conservative Republican. Approaching 70, he got ill. Between his insurance co's evasions and medical system misdiagnosis he ended up with a 2yr debacle that went thru his entire savings (incl lawyer money fighting the insurance co.). When he was finally healthy, and broke, and newly 70, he went back to work for someone else's engineering co. in a middling position at lowest salary he'd made since his 20s...best job he could get at his age, despite his skills and history.

He didn't call himself an anarchist, but he sure sounded like one when he got on subject of govt regulation enabling/protecting insurance & medical industry ways and means. It was the legal stuff that had him hottest...hence the anarchist tone ranting (only apt word -- I stated my self-intro paragraph and he went off in white heat for a while) at govt protections of what he regarded as insurance co crime even more than the insurance company.

Isn't that, less specifically -- multiplied by many folk's many issues, the tale of last Presidential election? And Dems are no less susceptible than Repubs to same reaction in next election ... Kurt's 1993 eg being an especially apt one for the occasion.

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Posted on Friday, October 9, 2009 - 11:23 am:

Joel,

EXACTLY! The Repubs collapsed into themselves because they couldn't figure out what to be anymore. They had lost the "soul" of their message, slowly, incrementally, but surely. The British Labour Party seems similarly doomed. U.S. Democrats are just better at doing it faster than anyone else. Clinton survived 1996 by going hyper-centrist, (remember "triangulation"?), but Congressionally, it took Republican screwups to end their reign. The Democrats are now screwing up at "light speed" nationally.

Newt became Speaker becuase he wasn't a Congressional Democrat, not because of his message.

Ditto Obama because he wasn't Bush, not because of policy preferences by the American people. He won because he was about "change", without ever saying which kind. Change was enough. See if that continues. It won't be.

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Posted on Monday, October 12, 2009 - 10:28 am:

Kurt, it may be just your bias, but you misrepresent a lot, in my opinion. I would like to see how the Democrats are screwing up at light speed nationally, especially when compared with the Bush regime.
Obama, after all, has been left hoding the bag of historically significant screwups, he didn't make them from whole cloth, as Bush did.

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Posted on Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - 5:57 am:

Jeff, err, Trent,

That " campaign finance law complaint" (not a lawsuit) was filed by me with the Pennsylvania Department of State, who investigated and found it meritorious (I have the letter from State.).

They referred it to the Attorney General, who investigated, they pursued the candidate involved, who paid an administrative fine, and stopped his abortive run for the office he was seeking. He violated the reporting requirements by raising funds without a state filed campaign committee. He is Michael Morrill. He clearly knew better, having been the Green Party's candidate for Governor of Pennsylvania in 2002.

Michael, the gentleman (and he is, or rather WAS - he is a nice family man who is better at parenting than most), and his cronies now also run that scurrilous rag of a website packed solid with lies and innuendos that are NOT truthful. They are vicious ultra-leftist liars who post to that site. It is a "hate speech" site that regular "normal" people never take seriously.

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Posted on Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - 6:10 am:

Brant,

When I say Congressional Democrats are screwing up, I mean thay are seemingly going too far in policies that the American people don't want and won't tolerate the collateral costs of. And I'm not talking about my personal views, esp. re; healthcare.

1) A healthcare bill that gets less popular by the week.

2) Cap and trade for CO2.

3) No attention to incentivize job creation in the PRIVATE sector. (They've done okay in public sector stimulus.)

4) Yes, ending "Don't ask, don't tell." (The "communities" will love it, the general public will hate it, ESPECIALLY the part that votes in EVERY election.)

5) Effectively "nationalizing" too many industries.

6) Unworkably high public debt with no ceiling in sight.

That's what I mean. Screwing up means getting WAAAAY ahead of where the public is on these issues. Leadership is one thing. They're morphing into "radicalization".

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Posted on Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - 10:41 am:

I know you believe that, Kurt, but a working majority of U.S. citizens don't. Look at the polling. A clear majority of the population want a public option on health care, and they want action on climate change, and they would just as soon that gay-rights restrictions stop as well; I think you're letting your own views color what you think the "majority" want, and you're out in right field here. (I changed it to "right" to be appropriate.) I guess we'll see.

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Posted on Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - 10:42 am:

The polling info I'm seeing says precisely the opposite of what you are saying.

http://www.pollster.com/polls/us/healthplan.php

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Posted on Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - 10:51 am:

I didn't say that the bill in the Senate is what they want, Kurt, I said a public option, and they are writing that out of the bill at the Republicans' insistence. It's not that they are behaving too much like Democrats that's getting them in trouble, it's that Democrats are behaving too much like Republicans, that's getting them in trouble.

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Posted on Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - 12:00 pm:

No Brant, to be more precise there are not 60 Senators who favor the public option and there MAY NOT be 51. There could be 51, but it's no slam dunk.

And that bit about not being "Democrat enough"? I heard the same thing about Bush (and McCain, come to think of it) not being "Republican enough" where I live, too.

We have to be wary of a too small or too homogenous circle of communications. In a world divided into PLU's and PLT's, most of us spend too much time talking to PLU's, and next to NO time with PLT's. There's more PLT's out there than you can shake a stick at. I spend almost equal time with PLU's and PLT's in my field.

PLU = People Like Us
PLT = People Like Them, in case you wondered.

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Posted on Wednesday, October 14, 2009 - 2:30 am:

I know quite a few people who are considered PLUs by people on the far right and the far left, wealthy people and impoverished people, professionals and people who never finished high school.

They function well in many milieus. They wear suits in court or when visiting legislators. They wear more casual attire when they're teaching classes or speaking to civic groups. And they wear what appear to be gardening clothes or even message t-shirts when they're protesting and carrying signs. They use pedantic legalese spoken in refined accents in court and with legislators, folksy humor delivered with middle American speech patterns when teaching or speaking to groups, and casual street slang when protesting and carrying signs.

A valued contributor to BBV, Paul Lehto, probably holds the world's record for the fastest changes from one persona to another.

I would consider PLTs to be those who have a limited social range, a single persona, and who judge themselves and other people by appearances. The Yes Men have built their careers around the false assumptions that PLTs are apt to make. It would be hilarious except for the fact that so many people prone to false assumptions and to reliance on dubious authorities, happen to be decision makers.

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Posted on Wednesday, October 14, 2009 - 7:11 am:

Brant,

If what you are saying were true about "not Democrat enough", as applied to Obama, then his favorable/unfavorable rating among Democrats would be eroding. It is, but only VERY slightly. His favorable/unfavorable rating among Republicans AND INDEPENDENTS, on the other hand, is TANKING! Look around at pollster.com. It's all there.

The data suggests you are dead wrong. The erosion in his support is CLEARLY tied to those who supported him in November 2008 who believed "The Big Lie" about his being a centrist.

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Posted on Wednesday, October 14, 2009 - 8:42 am:

Given the unknowability created by undisclosed data and lack of complete transparency, the following autosig by Mr Bellman is a meaningless comment (repeated many times, unfortunately). While it might be and probably is true in some specific instance, it admits on its face that it's not true in all instances, and the meaninglessness is created by the fact that there's no way to know when the hint applies, and when it doesn't apply, without resort to the data that's not made available.

As I often say, GIVE ME THE DATA and it won't be possible to have a "theory" of any kind, much less a "conspiracy theory." The problem is secrecy, not people thinking "their side" didn't lose.

The relevant quote / autosig:
"==========================================
Sometimes, every once in a while, the real reason "your side" lost an election is because more people really DID vote for the "other guy", hard as that may be to fathom."

Saying the above again and again at the bottom of each and every post does absolutely nothing to make it more true. And, indeed, it is not only "hard" to fathom it is IMPOSSIBLE to "fathom" if "fathom" includes rational thinking when the data is not disclosed and only mere conclusions (vote totals) are published. The "debate" is then to varying but significant degrees "faith-based" rather than rational because of the missing data, which is the fault of elections officials and not the fault of citizens. Citizens, those on all sides, do well to assume the worst when secrecy prevails, because secrecy invites corruption -- even if that means 1/2 the citizens think one way and 1/2 the exact other way.

Paul Lehto
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Paul_lehto

Post Number: 28
Registered: 4-2006

Best of Black Box?
Votes: 3 (A keeper?)

Posted on Wednesday, October 14, 2009 - 8:47 am:

Where are the HCPB supporters? Leaving the Holt bill virtually entirely to itself. The bill is not rescue-able except by such a complete rewrite that it would be grossly unfair to call such an "Amendment."

As far as Bradblog's apparent call for "pilot projects" -- elections are not the proper place to experiment with our rights. In fact, imoportant rights are not fit subjects for experimentation like "pilot projects". There doesn't need to be such for HCPB -- most of the country successfully has done this for well over a century, until quite recently in most areas. Precinct sizes are still roughly the same. Higher population is irrelevant as is population concentration because the same percentage of people is needed to be pollworkers, and the higher the population the more prospects there are, proportionally.

Any real commitment to transparent democracy quite quickly realizes that just as the jury system would collapse and be unrepresentative without jury summonses, if there's any real problem with getting enough pollworkers, they can be summonsed as well, and should be. This would have the added benefit of helping to disrupt any friendly groups of pollworkers who theoretically might come to a "settlement" on how to count votes, by adding a random outsider to the mix.

V. Kurt Bellman
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Formerelecdir

Post Number: 3126
Registered: 4-2006

Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?)

Posted on Wednesday, October 14, 2009 - 9:07 am:

Paul,

My sig does two things. It pokes snarky fun at two facts, which are core beliefs:

1) Only losers of elections ever question their veracity, winners never do.

2) We are all susceptible, to an extent we never quite grasp, to Gore Vidal's famous 1972 quote. "I don't see how Nixon won, all my friends voted for McGovern." I believe the modern term for the phenomenon is "internal community resonance".

In my considerable experience, Mr. Lehto, there is far more transparency actually available than even 98% of members of the bar are aware of. No one seems to me more oblivious to election law than attorneys are. In my experience there is far far far less "secrecy" than you imagine. That said, there is still more than there ought to be. Admitted.

Mark E. Smith
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Mymarkx

Post Number: 535
Registered: 7-2005

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Posted on Wednesday, October 14, 2009 - 9:26 am:

Typical snarky response, Kurt, including a claim to be a higher authority and a personal attack.

As it happens, in faith-based elections there is TOTAL secrecy.

If your "considerable experience" has enabled you to witness the processes inside black box voting machines so that they are no secret to you, it would be very considerate of you to let the rest of us know how you do it.

If the counting is secret, the way in which the results are arrived at are secret, and the results determine the outcome of elections, so the elections are secret--even if everything else except for the counting is fully transparent.

Your sig line, as Paul points out, is totally unsubstantiated by facts or logic, and is nothing more than your personal belief. You could equally well say, 'Sometimes, every once in a while, the real reason power corrupts is because gremlins toss floral bouquets to warthogs, hard as that may be to fathom.'

While it is true that in many cases the more popular candidate appears to have lost to a less popular candidate, if the votes were counted secretly, the reason is much more likely to be that there were some shenanigans by insiders during the secret vote count, than that people decided to vote for a candidate they didn't like.

Brant Lamb
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Username: Brantl

Post Number: 2384
Registered: 1-2005

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Posted on Wednesday, October 14, 2009 - 9:44 am:

Sorry, Mark, as big a know-it-all pain as Kurt can be, his sig line is about as mild and inoffensive as it can be (if you read it literally) as he doesn't say "most of the time" even though both you and he may unconsciously read it that way.

V. Kurt Bellman
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Formerelecdir

Post Number: 3127
Registered: 4-2006

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Posted on Wednesday, October 14, 2009 - 10:07 am:

"more popular candidate appears to have lost to a less popular candidate"

How can you say this so often, when, by definition, the way we determine this IS the election? What gives you the ability to ascribe adjectival phrases like "more popular" or "less popular"?

Polls?
Conversations with like-minded folks?
Intuition?

Please.

V. Kurt Bellman
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Formerelecdir

Post Number: 3128
Registered: 4-2006

Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?)

Posted on Wednesday, October 14, 2009 - 10:13 am:

Mark,

Knowing PRECISELY how a voting machine does what it does is something that NEVER concerned me. Knowing that ABSOLUTELY EVERY TIME I ran monitored input and output tests on any design of ballot or voting script that they accurately fed back the exact "votes" put into it, and they did, absolutely every time without fail, was always good enough.

I did tests like those literally dozens of times over four years. Never was a single vote ever misrecorded. Never. And this was not ONLY in "test mode". Test scripts were run in "live mode" too. People would suggest a ballot combination to be entered in, and it would be, and someone kept a separate paper tally. They always matched. Every time.

And it can't be "actual date" tested or differentiated because the machines had NO clock or calendar function.

And tests in "live mode" were at least slightly resource consumptive, because any time you closed the polls in "live mode" to get the printout, the machine could not under ANY CIRCUMSTANCES be used in that election again. You had to redo the machine from the ground up. This is, incidentally, the cause of the infamous Philadelphia April 2008 "both machines were broken in this key Obama precinct" stories. The pollworkers didn't stop at the checklist where it said, "STOP HERE AND TAKE IN VOTERS TO VOTE". They barged ahead and closed the polls on the machines as soon as they opened them. No recovery was possible. Spare machines had to be programmed, ballots printed, a large enough truck found, and the machines delivered and opened for business. But that doesn't make as scandlaous a story as a conspiracy does.

The machines were never broken. They performed EXACTLY as they should have. Pilot (poll worker)error.

V. Kurt Bellman
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Formerelecdir

Post Number: 3129
Registered: 4-2006

Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?)

Posted on Wednesday, October 14, 2009 - 10:18 am:

"Secrecy" makes for highly emotionally charged rhetoric. What is always lacking is a thorough test for the actual EXISTENCE of the "secrecy" in the first instance. Is it "secret" when someone doesn't know something due to a lack of having properly sought the information? I think not.

Let me stipulate here and now that some states have a better record on this than some others, and it would NOT surprise me to find out that these complaints come MAINLY from those in states "behind the curve" on transparency. But is it REALLY fair to over-generalize on this? Maybe you need to work Sacramento HARD on transparency.

V. Kurt Bellman
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Formerelecdir

Post Number: 3131
Registered: 4-2006

Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?)

Posted on Wednesday, October 14, 2009 - 10:38 am:

Paul,

This:

"Any real commitment to transparent democracy quite quickly realizes that just as the jury system would collapse and be unrepresentative without jury summonses, if there's any real problem with getting enough pollworkers, they can be summonsed as well, and should be. This would have the added benefit of helping to disrupt any friendly groups of pollworkers who theoretically might come to a "settlement" on how to count votes, by adding a random outsider to the mix."

has REAL promise. I LIKE IT! (That doesn't make you rethink it, does it?)

And YES, it would be necessary in my neck of the woods, ABSOLUTELY necessary! And I am pleased you realize how frequent and dangerous THIS part is - "helping to disrupt any friendly groups of pollworkers who theoretically might come to a "settlement" on how to count votes".

I have seen this FAR FAR too often, and I have had great trouble finding anyone to believe it. And it's not always a "settlement". The far more frequent excuse was, "I didn't want to have a fight over it. I was tired and wanted to go home." And you know what? Too often the wrong and insistent prevail over the correct and uncombative.

Here's the rub, Paul. In my state, even this WONDERFUL, BRILLIANT and BADLY NEEDED reform would require a State Constitutional amendment, and would only happen if it passes a statewide referendum, AFTER being passed by two consecutive sessions of the General Assembly. If it fails that popular vote, or fails in either House in either session, it could not be imposed.

And there are no Pennsylvania Constitutional Amendments in process right now. I just reviewed the file. It sits within 30 seconds of my desk. In fact, from January to July of this year, they would have had to come across MY desk, as would have any and all Pennsylvania impeachment petitions, no matter the office.

Mark E. Smith
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Mymarkx

Post Number: 536
Registered: 7-2005

Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?)

Posted on Wednesday, October 14, 2009 - 4:07 pm:

Kurt quotes me: "more popular candidate appears to have lost to a less popular candidate"

and then responds:

How can you say this so often, when, by definition, the way we determine this IS the election? What gives you the ability to ascribe adjectival phrases like "more popular" or "less popular"?

Polls?
Conversations with like-minded folks?
Intuition?

Please.
-----------------------

First of all, Kurt, that quote is not my sig line and I haven't posted it anywhere near as frequently as you post your sig line, which happens to be every time that you post.

Secondly, the reason that I can say "the more popular candidate" is the same reason, using the same logic and facts as your statement that "more people really DID vote for the 'other guy,'" i.e. an unlikely possibility such as gremlins tossing floral bouquets to warthogs.

It is actually easier for insiders to rig an election than it is for insiders to rig a poll, as polling methodology is usually open to inspection.

Perhaps Max Cleland wasn't popular and had been returned to office only because people didn't like him and Georgia wasn't robbed, people just decided to vote for somebody else. That's just as possible as gremlins tossing floral bouquets to warthogs, and just as substantiated.

It may happen that sometimes people say one thing in the polls and in conversations with friends, but vote differently. Maybe people lied when they swore out affidavits that they'd voted for Clint Curtis and they'd really voted for his opponent.

But if it is within the realm of possibility that sometimes, every once in a while, what appears to be a stolen election might not be, then there is LESS reason to closely monitor elections.

If it is within the realm of possibility that sometimes every once in a while, what appears to be a stolen election might be due to outsiders enabling corrupt insiders, rather than being the fault of the insiders themselves, then there is LESS reason to closely monitor insiders.

If it is possible that sometimes, every once in a while, the real reason that election results appear to be implausible is due to voters voting for "the other guy," rather than due to secretly manipulated vote counts, why not give the insiders the benefit of the doubt, since sometimes, every once in a while, what appear to be rigged elections might just be people voting differently from the way that they always had, differently from the way they told pollsters they would, and differently from the way that they swore under oath that they had, "hard as that may be to fathom."

It does seem to me that you're saying that if there's a doubt, we should trust the insiders to resolve it with their little-known, seldom-accessed, but, in your opinion, totally authoritative, conclusive, and unquestionably accurate reports, and we should direct suspicions towards the unreliable voters rather towards the reliable insiders.

Your sigline suggests that not all elections that appear to have been rigged, were actually rigged. Sometimes the results announced by the insiders after their secret vote counts, and verified by those same insiders, may be more reliable than any other evidence, such as polls, past history, sworn statements by mere voters, etc.

And when there are election shenanigans by insiders, sometimes, every once in a while, and in some districts always, it may be because of voters and organizations registering voters in such a way as to enable insiders, rather than insiders alone, and even though some people are too biased or dense to follow the convoluted reasoning, and foolishly believe that even in those cases any actual shenanigans would have to be ultimately laid at the doorstep of insiders who are either criminally negligent or running the schemes themselves, the implausible results may be due to citizens rather than to insiders.

In other words, you're blaming voters rather than insiders.

But subtly, so that they don't realize what you're doing, won't take offense, and might even be conned into collaborating with you in discrediting themselves.

Very few master strategists could come up with anything that devious.

V. Kurt Bellman
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Formerelecdir

Post Number: 3136
Registered: 4-2006

Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?)

Posted on Wednesday, October 14, 2009 - 7:10 pm:

Mark,

I never said shenanigans NEVER happen. They do. What I WILL CATEGORICALLY state is that shenanigans SELDOM happen generally, and NEVER happen most places, but FREQUENTLY happen in places like Atlantic County, NJ, and Philadelphia, PA, plus probably a few dozen other places I'm not as familiar with personally.

Who knows, Mark? Maybe San Diego belongs on that list, too. Maybe it doesn't. But casting aspersions on election administrators' honesty in a broad brush way is highly offensive to me in a deeply personal way, and by unauthorized proxy on behalf of more than 9000 others.

In fact, I consider it "hate speech". How's that feel for size?

Given the choice of trusting my life or finances to an election admin chosen at random or a general citizen chosen at random, I'll like my chances far better with the election admin.

I know for sure that every election I ran was so clean it squeaked. That never stopped losers, of BOTH parties, from trotting out false accusations. It's irresponsible and really ought to be legally actionable as libel and/or slander.

Even my former best friend, who ran the campaigns of a woman (R) who twice lost high profile races in my county by a whisker both times, had the temerity to question me about the races in a highly accusatory manner. He is now an ex-friend. I am not for sale, nor was I EVER!!

The fact is almost ALWAYS in close elections, the loser thinks they got screwed, by somebody somehow. It's a mental illness, I tell you.

Now, as to whether voters cause these disconnects, I'd love to see THIS hypothesis scientifically tested, if someone wants to do research that actually means something. Four years of running elections has proven to my personal satisfaction that some small but potentially significant portion of the voter base has no clue what they're doing or just did in a voting booth. I believe that upwards of 2%, perhaps more, could go vote a ballot, regardless of type or length, although length would make it far worse, come out of the booth and not be able to correctly tell you who they voted for.

You could stand there, hold the ballot they just cast, and perhaps 2% or more couldn't tell you who they actually just voted for. And further, I bet you could make the number SOAR with ballot design techniques.

I'd love to see this tested by academics. Even if my guess is high and the real number is 1% or half of 1%, do you REALIZE what that means in close elections? Yup, they're no better than a coin flip.

Mark E. Smith
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Mymarkx

Post Number: 537
Registered: 7-2005

Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?)

Posted on Wednesday, October 14, 2009 - 8:19 pm:

Kurt writes, "...casting aspersions on election administrators' honesty in a broad brush way is highly offensive to me in a deeply personal way, and by unauthorized proxy on behalf of more than 9000 others.

In fact, I consider it "hate speech". How's that feel for size?"

-------------------

That's very interesting, Kurt. Particularly since all elections administrators are election insiders. So casting aspersions on election insiders is hate speech in your book?

But casting aspersions on citizen voters and attributing motives to ACORN is not hate speech?

With secret vote counting, where elections administrators control access to ballots and computer logs, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to prove allegations of election fraud by insiders. It is very close to a perfect crime, as the perpetrators can prevent investigators from gaining access to the crime scene or the evidence. So most allegations of election fraud by insiders could be labeled false accusations, since there is rarely any way to prove them without the perpetrators' consent, and you would have such allegations be legally actionable?

Do you think it is a good thing to have people with power so great that they can program computers to alter the results of elections, prevent anyone from examining the code, and then, since nobody can prove what they had done, sue anyone who accuses them of election fraud?

The concept of black box voting is that secret vote counts controlled by insiders are easily manipulated and almost impossible to prove. It can most easily be done by insiders because they are the only ones who program the computers. So do you believe that having a website called Black Box Voting is casting aspersions on insiders in "a broad brush way," is therefore hate speech, and that Bev should be subject to legal action for libel and/or slander?

Do you and Bev plan to change the name of the website to Voter Registration Fraud Voting, so as not to cast aspersions on insiders?

I think I may be starting to understand how a populist, grass-roots candidate who starts out with a genuine desire to represent the interests of their constituents, can, once elected, be given privileged insider briefings and begin to think of themself as an insider, become suspicious, based on those privileged insider briefings, of their constituents, and wind up serving the interests of those they had originally intended to protect their constituents from.

Remember California Registrar of Voters, Tony "Trust Me" Anchundo? As Bev used to say, "Trust, but verify." I think Bev has even quoted Paul Lehto about the need of confidence men to inspire confidence in order to run their con games. Is our new motto, "Trust, and when you are denied access to any possibility of verification, continue to trust"?

Insiders have power that voters don't have, Kurt. Power corrupts. You may be an exception to the rule, and there certainly are exceptions to the rule, but it is still a rule. Nobody is questioning your integrity or honesty, but some of us don't like the fact that insiders have the power to secretly manipulate elections, and we don't think that questioning this imbalance of power should be actionable. We think it is the right of the people to question imbalances of power, abuses of power, and to keep a close eye on those who are susceptible to being corrupted by power.

I thought that the purpose of Black Box Voting was to defend the right of voters to transparent, honest elections. Sometimes that may mean questioning the power of insiders to secretly manipulate vote counts and withhold the evidence from voters, rather than simply trusting election administrators to do the right thing. If doing so constitutes hate speech, then perhaps we should pack it in, shut down the website, and just place our trust in the honesty and integrity of insiders.

Catherine Ansbro
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Catherine_a

Post Number: 5570
Registered: 12-2004

Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?)

Posted on Thursday, October 15, 2009 - 4:46 am:

Kurt said:

quote:
shenanigans SELDOM happen generally, and NEVER happen most places, but FREQUENTLY happen in places like Atlantic County, NJ, and Philadelphia, PA, plus probably a few dozen other places I'm not as familiar with personally.

Sorry Kurt, but you no grounds to make such a statement. On this website you have often shown yourself to be poorly informed about instances of BLATANT shenanigans that have occurred elsewhere. Just because you "are not as familiar" with them personally does not mean they did not occur, or that are not widespread in MANY places.

Go back and read Bev's book, for Chrissake.

To assume that elections, and election insiders, are "clean in general" may or may not be accurate--but assumptions IN EITHER DIRECTION are equally ill-advised.

Election systems must be designed and implemented so that they are observably "proven clean" to the fullest extent possible while preserving voter anonymity. They should NEVER be "assumed to be clean" just because it is someone's belief that they are clean.

V. Kurt Bellman
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Formerelecdir

Post Number: 3137
Registered: 4-2006

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Posted on Thursday, October 15, 2009 - 5:35 am:

"Do you think it is a good thing to have people with power so great that they can program computers to alter the results of elections, prevent anyone from examining the code, and then, since nobody can prove what they had done, sue anyone who accuses them of election fraud?
"

No, I don't believe any such thing is a good thing nor do I believe anyone has such power. I know I didn't. I used to be the consummate "insider", and I had no more access to change the "programming" of the machines than you do in San Diego, Mark. Not one iota more. You are speaking a myth and a lie. All I had access to change were data tables - lists of offices, candidates, and machine positions, NEVER the internal code of the machine.

This lie has gone on LONG ENOUGH! It is libelous. And Catherine,I'm damned sorry but if having to believe the allegations in Bev's book is the price of being here, I FAIL THE TEST! It is chock FULL is errors, misrepresentations, mischaracterizations, and one side's view of facts that are in dispute.

The same is true of "Hacking Democracy". I have been trying to find ANYONE ANYWHERE who will confirm that the New Orleans piece's Sequoias EVER WORKED they way they were represented to have worked in the film. I can find no one to confirm Sequoias EVER worked that way. They surely do not now. The film represented a "fact" that is surely presently a lie, even if it were once the truth, which I cannot confirm, one way or the other.

And actually Catherine, far too often the same is true of those "poorly informed about instances of BLATANT shenanigans that have occurred elsewhere". They are, when one bothers to do the actual research, not just accept the first spin as gospel, at best disputed factual allegations.

Dale McClain
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Dale

Post Number: 92
Registered: 10-2008

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Posted on Thursday, October 15, 2009 - 5:57 am:

BRANT: You are nominated!
You wrote:
Sorry, Mark, as big a know-it-all pain as Kurt can be, his sig line is about as mild and inoffensive as it can be (if you read it literally) as he doesn't say "most of the time" even though both you and he may unconsciously read it that way.
======================================To Brant:
I am recommending you to be referee on this thread!
I think we need to help Udar get his thinking straight
and the best way to do it would be for a good referee to kick those who double dribble in the shins. Those who commit fouls should be reprimanded as well as receive a knee to the crotch.
Now --- JUMP BALL!
Dale
========================
UDAR asks:
And what about Brad's request for pilot projects?
Dales hypothetical remark:
More about pilot error than pilot projects in this thread.
===================
MARK in part.:
I would consider PLTs to be those who have a limited social range, a single persona, and who judge themselves and other people by appearances. The Yes Men have built their careers around the false assumptions that PLTs are apt to make. It would be hilarious except for the fact that so many people prone to false assumptions and to reliance on dubious authorities, happen to be decision makers.
==========================
Do you think it is a good thing to have people with power so great that they can program computers to alter the results of elections, prevent anyone from examining the code, and then, since nobody can prove what they had done, sue anyone who accuses them of election fraud?
Dales hypothetical remark:
NO-NO-NO- Mark --you have it all wrong!---SNARKFULLY speaking. THEY will get sued if they give out any information about how the counting is done.
=====================================
It is actually easier for insiders to rig an election than it is for insiders to rig a poll, as polling methodology is usually open to inspection.

Dales hypothetical remark:
Where did you get this information? In my opinion the Media bombards world Information sources with a spin on their target goals. Polls then play back that perception and report the results to the public, later to be reflected in the election results.
======================================
CURT..in part:
I know for sure that every election I ran was so clean it squeaked. That never stopped losers, of BOTH parties, from trotting out false accusations. It's irresponsible and really ought to be legally actionable as libel and/or slander.

Dales hypothetical remark:
Not exactly� in my case--- It was never who won or who lost but how the game was played.
===================================
And YES, it would be necessary in my neck of the woods, ABSOLUTELY necessary! And I am pleased you realize how frequent and dangerous THIS part is - "helping to disrupt any friendly groups of pollworkers who theoretically might come to a "settlement" on how to count votes".

Dales hypothetical remark:
Please tell us about the friendly little groups of NASED oriented election officials.

=================================
Knowing PRECISELY how a voting machine does what it does is something that NEVER concerned me. Knowing that ABSOLUTELY EVERY TIME I ran monitored input and output tests on any design of ballot or voting script that they accurately fed back the exact "votes" put into it, and they did, absolutely every time without fail, was always good enough.

Dales hypothetical remark:
Not good enough for me Curt. I have read the 300+ page Everest report and there are serious doubts way beyond reasonable doubts that do concern me.
======================================
FROM THE BRAD BLOG:
In Part:
But the bill still fails to ban the practice of computerized, privatized, secret vote counting by proprietary "trade secret" protected optical-scan devices. With the protections written into the bill for the private companies who manufacture and sell those devices, BlackBoxVoting.org's Bev Harris argues the bill would amount to "the surreptitious dismantling of self-government".

Dales hypothetical remark:
I liked one of brad blogs readers comments on a bill to amend HAVA.

IN PART:

A BILL
To amend the Help America Vote Act of 2002 to require a voter-marked permanent paper ballot, and for other purposes.
(a) IN GENERAL.�The Help America Vote Act of 2002 (42 U.S.C. 15481(a)(2)) is hereby amended by striking everything after ��An Act� and adding the following:
"Boy did we screw up. We cost the American Taxpayer billions of dollars that were wasted on the purchase and maintenance of proprietary, insecure and unreliable election equipment and we also created a de facto permanent Federal agency in the form of the Election Assistance Commission which has failed in every last one of its mandated duties and which agency instead has acquired a remarkable track record of corruption, misfeasance, malfeasance and outright fraud. America, we are very sorry."
======================================

V. Kurt Bellman
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Formerelecdir

Post Number: 3138
Registered: 4-2006

Best of Black Box? N/A
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Posted on Thursday, October 15, 2009 - 6:09 am:

Mark,

"But casting aspersions on citizen voters and attributing motives to ACORN is not hate speech?"

No, it's called making a criminal Election Code accusation, which I have done, formally and informally, and I stand by them. I witnessed, first hand, criminal Election Code violations and reported them to the relevant authorities.

Catherine Ansbro
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Catherine_a

Post Number: 5572
Registered: 12-2004

Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?)

Posted on Thursday, October 15, 2009 - 6:26 am:

Kurt said:

quote:
No, I don't believe any such thing is a good thing nor do I believe anyone has such power. I know I didn't.

My point is that not everything can be wisely assumed to be the same as one's personal experience.

My points about the Middleton CT election are one example. If someone makes assumptions that re-running an election is not possible, based on personal knowledge of PA laws, that could misinform people from other states where different rules apply.

Same for election fraud.
* Did you read all the threads of KY rural elections and the goings-on?
* Did you look at the videos posted re: the NH recount?
* Did you look at the videos from Volusia?
* What about the Texas counties where several elections (not just 1) were won by exactly 18,181 votes?

Do you truly think we should all assume that "all elections are clean" because you personally wouldn't have known any way of rigging an election on your county's election equipment, and because you personally are a person of high integrity?

I don't believe all elections are rigged. I also don't believe all elections are clean. Add human error (both innocent and "crooked-made-to-look-like-a-glitch") and it's hard to know anything when procedures are sloppy in design and execution.

Election systems should ideally be robust enough to deter fraud or error, to identify either when they occur, to rectify within reason when fraud or error occurs, and to hold accountable individuals or groups whose actions or inactions--for whatever reason--created the problems.

I don't expect perfection, but we should keep moving in that direction. Assuming we don't have any serious problems is not the best way to move in the right direction.

V. Kurt Bellman
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Formerelecdir

Post Number: 3139
Registered: 4-2006

Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?)

Posted on Thursday, October 15, 2009 - 6:26 am:

Now...

Are there systems OTHER THAN the ones I used or am familiar with that DO give code altering access to insiders, yes, I suppose there might be, and they need to be drummed out of the market if they exist. I know most systems TRY to eliminate that kind of access, some better than others, unfortunately. I know anyone doing what Mark alleges goes on routinely is A FELON! There is no need to candy coat it. They deserve LOOOONNNNG prison sentences.

I have been approached by a former Congressman's "people" for access to non-machine-related data above what they were entitled to, and I ratted them out so fast publicly I was hailed as a hero on DU. Then, two years later when I complained about the excesses of the left, I was vilified on DU.

To both parties, you're only worth a fecal chunk when you're THEIR party's reliable tool and stooge. No bloody thank you, sir. Integrity is a fulltime thankless job when you serve politicians.

V. Kurt Bellman
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Posted on Thursday, October 15, 2009 - 6:36 am:

Catherine,

I got to know fairly intimately about 70 other people who did what I did.

I'm going to run down my "gut" on them.

About 2-3 seemed EXCEEDINGLY slimy and suspect. I could bellieve they were at least corruptible, maybe worse.

Another 8-10 were CLEARLY more political than public service oriented. Patronage all the way with little or no interest in the technology, per se. They had come up through partisan ranks and knew all the "old fashioned" ways to scam their local elections to stay in power without using machine tricks, IF it ever became necessary, though it likely never would.

Another 4-5 were computer whiz techie types seemingly without a political bone in their body.

All the rest were career public service grandmotherly (not an age remark, more attitudinal) "clerical types" who would rather die (and from their demeanor were probably quite religious) and go to hell than corrupt or stand by watching ANYTHING get corrupted. Maybe you've seen the type. They apologize and giggle self-consciously with their hands over their mouths if the word "darn" or "sugar" slips out. This is a highly moralistic Bible belt area, and in most central PA areas, people don't even speed on the highways because it isn't the "Christian" thing to do. These people are mostly not corruptible.

The point is, Catherine, I do think I am a person of high integrity, yes. But I pale in comparison (I'm a roughian.) to most election directors I knew. They're nearly "saintly". I'm not. I don't "turn the other cheek" so good. I'm far more likely to rhetorically "go nuclear" on someone's a$$ if provoked.

Oh, here's the rub, though. Most, but not ALL, of the POPULOUS counties are in the earlier categories above.

V. Kurt Bellman
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Posted on Thursday, October 15, 2009 - 7:04 am:

"quote:
No, I don't believe any such thing is a good thing nor do I believe anyone has such power. I know I didn't.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

My point is that not everything can be wisely assumed to be the same as one's personal experience. "

True enough, Catherine. But it doesn't make Mark's generalizations any more valid or any less offensive.

V. Kurt Bellman
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Posted on Thursday, October 15, 2009 - 7:32 am:

"* Did you read all the threads of KY rural elections and the goings-on?
* Did you look at the videos posted re: the NH recount?
* Did you look at the videos from Volusia?
* What about the Texas counties where several elections (not just 1) were won by exactly 18,181 votes? "

*KY - yes, I even supplied Bev "offline" help in what to look for, because they were intentionally circumventing the safeguards on the systems I used.

*NH - yes, but nothing there proved quantitative malfeasance, merely rampant sloppiness and ignorance of what is even important to avoid, aka STUPIDITY!

*Volusia - Never heard of a Volusia issue

*Texas 18,181 - it is disputed that it ever happened other than on a test data posting for a website uploading test

Now, would you like me to someday soon run down the list of initially reported "scandals" and "issues" that turned out to be NOTHING? I can't because I don't have enough time left in my life expectancy, Catherine.

But lets start with the "no Obama on the 'emergency paper ballots' in the Philadelphia 2008 Primary" scandal. They were "slate cards" handed out by the Philly Democratic Committee endorsing Hillary, not even ballots.

Then lets go to the (same election) machine "breakdowns" in Obama-heavy precincts that were actually pollworker stupidity on parade. Besides, it was in a Congressional District where Obama HAD TO WIN because Hillary's campaign didn't even run a full slate of delegates.

I could go on and on ad nauseum, but I haven't the time.

We have developed our very own "crying wolf" problem.

Bob Fleischer
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Posted on Thursday, October 15, 2009 - 7:40 am:

Regarding "access to change the programming of machines":

If access to machine programming is outlawed, only outlaws will have access to change the programming.

Unless, of course, there are no machines in the first place.

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Posted on Thursday, October 15, 2009 - 7:44 am:

Bob,

It is NOT a central feature of electronic voting machines that their code be accessible to user changes. Not all are. None should be.

Search on the thread about the "Security Now" podcast and listen to what sorts of safeguards can and should be done.

There are machines PRESENTLY BEING USED even more secure than the one desdcribed in that podcast, which WAS hacked using extraordinary expertise and a vector that didn't need to exist, and DOESN'T on similarly done competitive machines.

Catherine Ansbro
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Posted on Thursday, October 15, 2009 - 8:32 am:

Kurt,

Your responses to the specific elections mentioned above are revealing and surprising.

Apparently one can be a long-time participant at BBV and be unaware of the election issues in Volusia County in FL. Maybe you will have a chat with Bev about this sometime. Ditto for the other issues.

"Well, I don't know about that" or "Personally I don't believe that ever happened" are poor responses from an expert when the incidents involved were serious, involve provable facts, and when a little personal research would show that to be the case.

When specific instances were raised in the past with numerous links, they were brushed off in the same way.

It can be useful to keep an open mind, and also to acknowledge when one is mistaken.

V. Kurt Bellman
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Posted on Thursday, October 15, 2009 - 8:37 am:

Oh, is Volusia that FL-13 massive undervote Congressional thing? I had never heard it referred to as "Volusia".

If that's the one, that has been totally explained and resolved to my satisfaction as a stupid ballot design. Every office on that multi-page ballot had its own page EXCEPT that Congresional race, which was under another office. Too many people missed what was a single occasion need to look for a second office on a page.

BUT, given that that's probably NOT the issue called "Volusia" and something ELSE is, I am PRIMARILY concerned, as should EVERYONE, I believe, with MY STATE! Why? Because elections are state business first and foremost. There's never BEEN a national election in the U.S. and likely will never be one, other than the quadrenniel opening of ballots for President and Vice President before a Joint Session of Congress. On paper, I might add.

What happens in other states get SOME attention by me, but not all that much by comparison. I am VERY concerned and alarmed that Pennsylvania residents will stumble on what is here and get a very distorted picture of their exposure to risk, or the lack thereof. I can't evade NJ stories because I use Philly market media outlets.

I think I am adequately on record as highly critical of many other states' laws and procedures.

Catherine Ansbro
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Posted on Thursday, October 15, 2009 - 9:10 am:

Kurt, I'm talking about something else.

Volusia FL is where they apparently had a ballot-manufacturing enterprise going, and where original signed voting machine tapes that were subject to FOIA requests were being thrown away in the trash, etc. All caught on videotape. Plus vigorous attempts to hurt Bev & Kathleen (some interesting driving experiences, if I remember rightly).

Law enforcement officials duly informed and provided with evidence. Nothing happened, no accountability.

V. Kurt Bellman
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Posted on Thursday, October 15, 2009 - 9:17 am:

Okay, I had heard something on that, but it was "before my time" here and I never had the time for much historical review.

I guess that's where the inside joke on "dumpster diving" comes from.

So, are the perps of that "felonious in PA" conduct still in place?

Mark E. Smith
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Posted on Thursday, October 15, 2009 - 10:18 am:

Kurt writes: "This lie has gone on LONG ENOUGH! It is libelous. And Catherine,I'm damned sorry but if having to believe the allegations in Bev's book is the price of being here, I FAIL THE TEST! It is chock FULL is errors, misrepresentations, mischaracterizations, and one side's view of facts that are in dispute.

The same is true of "Hacking Democracy". I have been trying to find ANYONE ANYWHERE who will confirm that the New Orleans piece's Sequoias EVER WORKED they way they were represented to have worked in the film. I can find no one to confirm Sequoias EVER worked that way. They surely do not now. The film represented a "fact" that is surely presently a lie, even if it were once the truth, which I cannot confirm, one way or the other."

Okay, now we have it out in the open. Kurt believes that Bev's book and the film, "Hacking Democracy," are "chock FULL is errors, misrepresentations, mischaracterizations, and one side's view of facts that are in dispute," that Bev is a liar, that the allegations contained in the book and the film are libellous, and that Bev should be sued.

Bev, meanwhile, appears to be grateful to have Kurt's privileged insider input, and appears to consider it to be a valuable contribution to this forum.

Personally, I feel that Kurt's consistent defense of insiders, and consistent attempts to discredit voters and election integrity activists, does more harm than good to the cause of election integrity. But that's just me.

When Kurt refers to "one side's view," he is referring to my side, the side of transparency and openness, and he is on the other side, the side that in any dispute where the facts are not clear, gives the benefit of the doubt to those insiders who are in a position to obscure the facts and hide the truth.

V. Kurt Bellman
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Posted on Thursday, October 15, 2009 - 10:29 am:

Mark,

There's a long way from "wrong" to "a liar". Apparently the distance from "socialist" to "liar" is a shorter trek. Not that I'm surprised by that.

Bob Fleischer
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Posted on Thursday, October 15, 2009 - 10:32 am:

I personally think that a certain level of "consistent defense of insiders, and consistent attempts to discredit voters and election integrity activists" keeps us on our toes, especially when it comes from a position of some authority and considerable experience, and makes us stronger. As long as it doesn't rise to the level of "shouting us down" (and it hasn't), I'm OK with it.

Bob Fleischer
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Posted on Thursday, October 15, 2009 - 10:37 am:

Kurt,

It IS a central feature of electronic voting machines that their code be accessible at the factory. That is all it takes.

Bob

V. Kurt Bellman
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Posted on Thursday, October 15, 2009 - 10:42 am:

Bob,

Oh yes, that's right. But if a system has been in use constantly since 1983, with static software on soldered-in ROMs, employs absolutely no per-election executable code, only data tables of multiple redundencies, has been administered by both parties over that time, and still passes every test script every time, for 26 consecutive years, since the days George W. Bush was a drunken frat boy wannabe and Barack Obama was a first year law student (oops, on edit, he was an undergrad), don't you think that's a lot of "testing"?

Now Bob, OF COURSE most places don't use a system that good. But I did. And other places need to answer very hard questions about why they chose what they chose, and take responsibility for the vulnerabilities they VOUNTARILY imposed on their populations.

They didn't HAVE TO, they CHOSE TO! (Note: some localities didn't choose, their states did. Some vice versa.)

All systems have SOME KIND OF vulnerabilities. Some FAAAAAAAAR worse than others. What amazes me is this one central question: Why are the worst most vulnerable systems the best sellers, and the relatively better more secure ones didn't sell so well, and few people even know they exist?

I'd like to see LOTS of people's answers to THAT one. I think the real answers are diverse and widely varied. Some probably can't be publicly admitted, lest subpoenas and writs of indictment start to fly.

But I feel good about one thing. The two jurisdictions I recently picked out for special snarkyness? Philadelphia, PA and Atlantic County, NJ? They both once used the very same very secure system my county uses.

I feel happy that Philadelphia recently adopted it. It gives me "warm fuzzies" about an otherwise eminently corrupted place. On the other hand, Atlantic County once used it, started circumventing its security features like Kentucky did, and then unceremoniously dumped it for the least secure system on the market. Hmmm.

V. Kurt Bellman
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Posted on Thursday, October 15, 2009 - 11:10 am:

Mark writes:
"But that's just me."

Yeah, probably. I thought you'd have that figured out by now. I know the feeling. Well. It sometimes gets lonely out here where the ceiling of the belllcurve gets low, doesn't it? Here's a dirty little secret. Move in close and I'll whisper it to you. I like it out here. I relish it. I cherish it.

If being near the tall part of the bellcurve were my bag, I'd never hang out here, and I'd go live the rest of my life just fine.

Nothing gets my jollies like opposing socialists. Call it a fetish if you like. I prefer to call it doing the planet a favor.

Mark E. Smith
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Posted on Thursday, October 15, 2009 - 12:12 pm:

You'll never have to worry about being lonely, Kurt. David Rockefeller, Ben Bernanke, Tim Geithner, Larry Summers, and many more respected and authoritative insiders agree with your point of view.

Only isolated kooks like me, Michael Moore, and the millions of Americans who have set new box office records for his latest film, "Capitalism: A Love Story," would disagree. Calling government of, by, and for the people (rather than of, by, and for autocratic, authoritarian insiders), "socialism" rather than "democracy," is a very clever tactic, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time.

Paul Lehto
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Posted on Thursday, October 15, 2009 - 12:34 pm:

I'm glad Mr Bellman agrees that summonsing pollworkers is a good idea. I'm not sure it's as absolutely required as he says it is in his neck of the woods, as my past professional experience teaches me how critically important the WAY and the WORDS are that one uses to motivate people to do things like become pollworkers. An appropriate "summons" even in verbal form, speaking to the critical machinery of democracy, its patriotism and the short one day of service (plus training) would in my experience get plenty of support and volunteers, given that even with a 95% "no" response in light of such a patriotic appeal, we would have abundant workers if we asked enough people at the 5% "yes" response rate. (Shuffling the volunteers would still provide the extra security of the summonsing method so a true summons is not absolutely necessary, just desirable). I just think that while election officials have tried, they have not tried in the right way (that I've seen). Given travel expenses and a donation of $1000 to the group of my choice if I succeed, I'd go to an area and do the recruiting myself. Surely, before moving to or continuing non-transparent machines, such an effort at recruitment in the most effective manner would be merited, no?

As far as Mr. Bellman's comment about "proving" the existence of secrecy, I admit I laughed out loud. In one sense, one can never prove the non-existence of something -- i.e. prove a negative. But in this case it can be proved, because the vote total "conclusions" presuppose the existence of intermediate data sources (electronic images for opscan and electronic ballots for DREs) which are not available for public inspection or accountability, even in a lawsuit to compel production of them in my personal experience and knowledge of others' efforts as well. The contracts recite that the processing software and so forth is a "trade secret." Thus, the precise methods for how the underlying data/ballots are processed are indeed a secret. A trade secret, specified as such in a signed document. And I know for a fact that we can't get at that data even with lawsuits in the vast majority of jurisdictions, and the tiny successes that might be argued are only slices of the whole picture, still preserving vast regions of, yes, secrecy.

Secrecy may also extend even to election officials themselves, and often does, but even if certain "key" people in the form of election officials arguably have some knowledgde or at least right to look at the "data" this is woefully insufficient because of the conflicts of interest inherent at an extremely high level when the government runs the election processes that determine the government's own power. Election officials, no matter how apparent in integrity, have structural disqualifying conflicts of interest -- it's nothing personal per se. It's no more personal than saying that no one is qualified to audit themselves for income tax purposes.

The only solution to the virtually insoluble problem of "what Power will check that Power" is a multiple-observer adversarial system in which everyone can see the ballots and all try to catch errors being about equally capable of doing so. Whatever "problems" exist with that system, they are less than with the existing system of government (election officials) vouching for government itself, and they are the same general "problems" we successfully overcome every day at the bank teller window.

For those who favor "audits" I only suggest NOT counting one's cash at the bank teller window and coming back X days later with the most scientifically accurate "audit" of some percentage of the cash that one can dream of. Then claim there's a discrepancy in the cash given X days ago (and assume this is true for the sake of this hypothetical). One will either be laughed out of the bank or else they'll call law enforcement or the FBI. There is no real substitute for on the spot counting. Recounts have to be 100% of the ballots, not only for the reasons above but that's also what tripped up Gore in 2000 - asking for a partial recount was rejected by state as well as federal courts even though apparently permissible under Florida statute.

I won't have time for detailed discussion but did want to respond on the "secrecy" idea as well as the rest of the above.

One other point. As Hobbes' pointed out in the Leviathan in the 1600s, when underlying terms or data are undefined (as are the ballot processing details) all discussion is necessarily a matter of unresolvable personal opinion. This is what occurs with election results. Mark E Smith is equally "correct" to say the loser one as Bellman is to say the winner truly won on occasion, or even if he were to say the winner won in all or nearly all cases. We just don't know the truth, and while some will consider some hypotheses to be very superior to others, the only thing stopping the battle of opinions from being perpetual is the will to maintain one's opinion to the blood end.

The problem as I see it is with the REPITITION of the autosig line. Like all repeated messages, by very virtue of its repetition it takes on added force -- which is "unfair" in a sense because nothing new has been stated. Instead, it's a function of the principle that anything repeated loud and long enough is something people will believe. That being said, I suppose Mr Bellman like the rest of us has the right to say something repeatedly subject i suppose to reasonable forum rules, and that others have the right to respond to it.

V. Kurt Bellman
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Posted on Thursday, October 15, 2009 - 12:59 pm:

Mr. Lehto,

Before I get any deeper into this post, let me say first that I consider you in the 2% of the bar that has any business in an Election case, not the 98% who don't. I sure you can confirm for all here that election law is seldom taught in our nation's law schools and has far different rules and procedures than most areas of law.

I have also at least temporarily altered by sig line to say with more tact what I usually say with more snark. Go look at it.

Yes, Paul, message CAN get results with pollworkers. But have you ever spent much time in the old cities of the "Rust Belt"? It's a struggle to find able-bodied people who can serve for 13+ hours and READ in some precincts.

That leads me to my larger point, the practical problem in my state. Our Constitution requires pollworkers to be residents of the precinct where the voting is to be administered, AND requires full day service, without split shifts. No "imports" other than one-time last-minute (i.e. too late to train them) emergencies are allowed.

Split shifts have recently been authorized for machine operators and clerks, but not Judges and Inspectors, who must serve all day. We are also Constitutionally prevented from using any employees of the federal, state, county, or local governments, except for presently non-uniformed inactive reservists. We actually go to GREAT lengths to avoid "insiderness" at the precinct level.

Do you have a solution? Our amendment process is cumbersome and slow.

==========================================
Before you question the veracity of any election, please self-examine to see if perhaps you haven't fallen prey to the all too common problem of the famous "I don't see how Nixon won..." phenomenon.

Brant Lamb
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Posted on Thursday, October 15, 2009 - 1:43 pm:

Kurt and Mark, both of you need to grow up, or else get someone to proof-read your stuff for childishness before you post. Mark beats you for volume Kurt, but you often beat him for snottiness. Enjoy the contest. The rest of us aren't.

Catherine Ansbro
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Posted on Thursday, October 15, 2009 - 1:46 pm:

Ditto what Brant said.

Mark E. Smith
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Posted on Thursday, October 15, 2009 - 2:04 pm:

Kurt, although questioning the veracity of various specific elections may have led some people to become election integrity activists, it is what happened AFTER they questioned the veracity of an election, rather than the results of that election, that became the focal point of BBV, at least until recently.

What happened was that when ordinary citizens questioned the results of an election, they found that there was no way to verify those results.

So most people shifted from what may have been a partisan impulse to question the results of a particular election, to a nonpartisan collective effort to press for transparency in elections.

I feel that even when it might be a misguided partisan impulse that leads people to question the veracity of any election, once they learn that most U.S. elections are impossible to verify, they will graduate to a nonpartisan collective effort to obtain transparency in the electoral process.

So I would suggest that no matter what the reason is that a citizen is led to question the veracity of an election, they should understand that others of different political opinions, may also be questioning the veracity of different elections, and will have no more ability to verify the election results than they do.

Therefore, I'd say that no matter what leads you to question the veracity of an election, don't stop there. Follow through and find out if it is possible to verify the veracity of elections in your district, and if it is not, stop concerning yourself with individual instances of unverifiable elections and join BBV and other groups in fighting for verifiable rather than secret election processes.

If I was going to have a signature line, it might be something like:

Just because it is theoretically possible that an election you thought was stolen, may not have actually been stolen, unless you can verify the results to your own and everyone else's total satisfaction, don't stop fighting for electoral transparency, because it is equally theoretically possible that you were right in the first place.

Dale McClain
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Posted on Thursday, October 15, 2009 - 2:21 pm:

To Brant Lamb: Did you catch that?
I think I just saw a double dribble!
Dale
====================================
Sometimes, every once in a while, the real reason "your side" lost an election is because more people really DID vote for the "other guy", hard as that may be to fathom.
��.
Before you question the veracity of any election, please self-examine to see if perhaps you haven't fallen prey to the all too common problem of the famous "I don't see how Nixon won..." phenomenon.
======================================

V. Kurt Bellman
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Posted on Thursday, October 15, 2009 - 7:01 pm:

Mark,

I'd like to say that might be the calmest most sane post I've ever read from you. I'd like to say it, but I can't because there have probably been others, too. But it's a "keeper", for sure. One of the votes is mine.

That, sir, was well said. Bravos. The problem is, by reading MOST of your stuff, it's hard to remember that the stuff of the 2:04PM post is in you somewhere.

I guess I'm guilty of that too.

We share the desire for greatly enhanced transparency. It would serve us both well to remind ourselves of that while we vehemently disagree on the core politics and policy.

I want all the transparency that can be mustered because I am CONVINCED it will only reveal how clean things really are.

What dismays me are the people who have "gone away" because it ALWAYS WAS solely a partisan thing for them and as soon as Obama won, they were gone. Poof! End of problem. These ranks are undeniably thinned out.

Here's a fact. Most election directors don't believe there ARE any genuine transparency advocates. They think it's ALL just badly disguised partisanship. I know. I used to think that too.

Now, Mark, about my 2% hypothesis. I don't believe the confused 2% are partisanly equally distributed. Demographic trends show me a bias against left/progressive/Democrat areas. It's NOT a random factor. Poorer, older, sicker people, who are more prone to vote D, screw up trying to vote more than "peak earners" do. ANY technology has a skewing bias. It's a tough badass problem. It needs attention.

Mark E. Smith
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Posted on Thursday, October 15, 2009 - 8:29 pm:

Quite the backhanded compliment, Kurt. While you are possibly correct that "peak earners" not only are more prone to vote R, but also less apt to screw up trying to vote, I don't think that makes them less of a danger to democracy.

Perhaps you are unaware of the many psychiatrists who do not accept Medicare and who charge between $400 to $600 an hour. and of the many high-end detox clinics that do not accept Medicare and are unaffordable (pun intended) to all but peak earners.

Although peak earners are a smaller group, I believe that at least 2% of them are as screwed up and as apt to screw up as poorer, older, and sicker people. If this was not the case, there would be no market demand for high-end shrinks and detox clinics, and they'd go broke.

Now it is true that there are more poor people than there are peak earners, but only peak earners are in positions of power where their screw-ups can be endanger our whole society. For example, if a poor person screws up their ballot, one ballot is screwed up and it is very likely to be caught. But if a high-salaried legislator screws up a bill, or a high-salaried election official screws up a voting machine or software programming contract, entire elections can be screwed up.

Of course, the screw-ups by peak earners may be deliberate rather than accidental, so I don't find it reassuring to know that they not only tend to be in positions of power, but also tend to be partisan. I would question, however that they tend to vote R. I think they'd tend to vote whichever way they think might enable them to remain in power and keep drawing those peak earnings, which can easily vary from year to year and from one district to another. Many peak-earning corporations and corporate executives tend to hedge their bets and donate to both sides of the aisle unless one side has a clear advantage.

Kurt writes: "Here's a fact. Most election directors don't believe there ARE any genuine transparency advocates. They think it's ALL just badly disguised partisanship. I know. I used to think that too."

Some may not believe there are any genuine transparency advocates, Kurt. Others may be opposed to transparency themselves, prefer opaque election procedures that enable them to keep voters in the dark and control elections in accordance with their partisan preferences, and just be pretending to believe that there are no genuine transparency advocates while ignoring, silencing, and discrediting those they come into contact with, so as to remain in power. Just because it is a fact that some peak earners may be corrupt or screwed-up, doesn't necessarily mean that they're stupid.

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Posted on Friday, October 16, 2009 - 2:30 am:

To Brant : WHISTLE ! Out of bounds! Neither Nixon nor Agnew needed electronic enhancement to get into office.

Give the ball to Mark.

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Posted on Monday, October 19, 2009 - 6:27 am:

Do you really think I'm dumb enough to volunteer to be a referee between these two, Dale? I've got a 32-hour a week job.

They can't even directly compliment each other, even when they agree. Their heads might explode.

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Posted on Monday, October 19, 2009 - 7:07 am:

Brant,

I reserve the right to allow socialism to be enough of a background disagreement (euphemism alert) to allow me to be highly suspicious of agreement when it happens.

There are just SOME people who when they tell you the sun rises in the east, you feel a compelling need to wait til the next morning to reconfirm it.

Kind of like he feels about election administrators.

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Posted on Monday, October 19, 2009 - 8:14 am:

Yes, I see what you mean Brant, It would be a full time job--eight days a week to monitor this game .
But we can still play it back in slow motion and watch for fouls etc.

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Posted on Monday, October 19, 2009 - 8:40 am:

Kurt's right that we do have some serious background disagreements.

For example, I call government of the people, by the people, and for the people, democracy, and Kurt calls it socialism. This is a crucial disagreement because if it is called democracy, we might achieve it some day, but if it is called socialism, we can be labeled subversive for even advocating such a thing.

Kurt is willing to sacrifice a certain amount of transparency in order to make elections "workable," and I'm not.

Kurt feels that no matter how self-evidently true and readily verifiable something may be, it may still be useful to cast aspersions on the person saying it, based on background or class differences. I feel that if something is self-evidently true and readily verifiable, casting aspersions on the person saying it for no reason other than background or class differences, is bigotry.

Kurt feels that if one percent of ACORN employees are corrupt, that is sufficient reason not to trust ACORN as an organization, but that if one percent of election administrators are corrupt, that is not sufficient reason to distrust election administrators as a group.

I agree with Paul Lehto that con men require people to trust them, and I've noticed that the more trustworthy a person may seem, particularly among peak earners, Bernie Madoff being a prime example, the bigger con man he may turn out to be.

Kurt feels that we need more transparency in elections, but that in order to keep things workable, elections don't need to be fully transparent to everyone. The German Constitutional Court disagrees.

=============================================
Before you accept the results of any election, verify them. If you cannot verify them, don't trust them. Elections officials are humans, not gods, and trust in them is idolatry, not democracy.

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Posted on Monday, October 19, 2009 - 8:59 am:

Brant,

Here is an article that succinctly summarizes my previous "Democrats screwing up" thesis. Of course, Michael Barone is long a respected political commentator, being the author/editor of the famous "Almanac of American Politics".

Do you dispute the core theme of Barone's piece? He said it far better than I could have, with data all over it. I'm curious about where you live. Do you find the locals out of step with Barone, or in large agreement, as I see here?

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/political_commentary/commentary_b y_michael_barone/unlike_obama_americans_reject_european_model

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Posted on Monday, October 19, 2009 - 9:48 am:

Mark,

I'll make you a deal. I won't gripe about your belief that democracy and socialism are linked, and you don't gripe about mine that small business capitalism and essential freedom are linked.

I find real old-fashioned small business capitalism even MORE indispensible to the American experiment than even democracy is, per se.

I hold that as core a belief as yours seems to be. We can agree that big corporate capitalism is a bastardization of anything that has the word "freedom" legitimately attached to it.

Truce?

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Posted on Monday, October 19, 2009 - 9:59 am:

If you look back no farther than the year 2000, hand-counted paper ballots may also appear to be a European concept, and therefore socialist and undesirable from Barone's point of view.

On the other hand, if you look back a little further, you'll find that imperialism, globalization, and oligarchy also appear to be European concepts, but I don't see how Barone, Kurt, or anyone else could therefore deem them to be socialist in nature.

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Posted on Monday, October 19, 2009 - 10:34 am:

Truce? Are you saying that we, you and I, are at war, Kurt? When, exactly did you declare this war?

Kurt writes: "I find real old-fashioned small business capitalism even MORE indispensible to the American experiment than even democracy is, per se.

I hold that as core a belief as yours seems to be. We can agree that big corporate capitalism is a bastardization of anything that has the word 'freedom' legitimately attached to it."

I've always thought that discussion of issues was legitimate, but that personal attacks based on beliefs, was not. Definitions are a legitimate avenue of discussion. And there are, of course, different definitions. With regard to democracy and socialism, these are the ones I happen to prefer:

de⋅moc⋅ra⋅cy /dɪˈmɒkrəsi/ �noun,
1. government by the people; a form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system.

so⋅cial⋅ism /ˈsoʊʃəˌlɪzəm/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [soh-shuh-liz-uhm] �noun
1. a theory or system of social organization that advocates the vesting of the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution, of capital, land, etc., in the community as a whole.

If I understand you correctly, Kurt, you believe that small business capitalism is more important than democracy, and that socialism does not encourage small business capitalism.

I disagree.

I've found that small business capitalism is better able to flourish under socialism than it is here. By placing limits (regulatory, taxation, etc.) on capitalism, socialist countries enable small businesses to compete. As far as I can determine, there is more small business capitalism in socialist countries of Europe and Latin America, than here in the U.S., and small business owners are more successful.

Where our government uses our tax money to bail out big corporations, socialist countries use tax money to fund worker-owned cooperatives and collectives.

Taxation and regulatory limits do mean that small business capitalism can never become big corporate monopoly capitalism. Other than that, small business capitalism seems to do better in socialist countries than it does here.

To give a local example, Ocean Beach is a part of San Diego county that has a more socialist local government than most other parts of the county. They voted to ban big box stores and corporate chains. In most of San Diego county, all I can find are franchises, corporate chains, and big box stores. In Ocean Beach there are all sorts of small, locally-owned businesses continuing to thrive, in part because they are not subject to unfair competition from big corporations, and in part because when San Diegans want to buy something that wasn't made in China, we usually have to go to Ocean Beach.

Kurt writes: "We can agree that big corporate capitalism is a bastardization of anything that has the word "freedom" legitimately attached to it."

Yes, we are in complete agreement there. Where we differ is that I don't think you can secure freedom without placing tax and regulatory limits on capitalism, so that small business capitalism can flourish and big corporate capitalism doesn't have free reign.

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Posted on Monday, October 19, 2009 - 11:13 am:

"If I understand you correctly, Kurt, you believe that small business capitalism is more important than democracy, and that socialism does not encourage small business capitalism."

Yes, Mark, as it is becoming practiced in this country, that is EXACTLY what I'm saying, in the macro sense. I also admit that it needn't necessarily be that way, just that it is turning out that way. I think your Ocean Beach phenomenon can trace its roots to more, ohh, aesthetic causes.

My family history can be seen as analogous to that overplayed fellow from last fall, "Joe the Plumber". I found the now-President's rejoinder to Joe offensive on just about every level.

In the meantime, I see far too much of governmental cozyness with not just certain industries, but certain firms within industries. I haven't looked closely lately at a dictionary definition, but my memory wants to associate that with fascism.

I guess the problem I have with your philosophy, Mark, is the linkage between economics and politics. I remember a whole department full of professors of economics repeatedly bashing us econ majors over the head to avoid mixing the two. I remember one prof, an admitted Marxist (his word choice) who insisted that phrases like "economic fairness" and "economic justice" didn't belong in the vocabulary at all. They were antithetical to the field of economics. They were dripping with politics.

I find your defense of the small business experience of more socialist regimes unconvincing. I have seen quite a few French entrepreneurs throw up their hands in digust and ennui. (Very small plastics companies collapsing under the weight of employment regulations.) They are gone now, and the market has never been able to reproduce the quality of product they formerly made, anywhere on earth.

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Posted on Monday, October 19, 2009 - 11:32 am:

Yes, Kurt, Mussolini's definition of fascism was when government and big business merge so that government operates on behalf of big business.

Calling corporate rule socialism doesn't make it socialism, any more than calling democracy socialism makes it socialism.

Since both the Democratic and Republican parties favor what they call free trade and free enterprise, and since both major party nominees in '08, McCain and Obama, went so far as to issue a joint statement in favor of bailouts to big business, during the campaign, at a time when 90% of Americans opposed the bailouts, I don't see how one party can be seen as more socialist than the other, by any definition, and I do think that democracy, that is allowing the people or the community in general, a direct vote on matters of importance, is the only possible solution to corporate rule.

In other words, if supreme power over politics, was vested in the people rather than in an oligarchy, the bailouts would have gone to small business capitalists and ordinary people, rather than to big corporations that are continuing to outsource our jobs, foreclose our homes, and destroy our economy.

The taxes and regulatory limits that are anathema to big corporate capitalism, which they derisively label socialism, happen to be the only way to protect old-fashioned small business capitalism from the big corporate capitalism that we both agree cannot be associated with the word freedom.

Last I heard, Joe the Plumber wasn't a plumber. He didn't have a contractor's license and he didn't have the capital to start his own business.

As for the Ocean Beach phenomenon, if you call wanting to encourage small business capitalism, wanting to keep money within the community rather than having profits flow to the offshore bank accounts of big corporations, and wanting a sustainable community, all arguments that were given for banning big corporate chains, "aesthetic causes," then you might as well call small business capitalism quaint and obsolete.

France has been having serious problems because they are trying to maintain a higher standard of living in a world where big corporate globalization makes it impossible for small business capitalism to compete. When they insist on decent wages and working conditions, big corporations move elsewhere. When they pressure their workers to compete with workers in China and India, they get suicide epidemics.

Academic economists have an astounding track record for being wrong. Technological development increases rather than decreases poverty. The free market is not and has never been free--countries use protectionism as long as they need it, and then deny it to other countries so as to unfairly prevent competition. Externalizing costs does maximize profits, but it does so by dumping the costs of pollution and environmental degradation on the taxpayers and eventually destroys the economy for all but those who have stashed their profits safely offshore. Overthrowing democratically elected foreign leaders and replacing them with fascist dictators more favorable to business interests, does not promote stability, it inevitably leads to violent revolutions. And the devaluation of the dollar isn't compensated for by an increase in trade, it just devalues the dollar to the point where nobody with any sense wants to use it for trade.

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Posted on Monday, October 19, 2009 - 11:41 am:

THERE, Mark, you've tagged my point of departure for me!

"The taxes and regulatory limits" are EXACTLY the point. Oligopolistic firms can weather "The taxes and regulatory limits" because of their "in the excess of open competition paradigm" profits, and THEN still lump them onto consumers in the end.

Small firms, who also feel the pinch of "The taxes and regulatory limits" don't have such excesses, and are harmed directly to the point of extinction.

No one has yet fashioned a sufficiently sharp fiscal policy scalpel that successfully excises the excess profits malignancy without also taking so much small business healthy tissue that it kills that patient while leaving the host of the malignancy at which it was originally targeted alive and only marginally disfigured, without any smaller competitors and able to dump its recent bills on an unwilling consumer or further beat up the standard of living of its suppliers, who must then surrender to the demands of the only marginally lessened behemoth on whose commerce they no wfind thmeselves wholly dependent.

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Posted on Monday, October 19, 2009 - 12:25 pm:

ROFL!

Kurt, when you have taxes and regulatory limits, oligopolistic firms have to go elsewhere.

Guess which factors have driven more small farms, factories, and stores out of business, almost to the point of extinction in the United States: regulations and taxes, or deregulation and tax cuts?

Small firms don't feel the pinch of taxes and regulatory limits because they're small. They don't have "in the excess of open competition paradigm" profits to tax. Because they are small businesses, they don't exceed regulatory limits.

If you increase taxes on businesses and individuals with more than a billion dollars in assets, only individuals and businesses with more than a billion dollars in assets will feel the pinch, not that they'd notice it.

If you limit monopolies, only monopolies will feel the pinch, not that they'd notice it.

If you regulate big corporations, only big corporations will feel the pinch, not that they'd notice it.

Just as the law in its majesty forbids both rich and poor to sleep under the bridge, but only the poor feel the pinch, equitable taxes and regulations would apply to both big and small capitalist businesses, but only the big ones would feel the pinch.

Sure, the big chains and corporations aren't harmed by being excluded from Ocean Beach. But where they aren't excluded, small business capitalism has been swallowed alive by big predatory corporations.

If Wal-Mart leaves town, towns that allowed it to force everyone else out of business, are left with nothing. That has actually happened, but it can't happen in Ocean Beach because they didn't allow a Wal-Mart in the first place.

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Posted on Monday, October 19, 2009 - 12:29 pm:

I repeat this which was a late edit above.

"No one has yet fashioned a sufficiently sharp fiscal policy scalpel that successfully excises the excess profits malignancy without also taking so much small business healthy tissue that it kills that patient while leaving the host of the malignancy at which it was originally targeted alive and only marginally disfigured, without any smaller competitors and able to dump its recent bills on an unwilling consumer or further beat up the standard of living of its suppliers, who must then surrender to the demands of the only marginally lessened behemoth on whose commerce they now find themselves wholly dependent."

I speak as a former supplier of a niche product to a service subsidiary of the aformentioned behemoth from Bentonville, AK who, by predatory pricing of that service, and acquisitions, created a near-monopoly (actually two large firms - the other captive of K-Mart) of an industry that formerly had HUNDREDS of suppliers, with whom I also did busniess. Eventually, it was just the K and the W, who drove my prices down to the point there was no profit in it. We had several competitors, who were all too willing to engage in suicidal pricing with the K and the W.

It was W who literally said, "We will set your prices from now on, like it or not."

Here's a funny, sad, and true story about the Wal-Mart phenomenon. In a town near me, a few years back a Super Wal-Mart opened. The local TV station did a story about the impact on the local small businesses, like a famous hardware store that had been there for 125 years. Everyone (customers) in that Wal-Mart hardware department "hoped" that it wouldn't kill off the old hardware store, because there were things there that Wal-Mart didn't have, and couldn't stock in that much breadth. The hardware store was gone in 18 months. Four-generation family business gone.

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Posted on Monday, October 19, 2009 - 12:55 pm:

I deeply resent your characterization of Ocean Beach as "no one." And there are plenty of other localities and even entire countries that have done the same thing.

And I don't think it is honest to mischaracterize what actually happened as being related to some theory of what might have happened, but that, to my knowledge, never has.

Regulations on predatory pricing, had they existed and been enforced, could have saved those small businesses.

The victims of predatory pricing were not the victims of any "excess profits" tax.

There was, in fact, no excess profits tax.

What there was, was deregulation that allowed corporate monopolies and predatory pricing.

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Posted on Monday, October 19, 2009 - 1:07 pm:

No Mark,

Exclusion is sound policy, right up until it comes up against litigation, at which time behemoths usually win.

And the Ocean Beach plan wasn't a "fiscal" remedy, i.e taxation. Tax policy is the blunt instrument that often kills healthy tissue along with the malignancies. In order for taxation to be used "fine" enough, it would usually be found to be excessively punitive and targeted, so the overreach becomes the preferred tool.

As for that hardware store, they were already being hammered by ever increasing taxes prior to the Wal-Mart's arrival, both in tax rates and out-of-control property tax increases for educational purposes. They were in trouble before Wal-Mart got there. They just were the final nail in the coffin.

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Posted on Monday, October 19, 2009 - 6:01 pm:

If the government isn't fascist, Kurt, that is, if it isn't run by and on behalf of big business, the behemoths don't usually win. We're accustomed to a system where whoever has the most money wins. That's called capitalism and it is neither just nor democratic.

You're right that the Ocean Beach plan wasn't based on taxation. So far you have cited a theory that taxing the rich and the big corporations for excess profits, MIGHT not be "fine enough" and MIGHT impact small businesses that do NOT have excess profits, but you have given no example of that irrational nonsense.

I can give you an example of taxation being used against big corporations. Before Venezuela became socialist, big multinational oil companies exploited Venezuelan oil and took most of their profits out of the country. Except for a few kickbacks to the oligarchs who allowed them to do it, no benefits from the exploitation of their oil went to the Venezuelan people. When Hugo Chavez was elected, he became part of a new socialist policy. Oil companies operating in Venezuela had to renegotiate their contracts as they expired, and Chavez wasn't taking kickbacks. Either the companies agreed to pay fair market taxes on the oil they were taking out of Venezuela, or Venezuela would not renew their contracts and would buy them out. Most oil companies agreed to pay taxes and are still operating there. A few did not and were bought out. Venezuela began using money from oil production to fund literacy, health care, small businesses, and other popular programs, particularly for the very poor. Not a single oil company has gone out of business. Those still operating there are making a nice profit, albeit a smaller one than before, and those that were bought out are still recording record profits elsewhere, just not in Venezuela.

If the hardware store you refer to was hit by local property taxes for schools, that was because the town needed to compensate for the loss of federal funding for education caused by bailouts for big corporations, an increased defense budget, and tax cuts for the rich. That's been happening all over the country. But every other business in that town was having the same problem. Had Wal-Mart not come along, the town might have had to cut education in order to help struggling businesses, so the hardware store might have survived, but only by taking candy from babies.

If we didn't have a fascist government more concerned with funding multinational corporations, bailing out big banks, and expanding wars of aggression, more federal funds would have been available for education and the town wouldn't have had to raise property taxes. In fact, if our fascist government hadn't cut taxes to the rich, the small businessperson wouldn't have had an increased tax burden.

There may have been an increased property tax for schools, due to diversion of federal funding from education to war and crony bailouts, but THERE WAS NO EXCESS PROFITS TAX.

Neither the hardware store, nor any other small business has ever failed due to a nonexistent excess profits tax that, if it actually existed, would only apply to businesses with excess profits. While you may quiver in terror that legislators might not be able to tell the difference between a corporation with billions of dollars in excess profits, and a small business that can't even afford to give its owner a million dollar bonus at Christmas, I think your fears are unfounded, irrational, and based on a cold war hysteria that imagines monsters where none exist.

There was no excess profits tax in the case you cite. In places where excess profits taxes exist, they only tax EXCESS profits and there have been no problems distinguishing between reasonable profits and excess profits.

What we had were tax cuts for the rich, and tax breaks and corporate welfare for big corporations. These were sold by means of propaganda that caused people to think that everyone would benefit from tax cuts. It was a lie. Tax cuts for the rich and for big corporations pushed the burden of funding local services onto small businesses and homeowners.

Not only were there no excess profits taxes, the richer an individual or corporation, the less taxes they paid. So tax cuts for the rich harmed small businesses because they were forced to take up the slack when the rich slackers opted out of the system and told the poor people to go f**k themselves, and the corporate tax cuts and tax breaks helped big corporations gobble up small businesses that had higher tax rates.

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Posted on Tuesday, October 20, 2009 - 6:05 am:

The problem becomes defining "excess". In the real world of Mom and Pop small business, expansion of either physical plant or services or product lines comes typically not by issuing stock, or commercial paper that gets traded on an exchange, or even in many cases through bank financing. (The myth that the bank bailout was needed to keep liquidity for small businesses to be able to get financing to make payrolls was a baldfaced lie.) Most small businesses not ONLY don't use bank financing to make payroll, they SELDOM use it for CAPITAL PURCHASES. They frequently self-finance expansion through retained earnings.

In my Dad's 53 years in business with weekly payroll (53 x 52 = 2756 payrolls), exactly 1 made with use of a bridge loan. Borrow to make payroll my a$$.

While those earnings on paper look like a tidy income compared to that on most people's W2's, they are frequently being taxed at lavish confiscatory rates and cripple Mom and Pop businesses' ability to expand.

This is NOT a theortical exercise. I've LIVED this. Profits made using $80,000 equipment, and suddenly the replacement equipment is now $300,000 (and the consumer product it creates is imploding in price by "Walmartization"), and any attempt to try to purchase it using retained earnings and partial supplier financing is not happening because of confiscatory tax rates removing the down payment, well, it can implode a business, and has. Banks seldom do financing of $300,000 equipment for businesses who've never dealt in those kinds of numbers before.

Small businesses need tax treatment different from W2 income to survive, and they aren't getting it. What looks like "excess profits" to some people is minimalist capital needs to survive looking forward to others. Could the owners glom onto it and live large? Yeah, but the business dies. What do they do after 18-24 months?

And Mark, I don't know how CA funds K-12 education, but there's NEVER been a significant federal component here. It's all state and PRIMARILY locally funded and has always been. The federal diversion to foreign adventures line doesn't pass the fact check. The feds usually only fund experimental stuff.

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Posted on Tuesday, October 20, 2009 - 9:03 am:

Kurt, federal tax money used to be returned, in part, to the states, who then funded or passed it along to counties to fund local services. As our government began to use that money for military adventurism and corrporate welfare, less was returned to the states, and local services felt the pinch. They were either scrapped or local taxes were increased to fund them.

But no matter what problems small businesses have obtaining bank loans and credit, THERE IS NO EXCESS PROFITS TAX. Big businesses are paying LOWER tax rates, not higher. There may be some sort of disguised, "small profits tax" that taxes small businesses and workers at higher rates than big corporations and peak earners, but there is no excess profits tax.

You cannot blame a tax that doesn't exist for our economy's decline. It may just be coincidence, but those who are bigger and have excess profits, pay lower tax rates (if they pay any taxes at all), have easier access to credit, and get more taxpayer money in the form of bailouts and tax breaks, than those who are smaller and do not have excess profits. When government favors Wall Street over Main Street, small businesses suffer.

It is not due to a nonexistent tax.

It may very well be due to the fact that our tax system operates exactly in the opposite way that an excess profits tax would (if there was such a thing here).

Nobody mistook survival income for excess profits and taxed them. Big corporations and the rich were given big tax cuts, and small businesses and workers were given small tax cuts, but because big corporations and the rich were no longer paying their fair share, existing local taxes were increased and new taxes derived, to fund local services. These applied only to local businesses because local governments cannot take federal tax cuts and subsidies away from multinational corporations.

As Joe Bageant says:

http://www.joebageant.com/joe/2009/10/raising-up-dead-horses.html

"Beyond that, the big money is constitutionally protected. Our Constitution is first and foremost a property document protecting their money. In actual practice, our constitutional civil liberties, inspiring as they are in concept to people around the world, are mainly side action to make the institutionalization of the owning class more palatable. You can argue that may not have been the intent of the slave owning, rent collecting, upper class founding fathers. But you would be full of shit. We can keep on pretending to be independent, free to keep on living in those houses on which we still owe $300,000. But they own and control the money that comes through our hands. And they plan to keep on owning it and charging us to use it."

And, by the way, I don't use the word fascist in referring to our government lightly. This lawsuit was just filed by a major corporate law firm, Morrison Foerster, on behalf of some 'not quite mentally all there' folks, some of whom are homeless and all of whom are military veterans who were used as guinea pigs to test bio-weapons:

http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.edgewoodtestvets.org/court-filed-do cuments/pdfs/20090724-First-Amended-Complaint.pdf

The parts about the Nazi war criminals and the Feres doctrine are most informative.

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Posted on Tuesday, October 20, 2009 - 9:44 am:

I know about the former Federal General Revenue Sharing, a Nixonian concept. It did some nice things, but again, I don't know about CA, but in PA it NEVER got to school districts, who have always been property tax dependent.

Revenue Sharing was for counties and ESPECIALLY cities. School districts (the biggest property taxers here by a WIDE margin - PA doesn't even HAVE a state property tax) have never benefitted from Federal General Revenue Sharing in this state.

Once again Mark, the present problem is NOT the CONCEPT of an excess profits tax, which should heavily tax the spoils of monopoly or oligopoly position. It is with the PRESENT and seriously proposed versions of the Internal Revenue code, and several new proposed employment mandates, which proportionately harm small buinsesses worst of all, as I think we just agreed.

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Posted on Tuesday, October 20, 2009 - 10:17 am:

I'm pretty sick and tired of people talking about socialism and democracy as antithetical things. They are related, but they aren't in the same class of ideas. Democracy/Democratic Republic/Monarchy/Dictatorship forms a continuum of governmental choices, communism/socialism/feudalism/capitalism form a continuum of economic choices.

There are democratic socialist countries. There are tyrannical captitalistic countries.

And Kurt? It's been well-documented that Wall-Mart has driven small businesses out of a town with predatory pricing.

Mark E. Smith
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Posted on Tuesday, October 20, 2009 - 11:04 am:

Thank you, Kurt. You are correct and we are agreed that the problems stem from our present system, and that currently proposed versions would not improve matters.

This began when you said that we disgreed on core beliefs because you thought that socialism would harm old-fashioned small business capitalism. Your example of how this could happen was an excess profits tax which we do not have and which has not been proposed in any U.S. legislature that I know of, and which wouldn't get very far if it was.

You were able to give no example of an excess profits tax harming small businesses, and I gave an example of an excess profits tax, in Venezuela, that was used to fund small business start-ups. It was also used to fund education, health care, and much more.

Even if PA has no state property tax and never benefitted from revenue sharing, it cannot avoid being hurt by our declining economy, tightened access to credit (for all except the very rich and the biggest corporations), and federal taxes that disproportionately hurt small businesses and the poor. The devaluation of the dollar also makes it difficult for small businesses, while multinationals use a basket of currencies because they operate in many countries.

Since the concept of an excess profits tax is not the problem with socialism, what do you believe the problem with socialism to be?

The only problem that capitalists, conservatives, fascists, libertarians, and others on the right have with socialism that I know of, is that it limits the ability of individuals and corporations to amass as much capital as they can. It doesn't prevent them from amassing capital, it just sets limits and requires those who profit to pay their fair share in taxes.

Have you ever played Monopoly, Kurt? The game was invented by a young Quaker girl to demonstrate how capitalism works. No matter what happens during the course of the game, at the end, one person has amassed all the property and play money, and the game is over. Every time. If you don't set limits, that's what happens. Every time. If you don't apportion the family meal equitably, so that everyone has something to eat, the strongest person in the family can take all the food themself and leave everyone else hungry. In most families that wouldn't happen, but in some families it would. Sometimes the strongest person in a family is their sole wage-earner and they get drunk on the way home and by the time they get home their paycheck has been spent and the family has no money for food that week. Only in a minority of cases, but it has been known to happen.

Not every big corporation wants to be predatory, but if some are, the others have to be in order to compete. Not every politician wants to cater to big corporations, but if their opponents do, they have to woo those big donors in order to compete.

Socialism is a cooperative rather than a competitive model. It sets limits and it guarantees a more equitable distribution of goods and services. That's what our Constitution was supposed to do, remember? Promote the general welfare? But that was just in the Preamble, and within the body of the Constitution there isn't a single word about ensuring the general welfare. All it does is ensure that those who have the gold, rule. Socialism ensures that those who have the gold, either share some or get the hell out.

Remember the flood of billionaires a few years ago who relinquished their U.S. citizenship to avoid taxes? And that even after taxes to the rich had been slashed. And they were all billionaires, which is why it made the news. They renounced their citizenship in the very country that had made it possible for them to become billionaires. They were so grateful that not only wouldn't they pay the exceedingly minimal taxes they were assessed, they wouldn't even fulfill their civic duty to vote. It was love it or leave it, and those who benefited the most from capitalism were the first to leave.

Many of the countries that the U.S. considers to be socialist, think of themselves as capitalist. The only reason we call them socialist is because they have limits on capital gains, equitable rather than inequitable taxation, and they promote the general welfare of their citizens by funding social services from tax money. They also have a little thing called proportional representation because they don't believe in taxation without representation.

Old-fashioned small business capitalism in the U.S. is exactly that: old-fashioned, out of date, passé. What we have is unfettered, deregulated, predatory, monopolistic capitalism, and it does not allow small businesses to flourish. It does not promote the general welfare. And it smears any system that DOES allow small businesses to compete (by leveling the playing field), and DOES promote the general welfare (by funding social services), as socialist and therefore intolerable.

One of the few remnants of socialism we have left in this country are our socialist volunteer fire departments, and it is very likely that they'll soon be underfunded and unable to continue to maintain their old equipment or buy new equipment due to our declining economy, and they will be privatized also. Fire fighting can be done more efficiently and profitably by capitalists than by socialist volunteers. Or at least more profitably. Your house is on fire? I'm sorry, we don't accept your insurance carrier, you'll have to pay cash up front. No, sorry, we're the only fire-extinguishing corporation in town. You'd like to speak with my manager? One moment while I place you on hold and reconnect you with our automated phone answering system. Thank you for calling FireCorp.

=============================================
Before you accept the results of any election, verify them. If you cannot verify them, don't trust them. If we are competent enough to count our change when we buy something, we're competent enough to distrust anyone who won't let us count our votes and insists instead that we trust them.

V. Kurt Bellman
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Posted on Tuesday, October 20, 2009 - 12:01 pm:

"The only problem that capitalists, conservatives, fascists, libertarians, and others on the right have with socialism that I know of, is that it limits the ability of individuals and corporations to amass as much capital as they can. It doesn't prevent them from amassing capital, it just sets limits and requires those who profit to pay their fair share in taxes."

Yes, these are the adherants I have called on occasion "cartoon conservatives". I think they are NOT indicative of conservatism EXCEPT as the disproportionate share they have taken of the "talkers" in conservatism.

I think rank and file everyday conservatives are far less doctrinaire than those whose views you have catalogued here. Rank and filers object primarily because they see severe socialism and where we are now as waypoints of various distance on the same highway.

I suppose you might see cartoon capitalism and where we are now as similar waypoints. I can see how you might arrive at that, but I see the former fear as the more clear and present danger.

I see no prediliction for this Administration to even understand the needs of small entrepreneurship. Their rap is all redistributive, and not TOWARD the small business sector, either. I know literally hundreds of small business people and by far MOST are feeling more endangered from the left than the right.

BTW, you are more prescient than you know about volunteer FD's in my region. They are collapsing and have been for some time. They have been replaced by paid municipal departments. The volunteer model suffers when people can no longer work in close proximity to their homes, as was once the case.

And Brant, there are also tyrannical socialist systems, too, and there is a growing fear we're becoming one, especially when the "socialism" is taken in both forms, corporate and individual. The middle can barely sustain one type, much less both. And only the middle lacks a viable advocate, for now.

Dale McClain
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Posted on Tuesday, October 20, 2009 - 2:12 pm:

Brant; Glad to see you back. We had a player down, rolf. I should have called TIME but it got past me too quick and I am not the referee .
====================
Another happening :

The word in question was quiver-..At 6:01 .

I think that was an improper use of the word quiver . In light of the General Motors thing Quiver is more of a sexual thing.. What do you think?

Any way the game goes on and the need for more iconic slang seems likely--- as a matter of fact �..
Well you get my point.

Mark E. Smith
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Posted on Tuesday, October 20, 2009 - 4:13 pm:

Kurt, not a single small business has been hurt by anything that the Obama administration might do.

Many have been hurt by Reagan voodoonomics through each successive administration, which appears to be continuing unchanged and unabated by the Obama administration.

Where you see a slippery slope that we might roll down, I see a cliff that we've fallen off.

Where is our big strong middle class? Where are all the family farmers? Where are all the little mom-and-pop small business capitalists? Do you think they all just disappeared this year? Or that they're all still around but might be harmed by something that could happen in the future?

One of the problems with rule by peak earners is that they inhabit their own gated communities and when they happen to notice anything outside, they blame it on something that might happen in the future because they won't take responsibility for the mistakes they've been making for decades.

This isn't a Republican vs. Democrat thing, as it has continued through both types of administrations. This is a peak earners vs. the little guy type thing and not only do very few peak earners bother to stand up for the little guy, but the little guy doesn't have a seat at the table when decisions are made. When Dick Cheney called the big energy companies in for a secret meeting, the subsequent legislation that emerged was arrived at the same way that our election results are arrived at: secretly, behind closed doors or proprietary hardware and software.

Just because ENRON was so outrageous that they got caught, doesn't mean that all the other energy companies haven't been doing the same thing, they're just less flamboyant about it.

And it didn't start with Reagan. Here's another excerpt from that Joe Bageant essay:

http://www.joebageant.com/joe/2009/10/raising-up-dead-horses.html

"The sharks are still running the only game in town and they have never had it better. To be sure, with the economic collapse some of the financial lords won't pile quite up as many millions this year. Others will however have a record year. All are still squatting in the tall cotton.

Their grandfathers who so hated FDR's reforms must be chugging cognac in hell celebrating today's America. America's unions have been neutered and taught to beg. At long last we have established a permanent underclass and deindustrialized the country in favor of low wage service industries here and dirt cheap labor from abroad. We've managed to harden the education and income gap into something an American oligarch can take pride in. Hell, my bank card is issued by Prescott Bush's Union Bank and my most recent mortgage was held by J. P. Morgan's creation. My electricity is generated by Rockefeller's coal and energy holdings and my Exxon gasoline credit card is issued by a successor to Standard oil. The breakfast I eat comes from Archer Daniels Midland. So did my dog's breakfast. We are the very products and property of these people and their institutions."

Sorry, Kurt. It isn't one political party or the other, or one administration or the other. It's those "rank and file everyday conservatives" who can't see or understand what has happened and is continuing to happen, because they're too concerned about what might happen. Just give them something to be afraid of, and they'll happily trust you and do anything you say.

Let me ask you something, Kurt. I think you consider yourself a rank and file everyday conservative. Supposing I had managed to talk you into loaning me a hundred dollars. Supposing that when the time came for me to repay the loan, I was broke and I asked you to loan me another hundred to repay you with. Would you do it?

That's the bailouts, Kurt. That's what the Democrats AND the Republicans believed was a necessary thing to do. So much so that they literally terrorized the 90% of Americans who opposed such stupidity by telling them if they didn't do it, the economy would collapse.

Which would hit your personal economy harder, Kurt, if you had to write off the hundred you loaned me, or if you gave me another hundred so I could repay you?

I don't care if they call themselves Democrats or Republicans, liberals or conservatives, or neoliberals and neoconservatives--I call them the oligarchy (your "peak earners") and my core belief is that the average citizen is more fit to govern than they are.

90% of us ordinary citizens didn't want to throw good money after bad, but we weren't given a choice in the matter--both candidates in '08 were pro-bailout. I've seen plenty of arguments that one was slightly less unqualified than the other, but as far as I'm concerned, anyone who would throw good money after bad is sufficiently unqualified for all practical intents and purposes, and unfit to hold public office.

V. Kurt Bellman
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Posted on Wednesday, October 21, 2009 - 5:34 am:

"Where is our big strong middle class?"
Still hanging on where I live but in recent peril.

"Where are all the family farmers?
Can't swing a dead cat without hitting one here. They're ubiquitous here. In fact, there's no corporate farming here.

"Where are all the little mom-and-pop small business capitalists?"
Again, there are thousands of them here.

"Do you think they all just disappeared this year?"
Nope, they disappeared from localities near me with leftist local political philosophies, and still thrive where the local government is conservtative. Truth.

"Or that they're all still around but might be harmed by something that could happen in the future?"
Yup. Washington is ther locus of their fears, since January 20, 2009.

It's a tale of two cities thing, literally. Reading and Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Reading - now the 6th most impoverished city in the nation. Only leftists have run it, like forever. The last party other than the present one to have a majority on Council was the Socialists in the 1930's. It is economically DEVASTATED. A shell.

Lancaster - 38 miles SW of Reading. CHRONICALLY conservative. Vibrant community teeming with small businesses and commerce. Median, not mean, income nearly TWICE Reading's.

You tell me, Mark, you tell me.

I live in Lancaster County, but geographically nearer Reading. The contrasts are STARK. Everywhere leftists govern is a mess. Everywhere conservatives govern is working beautifully. It's a wonder to behold. And it applies right down to the tiny townships and borough level.

I am also aware there are states and locales where this doesn't apply. I've been to Sausalito (sp?) Marin County, CA, and loved it there. I suspect I'd like your Ocean Beach, too. Ditto, Provincetown, MA, and even (for a big city) Boston, which I will be visiting soon. But in Pennsylvania politics, you need only track the political leanings of local governments to see what does and doesn't work. Left doesn't work.

Mark E. Smith
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Posted on Wednesday, October 21, 2009 - 10:04 am:

I was talking about the country as a whole, Kurt. Your provincialism limits you to a small picture.

But you never answered my question, you just changed the subject. Let me reframe it more accurately:

Supposing I had managed to talk you into loaning me a hundred dollars. Supposing that when the time came for me to repay the loan, I was broke and I asked you to loan me another hundred to repay you with, but I insisted that there be no requirement that I actually repay you, no timetable for repayment this time, and you had to promise not to question how I used the money. Would you do it?

Would you still call yourself a conservative if you did?

The 90% of us who opposed the bailouts included Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, and everyone else. In fact it coincided almost precisely with the 90% of us who aren't in the top 10% that hold power and make all the decisions.

In other words, regardless of your politics, if you wouldn't loan me more money under those terms and conditions, I think you're more qualified to govern than anyone in our present government who supported or voted for the bailouts.

If you could stop thinking in terms of left and right, Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, etc., and start thinking in terms of simple old-fashioned ordinary American common sense, we'd have a basis for discussion.

What doesn't work isn't left or right, liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, what doesn't work is stupidity. And what works isn't left or right, liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican either, it is common sense. And it is simple common sense to let the people, the community as a whole, decide issues of importance, because if you leave such decisions up to those who can benefit the most from stupid decisions, you'll get nothing but stupid decisions.

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Posted on Wednesday, October 21, 2009 - 10:18 am:

re "In other words, regardless of your politics, if you wouldn't loan me more money under those terms and conditions, I think you're more qualified to govern...":

I think you have to temper this conclusion by a realization that what happened last year was pretty much a financial suicide bomb threat -- a terrorist threat. "Give us the money or we'll blow up the financial system, and many people will get hurt."

While I still think that the Congress should have called their bluff, I can understand why they didn't. They didn't have to be incompetent or unqualified.

Bob

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Posted on Wednesday, October 21, 2009 - 12:07 pm:

Blow up the financial system, Bob?

Let's say that the financial system doesn't work, and the only way that we can get it to work is to borrow money. But since our financial system doesn't work, we can't repay the money. So we tell our creditors to loan us more money. They say no. So we tell them that if they don't loan us more money, the whole financial system will collapse, which isn't a terrorist threat because it happens to be true.

Think about it. ;)

V. Kurt Bellman
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Posted on Wednesday, October 21, 2009 - 12:24 pm:

Mark,

Why are you trying to get me to defend these bailouts? I never have. But, I used to have a better handle on what the banking and investments industry was like in the late 70's / early 80's than I apparently do now. I don't have sufficient knowledge of how our over-leveraged system has "worked" (as if!) lately. Banks used to spread risk on large deals with "Participation Departments" that privately remarketed portions of large deals that would consume too big a portion of a bank's loan portfolio. Then along came mega bank mergers and "securitization" of loans and portions of bundles of loans. The rest is history.

I would never grant a mortgage to anyone who couldn't verify income, either, but that's because I envision a system where "success" means good final outcomes for people's lives, not numbers of transactions.

I am MILES from understanding how close we came to financial Armageddon last fall, and what we've done, if ANYTHING, to do anything more than "kick that can down the road a piece".

My degree is in Economics, Mark, and if I don't understand it, and I don't, what hope do the famous 90% have?

What I do know is leverage had gotten obscene, and as long as "real incomes" didn't decline much, the horrors could be put off until "the new 'green' economy" became real and lucrative, Well $4.79 gasoline screwed that pooch. That was enough of a "real income" hit to set the fuse in motion. BOOM! I have my doubts about the "green economy". It doesn't make sense to me. I haven't seen ANYTHING to replace smokestack industry as a "middle class" creator. I strongly suspect that what we're doing trying to create a "green economy" is just doin' what the minister in "Blazing Saddles" was asking about the night they built the fake town. "...or are we just j***ing *ff?"

And Mark? I've completely given up on the usefulness of words like "Democrat" and Republican" as very descriptive. You might have to spend time in a legislature to get that. I see a whole bunch (admittedly not the majority) of D's more conservative than some R's.

Samuel Scharff
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Posted on Wednesday, October 21, 2009 - 12:56 pm:

@ Mark - 10/21/ 10:04

"What doesn't work isn't left or right, liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, what doesn't work is stupidity. And what works isn't left or right, liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican either, it is common sense. And it is simple common sense to let the people, the community as a whole, decide issues of importance, because if you leave such decisions up to those who can benefit the most from stupid decisions, you'll get nothing but stupid "

Here is Chris Hedges:
"America the Illiterate"
11/10/08
http://www.truthdig.com/report/category/hedges/P25/ edges

Begin clip
The illiterate and semi-literate, once the campaigns are over, remain powerless. They still cannot protect their children from dysfunctional public schools. They still cannot understand predatory loan deals, the intricacies of mortgage papers, credit card agreements and equity lines of credit that drive them into foreclosures and bankruptcies. They still struggle with the most basic chores of daily life from reading instructions on medicine bottles to filling out bank forms, car loan documents and unemployment benefit and insurance papers. They watch helplessly and without comprehension as hundreds of thousands of jobs are shed. They are hostages to brands. Brands come with images and slogans. Images and slogans are all they understand. Many eat at fast food restaurants not only because it is cheap but because they can order from pictures rather than menus. And those who serve them, also semi-literate or illiterate, punch in orders on cash registers whose keys are marked with symbols and pictures. This is our brave new world.

End clip

The rest is worth reading too

To me it seems that this state of affairs is the result of a deliberate attempt by oligarchs and toadies of all parties to uproot the Constitution and rule by the people - the sabotage of public education, the distortions of the media, etc

Regardless; I think Hedges hits a nerve. The question is, how to respond?

You and Kurt may have ideas?

Abacus

V. Kurt Bellman
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Posted on Wednesday, October 21, 2009 - 1:00 pm:

Samuel,

Yes, yet in SOME ways we have the most educated population ever. Amazing.

Mark E. Smith
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Posted on Wednesday, October 21, 2009 - 1:12 pm:

I wasn't trying to get you to defend the bailouts, Kurt. All I was trying to get you to do was to admit, which you just have, that the top 10% don't understand any more about economics than the bottom 90%, and are therefore no better qualified to govern.

One of the funniest parts of Michael Moore's new film, "Capitalism: A Love Story," is when he tries to get experts and economists to explain derivatives to him.

Even funnier, if you have a macabre sense of humor, is when he asks the person in charge of keeping track of the bailout money, where the bailout money went.

How close are we to fiscal Armageddon?

Just look at the country the way you'd look at a mortgage applicant. Do we have a way to generate income? Do we have substantial assets that exceed our debts? In this case you don't even need ordinary Americans to figure it out--even a trained economist can do it.

Mark E. Smith
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Posted on Wednesday, October 21, 2009 - 1:52 pm:

Samuel, this is how Joe Bageant put it:

http://www.joebageant.com/joe/2009/10/raising-up-dead-horses.html

"Then too, what else did we expect? His [Obama's] economic team of free market billionaires and financial hotwires includes most of those who helped Bill Clinton sell the theory that Americans didn't need jobs. Actual labor, if you will remember, was for Asian sweatshops and Latin maquiladoras. We, as a nation one third of whose population is functionally illiterate, were going to transmute ourselves into an information and transactional economy. Ain't gonna sweat no mo' no mo' -- just drink wine and sing about Jesus all day."

Personally, I feel that Americans are too literate and too educated. I've seen people in countries with widespread illiteracy and deepseated poverty unimaginable to most Americans, kick out their oligarchs, rewrite their Constitutions, eradicate illiteracy completely, greatly alleviate poverty, and establish sensible fiscal policies.

When you have a government of, by, and for the people, instead of a government of, by, and for the oligarchs, people make sure that their children get a decent education. Regulations are placed on banks and financial industries so that they cannot engage in predatory loan deals, housing is regulated and subsidized by the government to eliminate predatory mortgages, and credit is extended by the government to those who need it so that the loan sharks, even if they hadn't been regulated out of existence, would go out of business anyway. With a single-payer, not-for-profit national health care plan, people don't have to worry about toxic, untested "medicines" or health insurance. When workers own the factories, they never export their jobs.

It has been proven many times over that when ordinary people take over their governments and oust their oligarchs, illiteracy can be wiped out within two years.

If we change the definition of success from how credentialed we are and how many toys we have, to how much in control of our own destinies we are and how well we can preserve our habitat for future generations, many countries that had much more illiteracy than we have, are much more successful.

Economically, if we change the definition of success from how much credit we have and how much we can borrow, to how much we can produce and how much of the profits from that production we can retain and use for our own benefit, many countries with much higher illiteracy rates than we have, have been much more successful.

And in the long run, it isn't whether or not you can understand the words on the medicine bottle, the mortgage papers, the loan application, or the tax code, but whether or not you have a job, food, clothing, shelter, schools for your kids, health care, and sufficient power over government to make sure that it stays that way. Since illiterates have done it and we haven't, I have reason to suspect that our problem is too much rather than too little literacy.

Joel Morine
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Posted on Wednesday, October 21, 2009 - 6:40 pm:

Just a personal opinion...
that applies more places than here...
but time spent on what is or isn't
"capitalism" or "socialism" or "democracy"
is wasted. And discussions that start with a specific issue/question, and proceed to pursue an answer through resort to any such abstract category as if it led to some generalized path to an answer -- are wasted in proportion to the degree they employ that abstracted route.

I used to see it frequently in the teaching profession ...
specific situation -- digestible as a specific situation w/ specific potential paths & potential outcomes down those paths...
discussion abstracts an element of the situation -- picks an abstracted path accordingly -- and now gets further and further from the specific situation & what specifically suits or heals it.

There are few words of which this is more true than "capitalism", "democracy", "socialism". In effect they are hyper-educated ways to miss the points in specific situations, turning the issue into an abstracted game of algebraic manipulations to which the specific reality one started with is less and less relevant --
and vice versa.

Mark E. Smith
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Posted on Wednesday, October 21, 2009 - 8:04 pm:

If the goal is to get closer to "the specific situation & what specifically suits or heals it," Joel, then I don't think that attempts to define and discuss abstract categories like "capitalism," "democracy," and "socialism" are a waste of time, in fact I think they may be essential.

I live in a senior building and my upstairs neighbor has serious health problems. The doctors had her on a lot of pills, but they weren't sure what the problem was. I helped her learn to research her medications and symptoms online, as a result of which she began a vegan diet, stopped taking three different kinds of pills, and dropped two doctors. This afternoon she told me that she is feeling better, has more mobility, has lost eleven pounds, and that the remaining doctors think they're closer to figuring out the problem--in fact they have a tentative diagnosis that they hope to confirm with a test tomorrow.

I'm sure you're familiar with Dr. Helen Caldicott, Joel. She's a doctor and she considers the entire planet a patient that is ill and that she wants to help heal. The way she goes about it is to first try to diagnose the problem(s), and only then to prescribe possible cures. That's how doctors back in my day used to do it also, first diagnose, then prescribe. Things do seem to have gotten a bit twisted around lately.

The specific situation BBV is devoted to is black box voting, that is, elections with secret vote counts. So in order to solve the problem we need to do more than just observe the symptoms and prescribe something to cure them, we need to diagnose the underlying disease that is causing the symptoms and cure that.

So we really need to understand what voting is, why it is or isn't necessary, what it can and cannot do, what sort of systems have elections and how elections function in different systems, etc. When somebody says that voting is a civic duty, I want to know if the elections are honest and, if they are not honest, how voting in a dishonest election could be a civic duty.

I've pointed out many times that if we eliminate secret vote counts, but we still only get a "choice" between war and war, or between bailouts and bailouts, on the ballot, we're not going to be able to end war or bailouts by voting.

If you understand and define abstract concepts like oligarchy and democracy, then you can have a chance of diagnosing the disease causing the symptom of secret vote counts. Secret vote counts make it easier for the few to control the many. If you treat the symptom by eliminating computers from elections, the few will just go back to physically stuffing ballot boxes, counting the votes behind closed doors, preselecting the candidates by funding their favorites and having the corporate media smear the rest, and many more tricks. If you treat the symptom, the underlying disease will remain and cause new and different symptoms.

If you treat the disease, the symptoms will go away.

Germany doesn't have our disease, or at least not as severe a case of it. They have a more democratic Constitution and a more democratic form of government. So their high court ruled that secret votes counts are incompatible with democracy. You can't eliminate secret votes counts by saying that they're incompatible with democracy, if you don't have a democracy, if the insiders who control the secret vote counts don't want a democracy, and if the average voter doesn't even know what democracy is and thinks that if they can vote in faith-based elections with secret vote counts, they already have a democracy so any problems must lie elsewhere.

If, as some contend, free, fair, and open elections are the defining characteristic of a democratic form of government, what do they mean by a democratic form of government? Would free, fair, and open elections with only one name on the ballot, that of a dictator, make a dictatorship into a democratic form of government? No, only one name on the ballot isn't fair. What about two names, the dictator and his brother? Does that make it democratic? How about as many names on the ballot as anybody wants, but a system set up so that only the dictator or his brother can win?

Some of us here on BBV really want a democratic form of government--that's what led us to oppose secret vote counts. Some of us have other priorities. Maybe you're right, Joel, and abstract discussions are intellectual irrelevancies and a waste of time. But you'd have to apply that assertion to the specific situation here in order to convince me.

Brant Lamb
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Posted on Thursday, October 22, 2009 - 7:50 am:

There is a book called "The Greatest Management Principle Ever Known" that boils down to "people do what gets rewarded", (whether the intent was that rewarding works out the way it does, or not) and the current rewards are most available from corporate lobbyists, either in campaign conributions, or jobs following public service, etc. . How are we going to beat that until corporate money is forced out of our politics?

Joel Morine
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Posted on Thursday, October 22, 2009 - 9:27 am:

Mark,

In reply to yr last post's closing invite...

Paragraphs 2-6 are egs of specific-focused content ...

If you understand and define abstract concepts like oligarchy and democracy, then you can have a chance of diagnosing the disease causing the symptom of secret vote counts.

Having such words to point out there is a concept -- even a pair of abstract extremes no reality is with a real spectrum of possibilities people live within between those abstract nonexistent extremes -- is useful for discussion IF (or perhaps -- to the degree that) one keeps in mind that the discussion is about the specific realities in between. What happens in the realities defines the value of the words as tools in the discussion -- adherence to those words in anyone's mind DOES NOT define the value of the realities!!!

The rest of the paragraph I excerpted the opening to gets back to specifics.

If you treat the disease, the symptoms will go away.

If you treat the specifics in the reality of the disease -- yes. If we flog each other over which word applies to specifics which have elements of both abstracted words -- NO! Frank Herbert called it ghafli in the Dune books -- a distracting noise that leads listeners away from pertinence.

Germany doesn't have our disease, or at least not as severe a case of it. They have a more democratic Constitution and a more democratic form of government.

"more democratic"? is debatably useful or meaningless depending on whether it is a shorthand understood as such and also depending on what one does with it...as a contrast-extreme eg, deploying it as a magic-icon criteria in a my-side yr-side &%(*&()^^$^%#^%& is ghafli.

What follows in that paragraph points up a problem w/ what has been made of words like "democracy" they can be used by both sides as magic-icons. The issue that matters isn't which is "truly" talking about "real" democracy. The issue that matters is can we construct a system with the least possible potential for fraud that (1) is self-evidently transparent, (2) protects secrecy of individual's ballot, and (3) can we sustain the will & vigilance to follow thru on keeping it that way -- to investigate & prosecute fraud.

If, as some contend, free, fair, and open elections are the defining characteristic of a democratic form of government, what do they mean by a democratic form of government?

What matters to our material realities is the free, fair and open elections ... whether we call the form of govt, democratic, socialist or communist, oligarchy or theocracy. What follows in that paragraph is again a good eg of one way focus on those words strays from the point -- you've created a straw man that self-evidently knocks itself down ... it's a debate club argument winner, it plays for some, or rather plays that some, on the political talk circuit.

Even to those who regard it as a fair approximation of what we do, and shouldn't do, it isn't useful for changing the view of anyone who doesn't view our political theater that way.

Maybe you're right, Joel, and abstract discussions are intellectual irrelevancies and a waste of time.

Is another good example of how the sort of unstated reductionism of words like "democracy", "socialism" etc can be employed as a debate tool...
But what I said was what I said, not very clearly in my own opinion, but I took too many words to say it becuz I didn't say what you've characterized it as, so...

thanks for the invite here--
But you'd have to apply that assertion to the specific situation here
--and maybe I've said it more clearly this time.

But I don't intend to have a fun hourslong debate about the subject to see who can win an argument about it...not my idea of fun. It's hard enough to read.

I do find value in much that gets said in yr debates with Kurt, find much value in what both say ... and as someone who often agrees with a lot of what both of you are saying while you are so vehemently disagreeing with each other --

the degree to which you each or both get into arguing over the words, instead of specific devils & graces in specific details ... can make searching out the nuggets a tiresome boring chore. Still worth the work for what nuggets are there -- but I'm happier the days it's a richer grade of ore because the focus stuck to...
etc that I've already said redundantly.

Mark E. Smith
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Posted on Thursday, October 22, 2009 - 12:04 pm:

"The issue that matters is can we construct a system...."

In a theocracy, oligarchy, or tyranny, we can't, Joel. Those types of systems are constructed from above and people have to submit to them or rebel against them. Only in a government of, by, and for the people, whether you want to call it democracy or socialism, can we, the people, construct a system.

Do we know how to construct a system that meets your criteria for security, privacy, transparency, etc.? I think we do, and if we didn't we could simply borrow from other countries that have such systems.

Can we actually construct and implement such a system? That depends entirely on what form of government we have, a form of government where power is vested in us to do things like that, or a form of government where it is not.

Joel Morine
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Posted on Friday, October 23, 2009 - 7:14 am:

You've missed the pt Mark, nor will I spend days restating it. Take if for what it is and figure it out, or not. Setting up misrephrased straw men that weren't there to knock down is as much a waste of time as arguing over what is or isn't right left democracy socialism capitalism corporation or etc.
I haven't, noone has,
said democracy is no better nor worse than the others ...
I haven't, noone has,
said it doesn't matter whether a tidal crime wave has or hasn't fully completed their process of hijacking democracy & turning it into a disguise for something else...

I've said what matters more than what term we apply to any of it is what specifically we do and what specifically are the consequences of each doing, & not
(1) who wins what argument over what to call it, nor
(2) making what one can or can't call it the criteria of each specific doing's value.

Have a happy argument, Mark, I do appreciate many of yr points, probably agree with yr extremer pts more than many folk, & I've made my pitch requesting you to make them more effectively by
(1) bagging the joy of arguing terms instead of details
(2) pocketing debate club thrills that feed-&/or-start chicken-egg "you-started-it" perpetual circular arguments.

Use the thought or not...friendly advice from someone who agrees with you enough to prefer you were more effective abt what yr putting across, & wld prefer to find what nuggets yr delivering w/o wading thru so much strawfilled gaff to get there...

Nor do I say it only to you...
Just a periodic reminder we all need.
Generally when it is delivered, as many have offered similar variations toward the same larger theme, the invite takes for a while & then gets lost in the
?joy of ... fray?
--or call it whatever yr more comfortable with.

Brant Lamb
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Posted on Friday, October 23, 2009 - 8:53 am:

Mark seems to me to be very busy counting rhetorical coup, and not much else seems to matter.

Joel Morine
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Posted on Friday, October 23, 2009 - 10:58 am:

Brant (or anyone),
On another site where I perioidically post links to here, with no noticeable effect, someone asked whether/why it is/n't possible to create e-voting software that was trustworthy.

I thought you might remember much more immediately (than I can find by searching) a/some thread(s) from a year or two back when that issue was getting directly dealt with.

I'm comfortable with expressing/linking other problems w/ e-voting, but I'd rather link to where the strictly tech issues involved have been kicked around more thoroughly than I can...

They're Query rephrased seems to be in a dream world where we were really trying to produce hack-free open-source software to handle vote-counting,
is it doable?
or
why not?

Bob Fleischer
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Posted on Friday, October 23, 2009 - 11:09 am:

There are at a minimum two separate issues here: a hardware/software that is itself trustworthy (define that -- it will always have some potential for failure), and a separate issue is a system that is tamper-proof.

And tamper-proof has at least two aspects: one is whether the system provides any unintentional opening for hacking, and the other is whether there might be a back-door mechanism, as part of its design, that facilitates altering and/or tampering.

(I don't have time to expand on this right now, but there may be other aspects as well.)

Mark E. Smith
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Posted on Friday, October 23, 2009 - 12:12 pm:

You're right, Joel, Kurt didn't say that democracy is better or worse than other systems. What he said was, "I find real old-fashioned small business capitalism even MORE indispensible to the American experiment than even democracy is, per se."

Not better or worse, just less indispensable.

Brant, as I just posted in another thread, "...to the extent that effective rhetoric on behalf of and in defense of democracy is stifled, silenced, or dismissed as divisive and nonproductive, effective rhetoric AGAINST the fundamental principles of democracy will prevail."

Bob, if somebody can produce hardware and software that is totally transparent to the average voter without any special expertise, I'd like very much to know about it--and so would the German Constitutional Court, as they would then be able to allow e-voting without violating the fundamental principles of democracy.

Samuel Scharff
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Posted on Friday, October 23, 2009 - 10:08 pm:

@Joel - 10:58

Maybe it was this --

In �An Undetectable Computer Virus� David Chess and Steven White of IBM show that you can always create a vote changing program (a virus in their context) that no �verification software� can ever detect. They do this by a very clever argument which you can pursue in that paper, but the important thing to realize is that their results are not in doubt. You also should know that these arguments apply to every computer system that can ever be created. Therefore, if you use a computer anywhere in the vote counting process, you cannot be certain of the result.�

http://www.research.ibm.com/antivirus/SciPapers/VB2000DC.htm

This was in a BBV thread...

More references...two papers by leading scientists -- for cv look them up in Wikipedia.]

Dr. Peter Neumann, one of the world's most distinguished computer scientists: �Even if you can look at the source code, you can�t guarantee that there�s not a Trojan horse embedded somewhere in the code. Any self-respecting system programmer can hack the innards of the system to defeat encryption techniques or any password protection, or anything like that. All this stuff is trivial to break, for the most part. In most computer systems out there, it is child�s play. Given the fact that the underlying systems are so penetrable, it is relatively easy to fudge data-for example, to start out with three thousand votes for one guy and zero for the other before the counting even starts, even though the counter shows zero. Essentially a Trojan horse in the coding. I can do it in the operating system. I can do it in the application program. Or I can do it in the compiler. I can rig it so that all test decks work perfectly well�.�

http://www.csl.sri.com/users/neumann/dugger.html

Dr. Kenneth Thompson, another most highly-regarded scientist, won the Turing Prize [maybe one level below a Nobel award]; he wrote a paper which has become one of the classics; in it he showed how a trojan horse can be designed and released to do its work undetectably...

�The moral is obvious. You can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself. (Especially code from companies that employ people like me.) [:-)] No amount of source-level verification or scrutiny will protect you from using untrusted code.�

[His attack inserted malware in the source-level code whence the compiler translated it to machine-level code. Then he erased the malware items in the source level code. But the compiler itself had been subverted and remained ready to pass on the malware indefinitely in later occasions.

http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html.
===
There is even worse trouble at the hardware levels but I don't have a short note about that...

Abacus

Joel Morine
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Posted on Saturday, October 24, 2009 - 9:22 am:

Thanks Samuel,
Hope it is okay to paste the most pertinent portion of yr context comments as well...

BTW, I particularly enjoy how level-headed & to-the-pt yr posts are, & they keep me wondering if yr related to another Scharff also noteworthy for those qualities whom I used to play pickup hoops & referee w/ in SurfCity ... writes an investments advice column ... a quiet jewel who eschews glitter. In like manner, a good ballplayer who never flashed any ego about it. He got me started reffing, & reffing kids hoops leagues afterwards has delivered me a lot of valued life lessons -- & tales to tell.

If so, I hope you'll pass on my compliments & regards...and my thanks for pointing me down that particular path.

I've actually been thinking of him more & more recently becuz of a biz idea I've developed that needs a particular mix of skills in the start-up team, and an attitude that values community-building more than profit value to start with, but has enough potential legs -- and a unique mix of important potentials -- to be profitable down the road, if done right ... and a further value of negligible $$$s investment to start.

FWIW...

Joel Morine
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Posted on Saturday, October 24, 2009 - 9:33 am:

P.S. Just curious, but, can you really use an abacus ... I mean really use one the way it was used in its native culture?

IF so (or otherwise) you might enjoy a book whose title I forget re The Trachtenburg system of ??? mathematics ...
that may be the title, or part of the title,
I think the ??? may be "speed"?

It's abt a mental arithmetic system, ?perhaps (mistrusting my memory from reading it 20yrs ago) developed as a mental health sustenance exercise in concentration camps -- or some similar environs? which was eventually used as a math teaching system in (some?, most? all?) Swiss schools.

Catherine Ansbro
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Posted on Saturday, October 24, 2009 - 9:33 am:

Thanks for posting that info about software vulnerabilities, Samuel.

Recent posts by Charles Christopher highlight serious hardware vulnerabilities, including some present in well-known, standard-issue chips. See the link here and the following posts.

Serious firmware vulnerabilities have also been discovered and demonstrated. They have been discussed at length on BBV.

Joel Morine
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Posted on Saturday, October 24, 2009 - 10:40 am:

Thanks Catherine,
I'll include that...
I'll wait a day to see what others point to before I pass all this on...
in which case...

Samuel,
I'd feel more comfy abt using yr context comments as well if I have yr explicit okay re: that.

Joel Morine
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Posted on Saturday, October 24, 2009 - 10:41 am:

Thanks Catherine,
I'll include that...
I'll wait a day to see what others point to before I pass these on...
in which case...

Samuel,
I'd feel more comfy abt using yr context comments as well if I have yr explicit okay re: that.

Joel Morine
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Posted on Saturday, October 24, 2009 - 10:43 am:

Sorry,
Screwed up the edit somehow.

Samuel Scharff
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Posted on Saturday, October 24, 2009 - 3:46 pm:

@Joel 9:22
Your friend Scharff sounds interesting...I�m sure I�d remember him if I�d met him but I don�t. The ones I know are as diverse a lot as you�f find in any clan...one was an actor known for a performance as the Mock Turtle...

Thanks for kind words..Would like to say: I have same feelings about yours...

@Joel 9:23
I never got beyond entry-level skills with the abacus but found it really interesting - it was really an early digital calculator...One expert I read about actually finished a test faster than people using desk calculators.

@Joel - 10:41
The words are part of a clip from a comment by J. T. Gleason, who started this discussion. Since that was public - i.e., here on BBV - I guess it�s ok to quote him. I don�t know how to contact him. Haven't seen him here for months.

The BBV links:

Quote
http://www.bbvforums.org/cgi-bin/forums/board-profile.cgi?action=rate&topic=7032 8&page=73636&post=45849

The thread
A long, thorough discussion - ran for three months
http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/72/45002.html?1202083823

Hope this helps. Our household is moving so I may not be able to post items about hardware-level problems but they are really appalling

Abacus

Samuel Scharff
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Posted on Saturday, October 24, 2009 - 11:50 pm:

One more powerful example of the susceptibility of e-voting machine software:

Computer scientists take over electronic voting machine with new programming technique (w/ Video)

http://www.physorg.com/news169133727.html

Begin clips
Computer scientists demonstrated that criminals could hack an electronic voting machine and steal votes using a malicious programming approach that had not been invented when the voting machine was designed. The team of scientists from University of California, San Diego, the University of Michigan, and Princeton University employed �return-oriented programming� to force a Sequoia AVC Advantage electronic voting machine to turn against itself and steal votes.

�Voting machines must remain secure throughout their entire service lifetime, and this study demonstrates how a relatively new programming technique can be used to take control of a voting machine that was designed to resist takeover, but that did not anticipate this new kind of malicious programming,� said Hovav Shacham, a professor of computer science at UC San Diego�s Jacobs School of Engineering and an author on the new study presented on August 10, 2009 at the 2009 Electronic Voting Technology Workshop / Workshop on Trustworthy Elections (EVT/WOTE 2009), the premier academic forum for voting security research

===End clips
So even a robust design, by the standards of the time of its inception, may be subverted as new attack vectors are developed.

A commenter argues that this attack would leave any digital signature - �hash� - that the original software included, unaffected. So this protective feature is of no use against this kind of attack...

The basic paper:

Can DREs Provide Long-Lasting Security?
The Case of Return-Oriented Programming and the AVC Advantage
Feldman, Felten and others
http://www.usenix.org/event/evtwote09/tech/full_papers/checkoway.pdf

Abacus

Brant Lamb
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Posted on Monday, October 26, 2009 - 10:58 am:

quote:
Brant, as I just posted in another thread, "...to the extent that effective rhetoric on behalf of and in defense of democracy is stifled, silenced, or dismissed as divisive and nonproductive, effective rhetoric AGAINST the fundamental principles of democracy will prevail."

You would have a decent argument there, IF you were using any effective rhetoric in defense of democracy, I just don't think that you're doing that. I think your arguments are largely founded on foisting a straw man on your opponents and then setting them on fire.

Brant Lamb
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Posted on Monday, October 26, 2009 - 11:02 am:

Joel, in short: even if software is created that can be trustworthy for e-voting, there is no way that you can be certain that, at any given moment, that trustworthy software is running on the e-voting host, and not some software made to look like it, since the e-voting server will use its own software to respond to anyone querying the e-voting server in any way.

Mark E. Smith
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Posted on Monday, October 26, 2009 - 2:01 pm:

Brant writes, "I think your arguments are largely founded on foisting a straw man on your opponents and then setting them on fire."

Even if that were true, I don't think it is anywhere near as bad as making personal attacks in the form of unfounded generalizations, like many of your responses to me--including this one.

Where I have shown certain views, such as that educated or wealthier classes are better suited to govern than ordinary people, or that those in positions of power are thereby entitled to the public trust, to be elitist and anti-democratic, I think I have been defending democracy on BBV, even when I have had to do it alone.

As an example, to paraphrase your response to Joel, even if most, or even 99% of elections officials were trustworthy, with e-voting there is no way that you can be certain that they, rather than untrustworthy elections officials, control the elections, since one corrupt official with access to the computers can program them so that none of the trustworthy elections officials would be able to know the computers had been tampered with.

Brant Lamb
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Posted on Tuesday, October 27, 2009 - 5:15 am:

Mark, you just said "even if it were true" and then called it an "unfounded generalization", does your neck ever hurt after whipping it around into opposing points of view, this fast?

Many people have told you that you were putting words in their mouths and distorting their points, Mark. I have. Kurt has. I think Catherine has, as well.

Spot the pattern, son, it's pretty plain. Spot the pattern.

V. Kurt Bellman
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Posted on Tuesday, October 27, 2009 - 7:14 am:

Does democracy REQUIRE an attitude that "elites" , whatever they are, must be corrupt? Or is it okay to assume they are?

Or does someone BECOME "an elite" by the very attribute of having the job? What then is the solution? "The People" cannot spontaneously arrive at a location to hold an election.

For better or worse, election admin has become a PROFESSION, like brain surgery, or law, or being a CPA. Did it have to become one? No. But is HAS.

And whatever poor schmuck is in a management position is registered in ONE political party, and every party OTHER THAN his is less represented. The same applies to a board of three election board members. The majority rules, and conflicts are UNAVOIDABLE. What is the remedy?

"The People" IS NOT the answer. That's a slogan, not an answer.

Mark E. Smith
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Posted on Tuesday, October 27, 2009 - 8:12 am:

Democracy requires that there not be rule by elites.

Democracy is the opposite of rule by elites.

Medicine, law, accounting, etc., used to be professions, but they have become industries, and the less accountability and the greater the profit motive, the more corrupt they become.

Direct democracy, allowing citizens to vote directly on important decisions and vesting supreme power over government in the hands of the people, isn't just a slogan. Government of the people, by the people, and for the people, isn't just a slogan. The greater voice ordinary citizens have in government, the better the government, the better the educational system, the less illiteracy, the more accessible health care is and the longer the lifespan and the lower the infant mortality, etc. Give the people a voice and their lives improve. Give only the elites a voice and the rich get richer while the poor get poorer.

Poor countries with direct democracy manage to find polling places and hold elections with full citizen oversight. Elites assume that Americans are incompetent, and can give examples of individual incompetence, but I assume that Americans are competent, particularly when there are checks and balances, and I can give many examples of elite incompetence and/or corruption.

V. Kurt Bellman
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Posted on Tuesday, October 27, 2009 - 8:19 am:

I'm talking about the technical legal complexities of holding an election. They have literally EXPLODED in the last decade alone. Even experienced pollworkers are overwhelmed with new laws and procedures.

"The People" are ill-equipped to do what it presently takes to run an election to protect the rights that must be proteced under current statute and case law.

There is EVEN a viewpoint, with many ABA adherants, that all election administrators should have law degrees.

Mark E. Smith
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Posted on Tuesday, October 27, 2009 - 8:27 am:

Kurt, "the people" are capable of running elections in Germany, Canada, Australia, Ireland, and many other countries. Exactly what is it about Americans that makes you believe that we are less competent to run elections than citizens of other countries?

V. Kurt Bellman
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Posted on Tuesday, October 27, 2009 - 9:13 am:

"Exactly what is it about Americans that makes you believe that we are less competent to run elections than citizens of other countries?"

Orders of magnitude more legal and procedural complexity. Americans per se are fine. The complexity of our elections, and the law surrounding them, is the problem.

And BEFORE you have hope of making elections less complex, you FIRST have to slow down the blinding acceleration in the opposite direction.

It's kind of like asking how to get a rocket just launched from Canaveral to Orlando. It's kind of going the other way at a hellacious clip.

Mark E. Smith
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Posted on Tuesday, October 27, 2009 - 9:51 am:

The layers of complexity are mostly just stuff the bureaucrats did to protect their turf.

When bureaucrats make decisions sometimes the rockets crash all on their own without anyone trying to stop them.

Workers in many countries used to believe the same thing about factories--that without the various layers of management, nothing could get done. But when the companies went broke due to poor management and management fled, workers who took over the factories found that they were able to run them without any management, and to do it more efficiently. They didn't have or need MBA degrees--they were the ones who had been doing the work all along and they understood how to do the work better than management ever had. All management knew how to do was to exploit the workers and enrich management.

Not that experts can't be useful sometimes. There's a developing field of study about "managed inequality," that explains how governments, corporations, and other bureaucracies exploit the many for the benefit of the few. But you don't have to be a rocket scientist to know that secret vote counts aren't democratic and that giving away money with no oversight is sheer idiocy--only highly credentialed financial experts (Geithner, Bernanke, Paulson) and university presidents (Summers) could be that dumb--the average citizen knows better.

V. Kurt Bellman
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Username: Formerelecdir

Post Number: 3209
Registered: 4-2006

Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?)

Posted on Tuesday, October 27, 2009 - 9:57 am:

In my experience, election complexity is NOT coming from what you call "bureaucrats" who are largely seeking to avoid new complexity. It's an awful lot like work.

Newer type electoral complexity seems to be coming from two sources - the U.S. Congress and the courts, in approximately equal measures.

Mark E. Smith
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Mymarkx

Post Number: 598
Registered: 7-2005

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Votes: 0 (A keeper?)

Posted on Tuesday, October 27, 2009 - 10:51 am:

Yes, I've heard the "we're just doing our job" and "we're just following orders," song and dance many times before. What we should be doing is running the place.

The complexity cracks me up sometimes. Yeah, we don't like this stuff any more than you do, but your representatives ordered us to do things this way.

OUR representatives?

Well, yeah, you elected them.

Can you prove that?

Well, not to 100% certainty, but we assure you that it is most probable that you did. And if you didn't, there's nothing you can do about it anyway because it's all too complex for you to understand.

Uh huh.

V. Kurt Bellman
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Formerelecdir

Post Number: 3212
Registered: 4-2006

Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?)

Posted on Tuesday, October 27, 2009 - 11:14 am:

EXAMPLE: Show me a place that CORRECTLY administers provisional ballots, precinct to jurisdiction level, and I'll show you a rare place indeed. All studies have shown it is the single most misunderstood, and misapplied part of elections. No elections admins ever asked for it, believe me. The percentage of poll workers who can tell you when to apply a provisional and when to apply "fail-safe" is minuscule.

For the curious: you do "fail-safe" when a voter appears in a polling site he has moved away from, but hasn't re-registered at his new address. You let him vote there AFTER filling out a new registration for his new address.

If you can't verify the registration at all, anywhere, but the voter says there's some mistake, THAT'S a provisional.

If the voter admits he isn't regsistered in your state, but wants to vote anyway, he's an idiot. We actually had DOZENS of these in 2004. They put an out-of-state address right there on the affidavit! As if provisionals were a "vote anywhere you want to" ticket. One guy admitted he came over to PA to vote to help Kerry more, because he didn't need the help in his home state of NJ, and he knew he'd be in PA on business that day. Rocket scientist, huh?

Samuel Scharff
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Abacus

Post Number: 150
Registered: 8-2005

Best of Black Box?
Votes: 1 (A keeper?)

Posted on Wednesday, November 11, 2009 - 10:22 pm:

A trivial note but surprising...Serendipity is running amok

From my post October 24, 2009 - 3:46 pm, responding to Joel

“I never got beyond entry-level skills with the abacus but found it really interesting - it was really an early digital calculator...One expert I read about actually finished a test faster than people using desk calculators.”

In a truly surprising event ‘Wired’ today has a piece referring to the Abacus-vs-calculator contest I mentioned...

Clips

1946: The United States Army holds a contest pitting a Japanese abacus user against a soldier using an electric calculator. In four out of five rounds, the abacus wins.

The soroban or Japanese abacus is a handy calculating tool that hasn’t changed since the 19th century. Despite the ubiquity of digital calculators, the soroban is still used in Japanese schools and banks today, and many users are faster on it than on calculators.

End clips

http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2009/11/1112abacus-beats-calculator

The ‘Wired’ piece includes a link to a rather confusing account by a serious student which seems to me to suggest that the operator learns manipulative skill at a subconcious level so can complete calculations faster than with a calculator...

Stumbling on this just blew me away...

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http://www.bbvforums.org/cgi-bin/forums/board-post.cgi

Abacus

The public must be able to see and authenticate these four essential steps for an election to be public, democratic, and valid: (1) Who can vote (voter list); (2) Who did vote (3) The original count; (4) Chain of custody.