JIM CROW GOP STEALS ANOTHER ELECTION AS BRAIN DEAD DEMOCRATS & MEDIA SAY NOTHING

Electronic Voter Fraud, Pencil Version[/caption] By Bob Fitrakis & HarveyWasserman       The Jim Crow GOP has stolen yet another Congressional election, this time in Georgia.   As always, the media and Democrats are saying nothing about it.   And now the US Supreme Court will allow secretaries of state to completely trash the ballots of anyone they choose.   So the Trump/GOP domination of American elections is essentially secure for the foreseeable future. Anyone believing the 2018 or 2020 elections will provide realistic opportunities to overthrow Trump/GOP control of the government is living in a dream world.   That dream world fits an historic pattern we outline in our new STRIP & FLIP DISASTER OF AMERICA’S STOLEN ELECTIONS (www/freepress.org). Its latest incarnation has just surfaced in Jim Crow Georgia.   The much-hyped Congressional race between Democrat John Ossof and former Georgia GOP secretary of state Karen Handel was the most expensive in US history, costing more than $50 million.   It has ended with yet another victory for Jim Crow election theft as surely as if the KKK had run rampant through the countryside, lynching potential voters.   When the seat was vacated by a Trump cabinet pick, Ossof apparently won a run-off election. Early reports showed him with well over 50% of the vote. But as usual where electronic voting machines are involved, Ossof’s margin mysteriously fell under the majority as the evening proceeded, forcing a run-off.   Not one major media outlet reported that GOP secretaries of state like Handel have been using the infamous Crosscheck program to strip untold numbers of minority and other suspected Democrats from the registration rolls. As reported by Greg Palast in THE BEST DEMOCRACY MONEY CAN BUY, Crosscheck was developed by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach to eliminate millions of non-white voters from the registration rolls. In 2016 some 30 GOP secretaries of state used it to help put Trump in the White House.   Trump has since appointed Kobach to a special national commission on elections. Trump also picked J. Kenneth Blackwell, the former Ohio secretary of state responsible for flipping the 2004 presidential election from John Kerry to George W. Bush. The commission will be a perfect weapon to further enhance the Republican apparatus for stealing elections.   Meanwhile, in their endless fund-raising e-mails and public rantings, the corporate Democrats continue to focus on alleged Russian hacking. They avoid any real attention to the Crosscheck program and other forms of homegrown Jim Crow disenfranchisement that helped cost them the presidency and innumerable seats in the state and US legislatures, giving the GOP a growing iron grip on our government.   They fail to mention that a data analytics firm working for the Republican National Committee “accidentally leaked the sensitive personal details of roughly 198 million citizens … on the web for nearly two weeks.” As Business Insider explained: “This is what you can use to steal an election.”   In Georgia, Greg Palast has reported in that a grassroots citizens’ group recently compiled some 10,000 registration forms for Korean-Americans to vote in the disputed Ossof-Handel district. The completed forms were delivered to GOP election officials, but somehow the names were never entered onto the voter rolls.   When registration activists complained, Georgia authorities claimed to never have received the forms. According to Palast, when the activists told election officials they had photo-copied the forms, the state launched a legal lynching, threatening the activists with criminal prosecution and destroying their voter registration organization.   Those 10,000 disenfranchised Korean-Americans, combined with votes stolen by Crosscheck, could easily have won the first run-off election for Ossof, and the follow-up as well.   This is the third consecutive Congressional election the Democrats have lost since Trump took power. They also just lost one in South Carolina.   Pelosi and company are trying to crow about how close they came in heavily Republican districts, many of which re growing increasingly diverse.   But those seats still belong to Trump’s Jim Crow GOP. Like Al Gore in 2000, John Kerry in 2004 and Hillary Clinton in 2016, the party still refuses to even discuss how these critical elections were stripped with massive disenfranchisement and then, where necessary, flipped by electronic means.   To make matters much worse, the Supreme Court has just upheld partisan election stripping in Ohio, refusing to hear a challenge to Ohio’s Jim Crow habit of trashing ballots with minor errors on them.   The process has been perfected by current GOP Secretary of State Jon Husted, who regularly orders that ballots be discarded with tiny variations in details like omitting a zip code, missing a digit in a social security number, writing in legal cursive rather than roman letters.   Like Blackwell before him, Husted swings elections by pitching thousands of provisional, mailed-in and other suspected Democratic votes into the trash on the slightest pretext. The practice was challenged in court by the Democrats and the Northern Ohio Coalition for the Homeless. But the corporatist Roberts Supreme Court has left this electoral lynch process in place.   In essence this marks the death of the Democratic Party in Ohio and wherever else there’s a Trump/GOP secretary of state. Popular progressive US Senator Sherrod Brown, for example, will stand no chance for re-election in 2018 in a balloting where Husted can eliminate as many Democratic votes as he needs to flip the seat to the GOP, no matter who they run for it.   Major stories at Huffington Post, the New York Times and elsewhere make no mention of the trashing of those Asian-American registration forms or of the Crosscheck program stripping untold numbers of registered voters in Georgia.   Endless Democrat harping on Russian meddling, followed by countless fundraising emails signed by Nancy Pelosi, ignore that the party has zero chance of stopping the Trump GOP until registration forms are actually honored and votes are actually counted.   Neither the corporate media nor the corporate Democrats seem able to handle the inconvenient truth that our electoral system is, as Donald Trump says, totally rigged.   He should know. His party is the one doing it, Jim Crow-style, in Georgia and throughout the rest of the country.   The Democrats and their media cohorts are now beginning to mourn the weakness of the “Democrat” brand.   But they seem unwilling and/or unable to face the simple reality that these elections are being stripped and flipped. Until they do, there will be zero meaningful electoral challenge to the Trump catastrophe.   —————————   Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of the newly issued STRIP & FLIP DISASTER OF AMERICA’S STOLEN ELECTIONS: FIVE JIM CROWS & ELECTRONIC ELECTION THEFT now at www.freepress.org.                  ]]>

It Doesn't Take a Russian to Hack an American Election

by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman Originally published by the Columbus Free Press 6.16.trac Russia, Russia, Russia!!!   But what about the Americans? Attorney-General Jeff Sessions has confirmed the Russians hacked into as many as 39 state data bases, and did all they could to affect the electronic vote count that put Donald Trump in the White House. But Americans could have done it much easier. Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach set in motion a Jim Crow/Crosscheck purge of hundreds of thousands of mostly black, Hispanic and Asian-Amrican citizens prior to the election in at least 29 states. Now Trump has appointed Kobach to an “Election Integrity” Commission.  His co-commissioner is J. Kenneth Blackwell, who as Ohio Secretary of State helped steal the 2004 presidential election. Why isn’t this pair of election thieves being called to testify before Congress?  Why is there no national viewing of Greg Palast’s BEST DEMOCRACY MONEY CAN BUY on precisely this topic? The electronic flipping techniques Blackwell used in Ohio 2004 are part of the “black box voting” syndrome documented by Bev Harris.  No Russians needed. “Made in America” was the virtual statistical impossibility that Hillary Clinton won the exit polls in FL, NC, PA, MI and WI but lost them ALL in the official vote count, and thus the Electoral College. And how about the 70,000+ ballots from heavily Democratic areas of Michigan that officially showed no presidential choice, an insanely improbable outcome easily produced by a hacker’s algorithm.  Again, no Russians necessary. Likewise the sequential improbabilities in Wisconsin and much much more make it clear that rigging elections will continue as long as we have vulnerable registration rolls, electronic voting, an Electoral College, corporate campaign funding and much more. Meanwhile, there’s a high likelihood the upcoming special Congressional race in Georgia has already been hacked…by Americans!!  As reported by Palast, thousands of Asian-American citizens have already been purged from the voter rolls to pave the way to Congress for Georgia’s former Secretary of State.  Again, no Russians needed. It may seem like borscht, but election theft is American as apple pie. In reality the Americans have been stripping and flipping elections here and worldwide for many decades.  Here’s some history—-

·         In 1950, the Bureau of Social Science Research (BSSR) was founded as a division of the School of Social Sciences and Public Affairs at the American University. In 1953, it became a non-profit organization involved with the CIA, and was used as a propaganda tool in the overthrow of Iran’s Mossadegh. It then emerged as key player in the rise of electronic voting. ·         In 1974, the US General Accounting Office commissioned a year-long study on the rise of electronic voting equipment. In 1975, Rory G. Saltman, an electronics expert at the National Bureau of Standards, warned that “Increasing computerization of election-related functions may result in the loss of effective controls over these functions by responsible authorities and that this loss of control may increase the possibility of vote fraud.” (National Bureau of Standards Special Publication #500-30). ·         In 1975, the CIA admitted to a US Senate investigative committee chaired by Senator Frank Church that it was engaged in 5000 “benign” operations, which involved, among other things, electronic election rigging in the Third World. Election theft was preferable to a bloody coup said the Agency. ·         In its coverage of the 1980 Iowa Republican Caucus, the Manchester (New Hampshire) Union-Leader wrote that the campaign of former CIA Director George H.W. Bush “has all the smell of a CIA covert Operation….Strange aspects of the Iowa operation [include] a long, slow count and then the computers broke down at a very convenient point, with Bush having a 6% bulge over Reagan.” Bush won the primary over Reagan, 31.6% to 21.5%. This break-down of tabulating equipment at a key point in the vote count became a staple of the electronic tabulation process in elections to come. ·         In 1981, the Reagan-Bush administration established ties between the Bureau of Social Science Research (BSSR) and the International Center for Election Law & Administration (ICELA). The CIA-linked BSSR provided initial funding for the ICELA to promote the spread of electronic voting machines worldwide. ·         In 1984, the New York Times revealed that a company called The Computer Election System of Berkeley, California, created a software program and related equipment “…used in more than a thousand county and local jurisdictions to collect and count 34.4 million of the 93.7 million votes cast in the United States,” more than a third of the total votes. President Reagan signed National Security Directive NSDD245. The New York Times revealed that the secret directive involved: “a branch of the National Security Agency investigating whether a computer program that counted more than one-third of all the votes cast in the United States in 1984 is vulnerable to fraudulent manipulation.” ·         On December 18, 1985, legendary New York Times reporter David Burnham reported in California Official Investigating Computer Voting Security that state Attorney General John Van de Kamp found major errors in the computerized vote count from the 1984 election in California and elsewhere. Problems were found in at least thirteen areas nationwide, including Illinois, Montana and North Dakota. Van de Kamp said he “is concerned about what he sees as a potentially serious problem.” ·         In 1985, the director of International Center on Election Law and Administration, stated that electronic voting presents “a massive potential for problems” and that it “centralizes the opportunity for fraud,” according to Harris’sBlack Box Voting. ·         On November 25, 1986, Dr. Michael Ian Shamos, a computer scientist employed by the Pennsylvania Bureau of Elections as an electronic voting systems examiner, reported in An Outline of Testimony on Computer Voting Before the Texas Legislature that:“When one company or a conglomerate of companies apply unauditable software from a general distribution point, or participate directly in ballot setup procedures, there exists the possibility of large-scale tampering with elections. An errant programmer or tainted executive could influence or determine the outcome of a majority of election precincts in a country….” ·         In the 1988, New Hampshire Republican primary, during the first large-scale US use of computer voting machines in a presidential election, former CIA Director George H.W. Bush trailed Bob Dole by eight points in polls taken on Election Day. But when the votes were electronically tallied, Bush beat Dole by nine points. Such a 17-point turn-around qualifies among mainstream election statistical analysts as a “virtual statistical impossibility.” ·         In August, 1988, Roy Saltman wrote: Accuracy, Integrity and Security in Computerized Vote Tallying for the National Bureau of Standard’s Institute for Computer Sciences and Technology. He warned that “the possibility that unknown persons may perpetrate undiscoverable frauds” was a key problem with electronic voting systems. ·         In 1988 Ronnie Dugger, long-time editor of the Texas Observer, wrote a major piece on the move toward electronic-based elections in the New Yorker Magazine. He warned that the capacity now exists for “…altering the computer program or the control punch cards that manipulate it, planting a time bomb, manually removing an honest counting program, and replacing it with a fraudulent one, counting fake ballots, altering the vote recorder that voters use at the polls or changing either the logic that controls precinct-located vote-counting devices, or the voting summaries in these units’ removable data-hyphen storage unit.” Dugger concluded: “the problem in this segment of the computer business, as in the field at large, is not only invisibility but also information as electricity.” ·         In 1996, Chuck Hagel ran for US Senate in Nebraska against popular incumbent Democratic Governor Ben Nelson. Hagel had never held elective office. But he was part-owner of ES&S, a computerized voting machine company whose machines were used in conducting the statewide election. Michael McCarthy, president of ES&S, was Hagel’s campaign treasurer. Hagel became Nebraska’s first Republican elected to the US Senate in 24 years. Hagel’s part ownership of ES&S was hidden from the public during the campaign. One Nebraska newspaper called Hegel’s victory a “stunning upset.” Some 80% of the state’s ballots were cast and counted on ES&S machines. ·         After the presidency was given to George W. Bush in Florida 2000,  Harris posted a series of internal Diebold memos relating to a critical electronic miscount in Volusia County that helped swing the election. One memo from Lana Hires of Global Election Systems, now part of Diebold, complained, “I need some answers! Our department is being audited by the County. I have been waiting for someone to give me an explanation as to why Precinct 216 gave Al Gore a minus 16,022 [votes] when it was uploaded.” Another, from Talbot Ireland, Senior VP of Research and Development for Diebold, referred to key “replacement” votes in Volusia County as “unauthorized.” ·         In the November 2002 Georgia election, incumbent US Senator Max Cleland lost his seat to right-wing Republican Saxby Chambliss in an unexpected last-minute upset. It was the first election in which Georgia had used Diebold voting machines, and just prior to Election Day in an unusual move, the president of Diebold’s election unit Bob Urosevich brought in illegal software updates to the system. Harris found a set of files called “rob-georgia” among the secret voting machine database files. ·         In 2003, Ohio businessman Walden “Wally” O’Dell, promised in a fund raising letter to wealthy GOP supporters that he would deliver Ohio’s electoral votes to Bush. O’Dell ran Diebold, which owned and operated the bulk of Ohio’s electronic voting machines. Diebold also controlled the software that would count the votes that decided the 2004 presidential election. ·         In March 2004, we published the article Diebold, Electronic Voting, and the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy on freepress.org and on motherjones.com predicting that Ohio would be the new Florida in the 2004 presidential election because of the partisan connections of George W. Bush to the private owners of the electronic voting machines and vote tabulation software. The key source for the article, Athan Gibbs, was an African American entrepreneur who had invented a voting machine that gave each voter a verified voting receipt. Approximately one week after the article ran, Gibbs was killed when his car was hit by a truck on an interstate highway. ·        Machines used in the Ohio 2004 election in Columbus came from Ransom Shoup, convicted in 1979 for conspiring to defraud the federal government in connection with a bribe attempt to obtain voting machine business, according to the Commercial Appeal newspaper of Memphis. ·         On July 20, 2011, the Free Press published an election contract signed with GovTech, Michael Connell’s private IT company, allowing the theft of the  Ohio2004 electronic vote count, plus a graphic architectural map of the Secretary of State’s election night server layout system linked to the IT site in Tennessee. Both documents were filed in the King Lincoln Bronzeville v. Blackwellcase. There is much much more, now published at our STRIP & FLIP DISASTER OF AMERICA’S STOLEN ELECTIONS (www.freepress.org). In 2016 there is plenty of evidence of Russian interference. But in an American election, the likeliest strippers, hackers and flippers are still American.  If the Congress and the media ever gets around to investigating Kris Kobach, Ken Blackwell and other likely home-grown suspects, we are ready to testify. —————— This article was also published by Reader Supported News Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of the new STRIP & FLIP DISASTER OF AMERICA’S STOLEN ELECTIONS:  FIVE JIM CROWS AND ELECTRONIC ELECTION THEFT IS AT WWW.FREEPRESS.ORG
 This article was also published by Reader Supported News
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Donald Trump & Andrew Cuomo Are Brothers in Reactor Disaster

By Harvey Wasserman

Originally published at Reader Supported News

08 June 17

onald Trump and New York governor Andrew Cuomo have joined forces in destroying our economy and environment.

While Trump wages global war on the climate, Cuomo demands a statewide bailout meant to keep failed nuke reactors on line until they melt and/or explode, Fukushima-style.

Trump and Cuomo are both are apostles of radioactive obsolescence.

The global climate treaty Trump wants to break has been signed by every nation on Earth except Syria and Nicaragua (which wants stronger terms).

Trump is globalizing the US legacy of breaking 800 treaties with indigenous peoples.

Like America’s indigenous tribes, the nations of the world will never trust us again.

Trump has shredded our global standing, as Germany’s Angela Merkel (CEO of the world’s #4 economy) has pronounced us an unreliable trading partner and China (#2) moves to partner directly with the European Union.

As Trump sabotages the dollar, watch him blame our economic death spiral on Muslims, commies, immigrants, and people of color.

Trump’s wedge between the US and Germany is a dream come true for Putin’s petro-mafia.

So is his attack on climate science as he hands our techno-future to King CONG (Coal, Oil, Nukes and Gas), the obsolete monster of a failed 20th century past.

Trump’s hatred of Solartopian technologies — solar, wind, tidal, wave, ocean thermal, geothermal, LED, efficiency, electric and hydrogen cars, advanced batteries, etc. — leaves the US out of the biggest job-creating transition in human history.

Through it all, Trump tweets his “love” for nuclear power.

With him on that is the alleged “liberal,” New York governor Andrew Cuomo.

Cuomo wants New York ratepayers to pay $7.6 billion in raised electric rates to feed collapsing upstate nukes that could soon melt and/or explode.

The rate hikes would force New Yorkers as far away as Long Island to pay for uncompetitive loser nukes that supply them zero electricity.

In part because of a deal cut by Cuomo’s father Mario, Long Island still suffers from $7 billion wasted on the defunct Shoreham reactor.

None of the four upstate reactors Cuomo2 wants to bail out can compete with new wind or solar, which create far more jobs.

Tesla’s “Buffalo Billion” solar shingle factory will create 500 permanent jobs in northwestern New York, plus some 1400 spin-offs.

Ten such plants would create some 5,000 direct jobs, double those at Cuomo’s four loser nukes, with thousands more in spin-offs from cheap green power.

While Germany, Switzerland, Costa Rica, Iceland, Denmark, South Korea and others head to 100% post-nuke Solartopian futures, China is investing $360 billion in renewables, and India is following suit.

Trump attacks such investments here while Cuomo’s bailout cripples them in New York.

The final four US nukes under construction (in Georgia and South Carolina) have bankrupted Westinghouse, maybe Toshiba, and may soon be cancelled.

The 99 licensed loser US reactors all teeter at the brink of economic/ecological catastrophe.

But Cuomo’s New York bailout is a model for owners to gouge billions from ratepayers to keep them open.

Cuomo says he’ll shut two reactors at Indian Point, near New York City, but still wants that Trump-style public handout.

No commercial reactor has liability insurance, so the next melt-down/explosion could bankrupt us all, with none of Trump/Cuomo’s industry cronies held responsible.

Cuomo’s bailout is being challenged in court. Trump’s legal challenges are legion.

Together, these brothers in reactor disaster are the ultimate radioactive Luddites.


Harvey Wasserman’s Solartopia! Our Green-powered Earth is right here at www.solartopia.org along with Harvey’s History of the United States. The Strip & Flip Disaster of America’s Stolen Elections, written with Bob Fitrakis, is at www.freepress.org.

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