The Daily Blog Open Mic Monday 12th October 2015

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openmike

 

Announce protest actions, general chit chat or give your opinion on issues we haven’t covered for the day.

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8 COMMENTS

  1. Computerized Vote Rigging Is Still the Unseen Threat to Democracy: It’s Time to Change the System

    Here is the problem, it is so easy to rig an election.

    “Easily rigged and hacked, these computers are controlled by a handful of shady corporations, some with criminal records, who fight to keep their vote-counting software a “trade secret.”

    http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/27204-computerized-vote-rigging-is-still-the-unseen-threat-to-american-democracy-it-s-time-to-change-the-system

    How to Rig an Election

    By Victoria Collier

    Harper’s Magazine, November 2012 Issue

    http://www.democracymovement.us/how_to_rig_an_election

    It was a hot summer in 1932 when Louisiana senator Huey “Kingfish” Long arranged to rig the vote on a number of amendments to his state’s constitution that would be advantageous to his financial interests. Long was no stranger to rigged votes. This time around, however, the fix delivered by his machine was blatant and sloppy: his favored amendments won unanimously in sixteen New Orleans precincts and garnered identical vote totals in twenty-eight others.

    Eugene Stanley, the incorruptible district attorney for Orleans Parish, presented evidence of fraud to a grand jury. Louisiana’s attorney general, the less morally encumbered Gaston Porterie, stepped in to sabotage the case for Long. Nonetheless, two judges demanded a recount, at which point Governor O. K. Allen obliged Long by declaring martial law. Intimidated jurors found themselves sorting ballots under the supervision of National Guardsmen, who stood by to “protect” them with machine guns.

    When this effort failed, another grand jury was convened. Their eventual finding of a massive conspiracy led to the indictment of 513 New Orleans election officials. Once again, Long used his famous powers of persuasion. At his behest, the Louisiana legislature modified the state’s election law, giving ex post facto protection to the defendants. Election rigging, Long might have quipped, had become downright exhausting. But it worked.

    From the earliest days of the republic, American politicians (and much of a cynical populace) saw vote rigging as a necessary evil. Since the opposition was assumed to be playing equally dirty, how could you avoid it? Most Americans would probably have confessed to a grudging admiration for New York City’s Tammany Hall machine, which bought off judges, politicians, and ward captains, ensured the suppression of thousands of votes, and controlled Democratic Party nominations for more than a century.

    By the beginning of the last century, however, sentiment had begun to shift. In 1915, the Supreme Court ruled that vote suppression could be federally prosecuted. In Terre Haute, Indiana, more than a hundred men had already been indicted for conspiring to fix the 1914 elections for mayor, sheriff, and circuit judge. The incumbent sheriff and judge went to jail for five years, and Mayor Donn M. Roberts spent six years in Leavenworth.

    Roberts and his gang, declared the New York Times, had failed to grasp that “what is safe and even commendable one year may be dangerous and reprehensible the next.” Almost overnight, commonplace corruption had become unacceptable, and vote rigging a serious crime. It took a strongman like Huey Long to remain an exception to the rule. But the overall trajectory seemed to point toward reform, accountability, and security. In 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment was passed, seventy-two years after Elizabeth Cady Stanton first demanded women’s suffrage—the right that would, in Stanton’s words, “secure all others.” By the 1960s, Northern Democrats abandoned their Southern allies and pushed to end the mass suppression of black votes below the Mason–Dixon line. With the Voting Rights Act of 1965, many Americans began to believe that the bad old days of stolen elections might soon be behind us.

    But as the twentieth century came to a close, a brave new world of election rigging emerged, on a scale that might have prompted Huey Long’s stunned admiration. Tracing the sea changes in our electoral process, we see that two major events have paved the way for this lethal form of election manipulation: the mass adoption of computerized voting technology, and the outsourcing of our elections to a handful of corporations that operate in the shadows, with little oversight or accountability.

    This privatization of our elections has occurred without public knowledge or consent, leading to one of the most dangerous and least understood crises in the history of American democracy. We have actually lost the ability to verify election results.

    The use of computers in elections began around the time of the Voting Rights Act. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the use of optical scanners to process paper ballots became widespread, usurping local hand counting. The media, anxious to get on the air with vote totals, hailed the faster and more efficient computerized count. In the twenty-first century, a new technology became ubiquitous: Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting, which permits touchscreen machines and does not require a paper trail.

    Old-school ballot-box fraud at its most egregious was localized and limited in scope. But new electronic voting systems allow insiders to rig elections on a statewide or even national scale. And whereas once you could catch the guilty parties in the act, and even dredge the ballot boxes out of the bayou, the virtual vote count can be manipulated in total secrecy. By means of proprietary, corporate-owned software, just one programmer could steal hundreds, thousands, potentially even millions of votes with the stroke of a key. It’s the electoral equivalent of a drone strike.

      • “( I suspect they could have already rigged it last time around with the electronic component )”

        I don’t think they’ve gotten around to it just yet, and far be it for me to suggest kinsprissy thereries (as our Dear Leader would say).
        However it’ll be next on their agenda for sure (or at least amongst one of the ‘media commentator’, spin doctor CT brigade).
        BTW @ CHOOKY…. good to see to using this forum.
        Also, good to see your cynicism re Greens.
        Like you – Labour, then Greens and now seriously contemplating NZF. The reasons?:
        1. Where the fuck is Meteria?
        2. As someone that’s spent a great deal of their time working in the corporate/banking/IT sector – the number of people I’ve come across with certain values that are soon dispensed with as the corporate culture rubs off – James is a fine example of that IMO
        3. NZF cares about things like democracy, and sovereignty, and a few of those other little principles I care bout, no matter how inconvenient and cumbersome they might be.
        There are a number of other reasons of course but I’m sure a shit tired of having to vote for the ‘least worst’ option.
        I’d rather vote for the principled
        Labour is untrustworthy,
        Greens have succumbed (though they don’t actually realise it yet) and NZF at least seems to have been consistent and unafraid to state their case. (The racist thing that worries me heaps also seems to have had a lid put on it – maybe Winnie has come to realise that if it hadn’t been for a large contingent of Indians, that PSA virus would still be rampant and there’d be fuck all viable Kiwifruit orchards still in existence)

  2. Now here is one very gutsy lady.

    Helen Kelly still out there fighting, not only for herself, but also for others with cancer, wanting to have the right to use whatever pain relief therapy they choose, not what government deem is correct and legal.

    For Helen it’s cannabis oil. And who or what has the right to suggest otherwise, given her present and hopefully temporary situation.

    Go Helen. You are indeed an inspiration. I wish you well and hang in there girl 🙂

    http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/72923212/helen-kelly-says-government-needs-to-get-real-about-medicinal-cannabis#comments

    • She’s not only gutsy, she is NOT a ‘sellout’ – unlike many of her counterparts (I could name some – such as those that picked up cosy little directorships and board appointments; or others that chose to ride on their ancestor’s fame and principles while all the while riding the cargo cult steamship, acquiring property for what they’d hoped would give them an earn at any expense to those they professed to represent…….
      I’m not sure why I’m surprised looking back. Unlike Helen Kelly, they weren’t very nice people to begin with – I used to wonder how and why they turned. Only recently I realised they were always that way. It’s sad to think that people like Toby Hill is rolling in his grave, but Helen’s dad and her entire family hopefully (and should) feel really proud. There goes one principled and staunch lady.

  3. Great to see the ‘rock star’ economy working so well that more kiwis are having to break into their ‘kiwisaver’ retirement funds, just so they can afford to live.
    A classic case of – give with one hand, take away with the other.

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