News on the elections front

One important battle for election integrity is being waged by the Congressional Voting Rights Caucus

In particular there is H.R. 5131 Verifying Optimal Tools for Elections or “VOTE” Act of 2016.
by Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Georgia). Let your local representatives know that you are aware of the movement toward honest elections and you expect him or her to come on board.

At http://trustvote.org
you may be pleased to know that a new racketeering lawsuit that will be filed. I believe that one is being spearheaded by attorneys Bob Fitrakis and Cliff Arneback. Also Lori Grace, president of the Institute for American Democracy and Election Integrity.

“It is my strong recommendation that all election officials REFRAIN from procuring ANY system that does not provide an indisputable, voter verified paper ballot.” Dr. Rebecca Mercuri. She came up with the idea of a voter-verified balloting concept in a paper called “A Better Ballot Box.”

In my local area, I have recently contacted local elections office in Central Florida to participate as a poll worker in upcoming elections. I have a basic understanding of statistics and quality control. I have also been classified as a state whistle-blower in 2015. So I believe I should meet any minimum qualifications for insuring integrity in the local precincts.

BTW, if you're in Central Florida, you might want to know that Clint Curtis http://www.clintcurtis2016.com/
will be running in Florida District 47 in Orlando, much of his policies can be recognized as your basic Bernie progressive platform. Just to refresh your memory, a few years ago, in September 2000, Clint made national headlines in a vote fraud scandal right here in Central Florida where I live(Oviedo). Clint was asked by the Republican incumbent Tom Feeney to write a software program that would make it possible to change the results of an election undetectably. The 2008 documentary Murder, Spies & Voting Lies chronicled Clint Curtis's story.

But before that, Floridians James and Kenneth Collier wrote Votescam: The Stealing of America, published in 1992, the first hard-hitting book about high-tech vote fraud.

“Hand counted paper ballots and eternal vigilance are the only hope left for us. The corporate fascists are taking over, and we will never depose them non-violently as long as they control our elections.” Victoria Collier. Communications director of the National Election Defense Coalition,
She also contributes at http://www.truth-out.org

I believe like Victoria Collier and most Americans, and unlike all the corporate-sponsored politicians, that it is necessary to have voter-verified paper ballots.

We know that Canada hand-counts their presidential elections in four hours. Netherlands banned all electronic voting machines a decade ago, in 2006. But in the USA, we're still living in the Middle Ages. We live in a country with the worst record in the world for clean, quality-verified elections.

It's no coincidence that official vote counts habitually try to conceal this systemic fraud by keeping their own numbers at levels which are a little hard to detect, i.e. 49%-51%.

This is a 2% difference, and typical margins of errors for exit polls are typically 3%, which is also known as three-sigma in statistical quality control, or 93.3% accuracy. IOW for every 1000 votes sampled by an exit poll, it is normal to have about 70 votes to show up as a normal error for whatever reason. That would be within the margin of error in an exit poll and no cause for alarm. Can we detect the fraud at that level? I suspect it will not be good enough, we have to be smarter than the political crooks who are trying to stay one step ahead in the technology and who are trying to stay in office under the charade of a real democracy.

We can beat them with voter-verified paper ballots and hand-counts. We can detect their fraud by going to four, five or six-sigma levels of quality control. Which means to say that for every one thousand randomly-selected votes that will be hand-counted, as well as a separate exit poll, we can expect about 1/10th less errors at four-sigma instead of three-sigma, or 7 erroneous votes per 1000 hand counts instead of 70 at three-sigma. And likewise we expect 7 discrepancies in our exit polls per 1000 samples of the population set at four-sigma.

Their game of cheating by using razor-thing margins, this won't work because it would have to be much more sophisticated to beat four-sigma controls!

We can also go directly to the source of the fraud by examining the software code and the suspected pre-compiled executable programs to determine how the counts are being subverted within the central tabulators. We have to demand open-source and non-proprietary code as it is part of the public trust.

Again, as mentioned at the start, H.R. 5131 Verifying Optimal Tools for Elections or “VOTE” Act of 2016, it is the beginning of the end of fascist controls over our democracy, but it will not be the only battle that we have to wage.

At some point, people need to be arrested and face jail time. You can't make them stop by just fining them, because their allegiance is to corporations with gigantic offshore accounts. They will be reimbursed many times over and these shills will continue to cheat and steal votes in the elections.

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Dhyerwolf's picture

I'm assuming that you blew the whistle on someone and thank you for it! I hope you didn't face too many personal repercussions as seems to be all too common with whistleblowers.

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ngant17's picture

Fla. Statutes, Section 112.3187 (5) (a-b), the so-called Whistle-blower Act. When I was employed by the state for a large Florida university, in Oct. 2015 I was given whistle-blower status by the university's chief auditor for reporting (possible) wrongdoing by supervisory personnel with a certain department.

I had expressed concerns about private contractors working on campus and colluding with state employees to illegally tap into reclaimed water supplies that were billed to the university.

We're talking millions of gallons a month of unmetered water, which ultimately the students were paying for, by constantly-increasing tuition costs for attending the school. The reclaimed water meters were being disconnected or made non-functional all over campus, so as to hide the water flow data from increased scrutiny. It would not be difficult to tap into a large water main pipe and divert large amounts of reclaimed water off campus to businesses and land developments adjacent to the university.

Yes, after reporting the suspected wrongdoing to higher authorities in the state government, there were numerous repercussions against me as a maintenance worker in a lower position, basically it took the form of increased hostility by supervisors, i.e., making my job unnecessarily more difficult and dangerous. Or forcing me to work much longer and harder than other workers in similar position. At one point, I was informed by a fellow worker (who overheard a conversation between two supervisors in the employee break room), that two supervisors were discussing ways on how they were planning to “get rid of me”. At that, I considered my personal safety in the workplace was at risk and I chose to terminate my employment for that reason.

You have to understand that the current governor of Florida, Rick Scott, he should have been convicted of crimes related to Medicare fraud, he should be occupying a cell in a state prison instead of living in a governor's mansion. I believe that state corruption is permeated all over Florida today, it is controlled by Republicans, and I may have only exposed another one tip of one iceberg. Corruption related to unmetered use of reclaimed water supplies by one large university in the state. How big is it? I really was not employed there long enough to get the 'big picture'.

Ultimately at this time no one to my knowledge has been charged with any wrong-doing in this regard, at least in public. As far as I know, this corruption continues. I am no longer affiliated with the state of Florida in any capacity.

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riverlover's picture

Indicative of the time, I guess. Nestle is not the only villain. I can see how Universities would be easy targets. Cornell University started a "green" campus cooling project some years back, piping Cayuga Lake water (cold 200-400 feet down) through campus cooling systems and returning the slightly-warmer water to the Lake. Lake Source Cooling, if you want to look it up. How easy to tap into that, pulling millions (guesstimate) of gallons, who would miss several thousand? Same with electricity. Change all campus lighting to reduce power usage, who would miss a few thousand kWh? Operational Costs rise? Raise the tuition, it's the damn students running their computers and minifridges.

How easy.

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ngant17's picture

I will have to research this one at Cornell. The university (UCF in Orlando) is no longer permitted to draw water from underground wells. It was prohibited a number of years ago, mandated by St. Johns Water Management District, those wells on campus had to shut down and the school made the conversion to reclaimed water. However all the unmetered water use was never addressed until I started making it an issue.

The bottom line is that I think these universities and colleges can get away with the lack of accounting because they ultimately pass the charges to the unsuspecting students. If college was completely tuition free, as Bernie and Jill Stein are advocating, it would not only help the students but actually cause a lot of the widespread state corruption and scams to be exposed and shut down, because there would be much more accountability once the schools realize they don't have unlimited financial resources at their disposal and they have to actually work within a tighter budget.

As for me, after I reported the state corruption in the reclaimed water usage, I leveraged some of that technical knowledge into a small (honest) business for myself later on.

I basically install water sub-meters in residential and commercial properties for irrigation. It's essentially a value-added service which integrates irrigation controllers into a network where the water usage can be metered and uploaded into streamed data by the minute, hour and day, continuously to a cloud-based server. Without getting too technical, it works with a low-cost pulse transmitter (to measure or meter the water flow) which is wired from an irrigation water meter and then sends this metered data into a gateway device.

A dead irrigation valve, a broken sprinkler, or a leaking outdoor water line can be detected and a text message alert is automatically generated when water use is below or above a certain threshold which would for example be pre-determined based on normal runtime values of your irrigation system. Then you don't end up with dry or dehydrated plants or lawns, or a water bill a month later which mysteriously doubles or triples before you are aware of the problem.. The installation expenses in the long run can be considered as cost-neutral savings for water which will eventually pay for the initial parts and labor.

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riverlover's picture

And gave you new income stream (pun intended). I am all-too aware of water issues, living on a low-flow water well with filters required for the whole house. My water is tasty, untested except for radon, very high, Marcellus Shale is the surround. I never installed a water line to my refrigerator for automatic ice, that is a danger point in inside plumbing.

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ngant17's picture

Yes, remote monitoring of water usage in real time by sub-metering, it's more suitable for commercial applications, such as in rentals or in agriculture. But I have installed one system in a residential home at the request of an owner who had to spend thousands of dollars in repairs when a leaking toilet or plumbing fixture busted loose while they were out of town during the weekend.

If a spike shows up, you get a text alert and the water can be shut down within an hour or two, before any flooding takes place.

There are many other applications with the sensor technology business beyond water monitoring, but I don't want to advertise here because it's not appropriate. However thanks for your comments!

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riverlover's picture

My cottage in Canada was built by farmers, and the Good Idea was to put the hot water heater on the second floor. The cottage had evolved from copper plumbing back/forward to PE tubing, because it was not heated overwinter and the entire system had to be drained down and if water was left in the pipes... So draindown was good by gravity for the HW system. Until a few years ago when my plumber reconnected all in the spring and fixed a few inevitable leaks and left with the power on and the pump on. My water well there does about 30 gpm. The water heater (off) rusted through the bottom and spent several days liberally irrigating the entire house. $10K in damages. At least I didn't have drywall.

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once for President, then two years later for Governor. Both times the screens flipped my D vote to an R vote. Both times I got friendly help from not busy poll workers, but . . .

These early experiences of voting for the first time on no-paper-trail machines (I had moved from a different state) convinced me that voting, in this state at least, is rigged.

It was a bit validating to read in your trustvote.org link that such screen-flipping is indicative of vote tampering, although I would really have preferred not to have a belief that elections are rigged validated.

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