It Happened - The End Game of the Russia Hacking Narrative

Is this the real reason our government lied to us about Russian hacking? To ensure complete control over the outcomes of future elections.

The Department of Homeland Security on Friday declared the electoral system as "critical infrastructure," the latest in a series of eleventh-hour responses to alleged Russian election-season hacks.

The designation — which will put election equipment in the same category as the power grid or financial sector — came the same day that intelligence agencies released an unclassified report that concluded Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a hacking campaign against Democratic organizations and officials that eventually aimed to help elect Donald Trump. The report said Russian spies had accessed elements of state and local election boards as part of their digital meddling.

So now they will have control of all the polling places, election machines, voter databases, and all other information technology. No independent audits, then? Is this in response to being exposed during this election of election fraud? They got caught and now they want to make sure it doesn't happen again?

Barack Obama sure left a helluva legacy....

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/elections-critical-infrastructure-...

https://www.facebook.com/saneprogressive/videos/1356883241028821/?pnref=...

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looks like another power-grab by those who control the political economy at the expense of the people and in disregard for the Constitution. It seems to be another strike in the war on civil society where the majority are left alone to engage in the "pursuit of happiness."

As an aside, to think the financial sector is anything more than a parasitical system is laughable to me.

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"The justness of individual land right is not justifiable to those to whom the land by right of first claim collectively belonged"

Steven D's picture

Need to counter this with demand for paper ballots. Best defense against hacking.

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"You can't just leave those who created the problem in charge of the solution."---Tyree Scott

dervish's picture

They were saying that everyone needs to move to digital voting, and I remember thinking how stupid that would be. Voting without a paper trail isn't even voting, in any real sense.

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"Obama promised transparency, but Assange is the one who brought it."

Bisbonian's picture

except that I know that Homeland Security has no ears at all.

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"I’m a human being, first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.” —Malcolm X

paper ballots. Best defense against hacking.

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Anja Geitz's picture

Maybe I should've seen it coming, but I didn't. And for anyone who counters that DHS is really there to protect us from "Foreign interference", I think a hefty dose of logic and incredulity are in order. I really haven't digested the impact this will have. I just simply have no words.

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There is always Music amongst the trees in the Garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it. ~ Minnie Aumonier

Lily O Lady's picture

DHS? Now they're all, "Russians! Scary!" Incidentally a variation of "Trump! Scary!" All this is happening in the waning days of a Democratic administration. What a bunch of bs!

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"The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?" ~Orwell, "1984"

Anja Geitz's picture

For reminding me of that. It's as if a Republicsn version of the Stepford wives took over the Democratic Party. I just don't recognize it, or my friends who are still shrieking at me that we have to STOP Trump. From what? President Obama already signed away our right to Habeas corpus, we already have wolves guarding the hen house (i.e., former Monsanto Exec appointed as head of the FDA), anything that doesn't get "approved" is labeled FAKE news, while the agit prop coming from our MSM is "real" news. And now we have no legitimate election process. It boggles the mind.

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There is always Music amongst the trees in the Garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it. ~ Minnie Aumonier

It boggles the mind.

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Anja Geitz's picture

I keep thinking that someone will whisper in my ear confirming I've entered the Matrix, or something. Or am I thinking of some other movie. They start to blend. In either case it's some mind altering psy-ops reality where the good guys are the bad guys and the bad guys are still the bad guys and only a handful of people know it and everybody else is just telling us we are crazy.

If that makes sense.

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There is always Music amongst the trees in the Garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it. ~ Minnie Aumonier

and I feel the same way. That "Democrats" have now turned into their own version of cray-cray Tea Bags is evident to me. On Christmas day I had a "discussion" with two friends who basically shriek "misogyny" for Hillary's loss and I still am pissed off about that. I know I most likely pissed them off but I no longer really care. If they want to buy into this latest LIE from our PTB then there's not shit I can do about that but sit back and watch as they won't listen to me, or read some of what I send them from real news to read. Nope, they'd rather ignore it and think the way they think - that Rump is some aberration that ONLY the Russians could install, there's no problem with our democracy, none at all but for sexism and if we had just elected Hillary all would be fine and dandy. The stupidity of that is right up there with the RWNJ Baggers and they REFUSE to see it! I'm working on letting go of that anger but its damned hard and really, I'm no longer even sure I want to let go of that anger.

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Only a fool lets someone else tell him who his enemy is. Assata Shakur

Anja Geitz's picture

I've circumvented that by not talking politics to any friends in person. It saves me a lot of the grief that comes with the thoughts "I Don't know who these people are anymore".

It's just a rule now that I strongly enforce.

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There is always Music amongst the trees in the Garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it. ~ Minnie Aumonier

Pogo the Possum

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now that Obama has designated it "critical national infrastructure."

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edg's picture

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Pluto's Republic's picture

…or even state elections.

But the Parties are private clubs that somehow wangled taxpayers into paying for their corrupt and private elections. Non-profit corruption, no less.

Political Parties and their Primaries do not fall under any state or federal jurisdiction, regulatory body, or agency of civic rights. **

They're like the Elks Club, except their mission is to launder money for their rich friends.


** Please remember this. It will help next time. Tell your kids and grandkids, too, so they don't have any false expectations.

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____________________

The political system is what it is because the People are who they are. — Plato

We'll see the intention of this activity and see if those in control get farther from the universal use of paper ballots.

Good to be reminded of this easy fix - thanks.

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"The justness of individual land right is not justifiable to those to whom the land by right of first claim collectively belonged"

gulfgal98's picture

hand counted in public should be the rule. Also, all ballots should be retained for at least six months after an election unless the election is challenged and then they should be retained even longer.

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Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy

Roy Blakeley's picture

Paper ballots allow a much faster throughput of voters and more or less eliminate waiting lines. If machines are used, the number is often inadequate, they break down sometimes and you often get a couple of really slow people really limiting throughput. With paper ballots, all you need is a private place for someone to mark their ballot. These are usually little booths that are much cheaper than voting machines and you can have many of them much more cheaply than a few voting machines. Dropping the ballot in the box takes almost no time and even if you have an optical scanner reading the ballots, that goes very quickly--a matter of seconds. It is much harder to rig things so that voting is unacceptably slow in minority areas if paper ballots are used, because throughput is intrinsically much higher.

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Who you are
Where you are
How you vote.

Those that continue to say "why worry if you have not done anything wrong".

In an Orwellian world: you might not have done anything wrong today, but we found that what you did not do today is now illegal as of yesterday.

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riverlover's picture

Our government is now at war with us. At least no artillery yet.

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Hey! my dear friends or soon-to-be's, JtC could use the donations to keep this site functioning for those of us who can still see the life preserver or flotsam in the water.

snoopydawg's picture

and concussion grenades that they used on the OWS, BLM and DAPL protesters.
Of course they didn't use any of those things against the Bundy group both times.

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Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

That's been in the works for months.

Apparently they're annoyed that their control over the electoral process is not absolute.

To quote "Manos, the Hands of Fate:"

Yeah, that's a real bitch, daddy.

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

Anja Geitz's picture

I haven't wanted to leave the U.S. as much as I want to right now. I won't. I have family here. But there is nothing here, no infrastructure, where my beliefs can be represented. Taxation without Representation. Truly.

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There is always Music amongst the trees in the Garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it. ~ Minnie Aumonier

I worry about Social Security being cut, stranding me somewhere I am not allowed to work.
Not to mention, some of the countries I considered are now taking a hard right swing, going all austerity, etc...
We will have to make our stand here.
We need millions out in the streets.

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"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981

TheOtherMaven's picture

or maybe AEthelmearc. The SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism) has the right idea: our "kings" have no real power, and we change them every six months. Biggrin

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There is no justice. There can be no peace.

I sure as hell don't fit in this Amerikkka place.

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"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981

TheOtherMaven's picture

so I theoretically have the option to choose.

Too bad I don't live near the US-Canada border - I'd be over it before you could say "O Canada!" Lol

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There is no justice. There can be no peace.

I can't catch a break.

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"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981

unless you are a student attending university there, will live with a relative there who is a Canadian citizen, have a bonafide job offer there, or have megabucks to invest there. Good luck.

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riverlover's picture

And now I am too old to get a job, but am bilingual (the correct way). But yes, big bucks to buy in. Last I looked $50K on loan would do it, I am sure inflation has increased that. And NEVER piss off Customs Officers.

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Hey! my dear friends or soon-to-be's, JtC could use the donations to keep this site functioning for those of us who can still see the life preserver or flotsam in the water.

gulfgal98's picture

continues to be both so prophetic and appropriate. Just when I thought it could not get any worse, it does and it is happening nearly every day.

"...isn't the problem here that the government takes on, arbitrarily and without justification, an adversarial attitude towards its citizenry?" ~CantStoptheSignal

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Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

Mainly because my academic training gave me the ability to pull apart what you might call mental furniture--assumptions, mostly--and get it out of the way so that the obvious becomes, well, obvious.

Some folks are born with this ability and don't need to go to school for over a decade to get it. Wink

And yes, they are being horrible. Someday when we're actually settled in the new home (I've got 40 boxes of books all over the floor in the living room) I'll have time to write more than one essay in a week, and I'll have more to say about our adversaries.

[video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Vk4NxjKpu0]

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

I'll try again:

"Who is not an adversary?"

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

riverlover's picture

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Hey! my dear friends or soon-to-be's, JtC could use the donations to keep this site functioning for those of us who can still see the life preserver or flotsam in the water.

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

Lookout's picture

Also because of RUSSIA! So voting and media integrity will be secure. HA

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“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

Anja Geitz's picture

coming from fellow Democrats screaming about how awful Trump is more irrelevant. This all happened on Obama's watch.

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There is always Music amongst the trees in the Garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it. ~ Minnie Aumonier

Gob smacked! Thought I was naive believing "hope & change" - the DemoRATS can't sink any lower. At least Clintons aren't back in the White House, only positive thing I can think of right now.
"Don't vote, it only encourages them." My favorite graffiti from a wall in Oxford, England, years ago.

Forget GOTV, really, need to organize to PBorNV. ( Paper Ballots or No Votes)

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snoopydawg's picture

IMG_0871.JPG

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Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

Anja Geitz's picture

Stealing that!

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There is always Music amongst the trees in the Garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it. ~ Minnie Aumonier

asterisk's picture

Right after the election I strongly disagreed with people who voted for Trump. If he reigns in the 'security' mob I will change my views about him.

I still am absolutely not a fan of Trump, but my views about the Clintons have gotten much more negative since the election.
I was worried that if Trump lost he would invite his followers to have a Second Amendment based protest. This Russian-scapegoat scheming is worse.

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Deja's picture

Off topic, but your comment reminded me that an ex military guy was pushing Victory Coffee on Shark Tank, Friday night.

I have been listening to an archived reading (from the '70s) of 1984, on PRI KPFT Houston, every Tuesday morning for the past couple of months.

I had the TV on as background noise Friday night, and hoping for an additional heat source since my heater stopped working, and did a double take when I heard the name of the product.

I immediately texted my daughter, son and brother about it. None "got" it because of how long ago they read the book, but I explained its reference.

I "got" a chill down my spine, though.

Life immitating art?

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dervish's picture

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"Obama promised transparency, but Assange is the one who brought it."

Deja's picture

When I was 0 for 3, I texted that ad to all three. I also told my millennial kids to embrace the suck, because they would be subjected to it far longer than I, because I'll be dying (hopefully) before them.

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I was an observer in a recount. I discovered uncounted ballots in a room, under a desk, on the floor. Those ballots changed the outcome.
I have also observed lock boxes that were unlocked.
At least paper balloting lent itself to oversight, so that was better than nothing.

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"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

Or screw it up.

When it's all digital, there's no physical evidence, ever, of the way things actually were. Which is how they like it.

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

Deja's picture

They count paper ballots on location, at individual polling places, by hand, in public, for everyone to see. Poll workers are selected by lottery, presumably in public as well.

Our own Alex (sorry, can't recall his last name) hooked me up with this fact. He also said that Bolivia has a fourth branch of government - The Election Branch (not exact name, I don't think, but you get my point).

A girl can dream. It would be so much better, imo.

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ballots is somehow beyond the capabilities of the United Fucking States of Fucking America, Fuck Yeah (tm) is one of those great mysteries of the power of propaganda. it's the kind of thing where, somebody will say it, and it will get reported, and then all over the nation millions will dumbly nod, but if you could just sit in front of each of them and slap them on the cheek and say, "SNAP OUT OF IT! OF COURSE WE CAN COUNT PEN MARKS ON PIECES OF PAPER!!!" they'd be, like, "oh, yeah. right. what was i thinking?"

in a presidential election year, there are about 100,000,000 ballots cast, each with maybe 10 individual races on it (depending on whether your state has judicial elections, and when they hold their municipal elections, and so on). so that's a total of about 1,000,000,000 individual data items. counting those data items in triplicate, at 2 seconds per data item, would require 6,000,000,000 seconds of human labor = 100,000,000 minutes = 1.7 million hours. At $20/hour total cost of employment per ballot counter, that $35 million -- a tiny fraction of what will be spent by the thousands of candidates running for various offices across the country.

and fuck it, we could crowdsource verification, just so everyone can double check. employ universal ballot formats across the country, and when the polls close, all of the ballots are run through an onsite scanner, with the images directly uploaded via open-source software to a public website. at that point, any doofus with a computer science degree could write a program to count the scanned ballots, nevermind an army of folks without degrees visually inspecting/counting the ballots. if the tabulation from the formal onsite counting does not correspond to the openly accessible online ballots, there's a problem.

There is nothing hard about conducting secure elections, other than the part where we need to bully our representatives into conducting secure elections.

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The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

Pricknick's picture

There is nothing hard about conducting secure elections

They never said they wanted them secure. Just controlled.

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Regardless of the path in life I chose, I realize it's always forward, never straight.

bully them into doing it. and exactly why the droning heads intone that it is an impractical thing to attempt.

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The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

Paper is a start.
Nevertheless, about 20 years ago, the Texas Rangers were called to guard a courthouse and arrest anybody unauthorized going in or out during the count. They might have seized the ballot boxes. The details are fuzzy.
Polk County, Texas. I will be there in trial tomorrow afternoon.
The local Ranger at the time is their Sheriff now.
I say, let's do it like Bolivia!

Good times!

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"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981

sorry, i didn't say that explicitly, but yes: I want the ballots counted on site by people who are being paid to count the ballots, with the entire process wide open -- it's much more difficult to "lose" any ballots if the machines are opened and the ballots removed only to hand them to the counting teams -- and as soon as each ballot has been tabulated by the third counter, it is run into the scanner and the image uploaded.

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The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

Think it's Ochoa or Ocana.

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Deja's picture

Thanks, Writerinres! That sounds familiar. He actually linked to the translated version of the Bolivian Constitution (I think) that outlined the whole process. It was a while back, but I think it was a comment in an open thread. I'll go try to find it using my comments.

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Deja's picture

Very cool! I'd love to adopt a similar system, but we'll have to overthrow the money changers in charge, first.

http://caucus99percent.com/comment/120803#comment-120803

The following quote is from a reply to Alex's comment.

Then we have Article 168. (PUBLIC COUNTING VOTES).

After the vote, the Electoral Jury will [perform] the scrutiny and counting of votes in the same place where the polling station was installed in a public ceremony in the presence of the delegates or representatives of political organizations, voters and voters, and members of electoral support missions wishing to attend.

Highly recommended reading!

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sojourns's picture

a matching serialize receipt containing the voters ballot choices, to be held by the voter with a positive rule that carries the weight of law instituting a recount, in part or in full, be carried out should votes be lost or missing. Violations such as failure to report any lost votes are charged with felonie(s).

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"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones."
John Cage

Deja's picture

Not that my vote is anonymous, anymore. I have my driver's license scanned, then I'm given a code that I have to enter into a machine before I can use that machine to cast my votes.

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sojourns's picture

contain information as to who the voter specifically voted for. Merely name and address. It's how they find you when the courts are assembling juries, for example. The receipt itself does not need contain any human readable information. That could be printed on a q code. That data could most certainly remain anonymous.

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"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones."
John Cage

snoopydawg's picture

were hacked, when the truth is that someone in Hillary's campaign LEAKED Podesta's emails.

Beyond establishing election systems as a formal priority, Johnson said the move is meant to send a signal internationally that the United States would take every step possible to protect those systems in the same way it defends the energy, defense, banking and other sectors.

As someone in the comments posted, they can't just do this.

Any changes to the election infrastructure by the federal government must be by Constitutional Amendment. Otherwise the states have control.

Anyone know if that is true?

The Deep State has been opening up the curtain for a decade, but now they are in full view.
I wish to hell that I knew what we could do about this.
They have been militarizing the police since the drug war started, but have ramped up the program big time during the last decade. They know that they are going to need them.
Or they could hire more mercenaries like they hired Tiger Swan for the DAPL protests.
I didn't think we'd see private mercenaries being used against Americans this soon, but they purposely started doing that against Native Americans who were protesting against an oil pipeline.
The 'drillers' think that what they did to the protesters was acceptable.
Same with cops beating up thugs

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Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

Big Al's picture

I think it's pretty simple. We need a lot of people, a lot of money, and goals of changing the political system, removing those in power and bringing to justice those who have committed the crimes.
It's not simple to do of course, but if you think about it, there's not much we can do other than overpower them with our numbers.

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Pluto's Republic's picture

Any changes to the election infrastructure by the federal government must be by Constitutional Amendment. Otherwise the states have control.

And the Constitution is entrenched by its own legal barriers, so it can no longer be amended, in any case.

The constitution merely sketches the qualifications for office, confers on men and women of all colors the right to vote, and establishes the electoral college to tabulate the final results of the various state-controlled election processes. It also allows Congress to pick the most inconvenient voting day it can find.

Everything else is done however the various states feel like doing it. Or not doing it. At first, there were only a few states to oversee, but the people dropped the ball and stopped evolving the constitution as the nation expanded and transformed. Thus, the election process has become a for-profit rodeo of interested parties, including the media, designed to benefit the movers and shakers in a number of different ways. The longer elections are drawn out, the more money all the interested parties can take home.

Election laws are a robust part of most of the world's Constitutions, but not this one. Election resolutions come one day, and go the next. It's a free-for-all in the fifty different states, and year over year, more people forfeit their voting rights.

The Supreme Court weighs in now and then — on election finance, voters rights, and spurious state laws to restrict them. But it's a gerrymandered Supreme Court composed of political appointees. Once the human lifespan doubled 100 years after the Constitution was written — and the people didn't rewrite it like they were supposed to — the majority ideology could hold power over the Court for an unnatural length of time, allowing them to rig the system further to favor their political prejudices.

If the Founders had only known….

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____________________

The political system is what it is because the People are who they are. — Plato

authority. it just generally chooses not to exert it.

Section 4
1: The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.

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The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

Big Al's picture

against those who allegedly hack or interfere in the electoral system. Designating it as critical infrastructure would indicate an attack against the country. A logical step if you're the ruling elite.
The electoral system, or our political system in general, is already controlled via the duopoly and oligarchy.

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And it wouldn't have to be a hack, and there would not have to be proof of hacking, amirite?
Dammit, we are so screwed.

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"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981

MsGrin's picture

So, I'm not surprised it's here. I'm agnostic whether this is a good or a bad thing. If it takes us in the direction of paper ballots, I'd call that progressive.

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'What we are left with is an agency mandated to ensure transparency and disclosure that is actually working to keep the public in the dark' - Ann M. Ravel, former FEC member

The Travis County Clerk here - who handles elections among other things - has teamed up with critics of our current electronic voting system to design a new system that is more secure, and is able to be audited by third parties. You still vote electronically, but when you're done, the machine prints out a paper ballot, as well.

It's called STAR vote. (STAR is short for “Secure, Transparent, Auditable, and Reliable”)

Can this Texas county fix America’s electronic voting problem?

Dana DeBeauvoir, a spirited 62-year-old who has overseen the election process in Travis County, Texas, since 1986, has been fending off complaints about voting for decades. In recent years, most of those complaints have been about the reliability of electronic voting machines.

So one year, when a group of voting activists asked her to deliver a keynote speech at their annual conference in Washington, D.C., she decided to give them a piece of her mind.

“I told that group, basically: ‘Shame on you for picking on, and beating up on the wrong person, and for basically only throwing rocks, and not doing anything about the problem itself. All you’re doing is picking on an administrator and contributing nothing to the solution.’ So I challenged them, and I said: ‘YOU come up with an answer to these security issues, and I’ll help build it.'”

They did. The result is a system that could be a more secure alternative to our flawed voting mechanisms. It records votes in a public, digital, anonymous ledger so that individual voters can look up the record of their vote and see that it was counted correctly, and third parties can audit the results.

One other good thing about it is that it would be a lot cheaper.

Right now, we spend a lot of money paying the companies who've designed our current systems fees to use their proprietary software.

DeBeauvoir’s office is budgeting $4 million for a pilot project for next year (a million of which still has to be approved by the county commissioners’ court). She envisions the county controlling the rights to the software, and a commercial company like IBM coming in to provide services and tech support. Other jurisdictions would be free to use the software for their own voting systems.

There's a lot more about it in the article.

And here's a second article from The Texas Tribune back in July 2014.

The new system will be county-owned and -operated, relying on open-source software that can be shared across jurisdictions and only requires equipment that can be bought commercially off the shelf, like tablets and scanners.

Here's one more article about STAR Voting from November 16, 2016 - the most recent article I could find. It's from Fortune Magazine.

This Is How We'll Be Voting in 2020

At the same time, there’s little profit motive for entrenched voting equipment manufacturers to substantially change current voting technology, which is a hodgepodge of touch- and touch-button screens, optical scanners, and paper ballots. Add to that a federal and state certification process for new technology that can take years and easily cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and you’re basically left with the status quo—and systems that get an overhaul once every 20 to 30 years.

“I have managed to pull together $4 million to get us started and to phase one, which is building the prototype,” DeBeavoir says, adding it could take more than a year and close to $1 million to get her system certified.

I had read somewhere else that she'd hoped to be finished in time for the 2018 gubernatorial elecion in Texas in 2018 - and it might be. I'm -thinking- that voters in Travis County would use it first (in 2018) and then be rolled out to other jurisdictions who wanted to use it by 2020, but I'm not sure.

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that paper output must match internal counting. I don't know why people keep thinking that electronic voting that provides a piece of paper "verifying" your vote is just as foolproof as actual paper ballots.

The program needs only to remember how you vote to provide online confirmation - that does not mean your vote was counted internally as you intended.

The encouraging part is that the software is open source - the code can be verified by anyone who knows the coding language. I also recall that in CA's primary Bernie won where code was open source and Hillary won when electronic voting machines were closed (and therefore unverifiable).

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MsGrin's picture

and she gave a presentation on the plan. I'd like to hear it a second time.

...and, officially, I worked for her when I temped for the County - she'd pop in every so often.

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'What we are left with is an agency mandated to ensure transparency and disclosure that is actually working to keep the public in the dark' - Ann M. Ravel, former FEC member

snoopydawg's picture

President Barack Obama is stuck between false flag operations and political circus?

At least no one has died from this one, right?

The only people “hacking” the US election have been the two political parties. The Democratic Party actively conspired against Bernie Sanders and actively stole thirteen primaries from Bernie Sanders using electronic ballot tampering. The Democratic Party also organized roughly three million dead, duplicate, and illegal alien voters. The Republican Party used various means to repress a million black voters.

Not to sure about the last part where he says that the DP used dead people, ect. I haven't heard anything about this before.
Then he talks about what happened after the nypd looked at Weiner's laptop that had 650,000 emails from Huma Abedin on them.
It gets interesting from there.
Take him with a grain of salt.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-russians-did-not-hack-the-us-election-a...

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Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

TheOtherMaven's picture

but that's old-time Tammany Hall shit. The ward bosses used to collect names off tombstones and out of obituaries, and then tell their minions to go vote under those names.

Tammany Hall was the Democratic machine in New York City, 1786-c. mid-1960s.

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There is no justice. There can be no peace.

riverlover's picture

Levers for votes, registered when you pulled the big lever to vote. That was so 1990's. Kids went in the booth with parents. Good training on citizenship. Why did that become outmoded?

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Hey! my dear friends or soon-to-be's, JtC could use the donations to keep this site functioning for those of us who can still see the life preserver or flotsam in the water.

TheOtherMaven's picture

repair them - all became "forgotten knowledge".

Once that kind of knowledge is forgotten, it is rarely if ever recovered.

Addendum: They did require a lot of maintenance.

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There is no justice. There can be no peace.

riverlover's picture

depending on election depth that time. The tables where one signs to rolls and now gets handed a ballot, and a proffered folder for anonymous voting is managed by many grey-hairs. I am always told my ballot number at the precinct, so much for anonymity.

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Hey! my dear friends or soon-to-be's, JtC could use the donations to keep this site functioning for those of us who can still see the life preserver or flotsam in the water.