Crossposted on Dailykos.
The November mid-term elections are still months away, but now is the time to act. State by State, County by County the use of Deibold voting machines and tabulators needs to be challenged on security grounds.
Ensuring that every vote is counted is one of our most sacred trusts, if I were highly cynical (or possibly a Republican) i would suggest that a co-ordinated effort to block Deibold and ES&S machines be mounted in each state and district where a Competative Democratic Challanger has emerged in the last few months.
But doing such a thing would be highly partisan, highly calculated -- highly --
Ah, what the heck, let's go for it,
As reported last month, there are major e-voting issues cropping up in Florida.
As the Leon County supervisor of elections, Ion Sancho's job is to make sure voting is free of fraud. But the most brazen effort lately to manipulate election results in this Florida locality was carried out by Sancho himself.Four times over the past year Sancho told computer specialists to break in to his voting system. And on all four occasions they did, changing results with what the specialists described as relatively unsophisticated hacking techniques. To Sancho, the results showed the vulnerability of voting equipment manufactured by Ohio-based Diebold Election Systems, which is used by Leon County and many other jurisdictions around the country.
Sancho's most recent demonstration was last month. Harri Hursti, a computer security expert from Finland, manipulated the "memory card" that records the votes of ballots run through an optical scanning machine.
New York is dragging it's feet on Voting machines.
ALBANY, Jan. 11 - The federal Justice Department has threatened to sue New York State over its failure to modernize its voting system, saying New York "is further behind" every other state in complying with new guidelines stemming from the 2000 presidential election dispute.The state has yet to decide what kind of new voting machines it will certify, leaving many local elections boards in uncertainty as they try to modernize their voting systems in time for next fall's primary elections. And the state missed the Jan. 1 deadline for creating a statewide database of registered voters, as required by the federal Help America Vote Act.
New York is behind all other states and territories in deciding how to spend its share of $2.3 billion in federal aid to modernize voting machines and other elections technology. So far the state has received $220 million to replace its 20,000 aging voting machines, train local election officials to use the new machines, and create the voter database. The money is unspent and collecting interest, officials say.
There's also been headway made in California and about a dozen other states.
California is one of two dozen states that mandate a voter-verified paper trail for touch-screen machines. A dozen of those now use the paper printouts in a sample recount.
In various polls the desire to vote for Democrats and have them take over control of congress is running about 10-15 pts against Republicans. [ABC Poll 1/23 - Republican Candidates 38% Democratic Candidates 54%]
In addition to strong polls, Democrats running for Congress are apparently doing very well with fundraising compared to Republicans.
If this trend continues, and unless something really oddball and strange happens during the election, Democrats are likely to pick up several seats.
Yeah, right...
If we've learned anything about Republicans in the last few years, they don't just sit back and trust that things are just going to go their way. They create their own luck, so we have to do the same.
No, I'm not saying we need to cheat - I'm saying we need to make sure they can't. Now the nation is a big place, so we have to stay focused on where or efforts will do the most good, or rather prevent the greatest damage.
So, although we have 56 Fighting Dem/Band of Brothers candidates running for Congress in Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota , Missouri, North Carolina and New Jersey my opinion is that we need to focus our attention on the areas where we're likely to get the biggest bang for our buck - and that means Looking at the states where we currently have multiple Candidates running simultaneously.
Republicans currently have 34 vulnerable candidates (those whose won their seat with less than 60%), 24 of those candidates face Democratic challengers.
Of those 24, we have multiple candidates in
Additionally there are 8 open seats currently held by Republicans that are up for grabs, which have 5 well funded Democrats vying for them.
Those five are in California, Colorado, Ohio, Vermont and Wisconsin.
Taking all this in, it's my opinion that the following list of ten are our Battleground States to take back Congress in 06 (listed in order of greatest potential seat gain to least, with link to the Secretary of State, Legislature and Governor)
- California - Legislature - Gov
- Texas - Legislature - Gov
- Pennsylania - Legislature - Gov
- Ohio - Legislature - Gov
- Florida - Legislature - Gov
- Illinois - Legislature - Gov
- Colorado - Legislature - Gov
- Indiana - Legislature - Gov
- Kentucky - Legislature - Gov
- Virginia - Legislature - Gov
These are the states that I think strong and vigorous efforts should be focused to protect election integrity. These states offer the greatest potential gains for viable Democratic Candidates, if we hit a complete grand slam (including the incredible accomplishment of flipping Ohio) we gain 45 Seats. Even if our 13 most vulnerable Democratic incumbents all lose we're still up 32 seats.
In order to take back the house - Democrats need a net gain of only 15 seats, less than half my rather rosey projection. And again, that's just focusing on the ten states - things could get much better if we have a surge and all 56 Fighting Dems get swept into office, but lets not get crazy.
I have little doubt that all these various scandals, from Abramoff and Cunningham's guilty pleas to the complete and total lack of Congressional Oversight on Katrina, WMD's, Intelligence Gathering, Medicare, the Bankruptcy Bill, Schiavo-gate and Tom Delay's ever increasing troubles, are going to have a major impact on the mid-term elections. The Republicans are losing ground fast. But I don't think we should sit back on their lack of laurels, these are the people who used the FAA and Homeland Security to track down Democrats in the Texas Legislature in order to further their gerrymandering plans - and picked up five House seats because of it.
We absolutely have to make sure that the votes get counted - particularly where they really need to counted.
If it takes a call to state legislators considering the issue, call. If it takes call to the Secretary of States - then call. Emails? Do it. Faxes? Go to town. LTE's? Go nuts. If lawsuits are needed, we need to sue.
Throw everything against the wall, leave everything out on the mat. Time is running out and we need to be ready. This isssue is as large and important as the Alito Confirmation (where we managed to Flip 20 Senators) - we should put no less energy into this.
Vyan
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