CODE RED-Computerized Election Theft

CODE RED-Computerized Election Theft and The New American Century

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Vote Counts and Polls: An Insidious Feedback Loop

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In a nation that counts its votes in secret, polls take on a special significance. The United States is such a nation and our polls, both pre-election and exit, serve as parallel vote counts and establish the baseline against which the electoral results themselves are seen to be somewhere on the spectrum from “just what we expected” to “shocking.” The polls, in other words, serve as a kind of “smell test”: Miscounted elections, the vote counts of which veer widely or consistently away from the polling numbers, emit a certain odor, whether or not their results are actually challenged or investigated.

As a veteran analyst of election forensics, I have crunched polling and voting data from elections dating to 2002, when the Help America Vote Act hastened the computerization of voting in the United States. During this period, a pervasive pattern characterized that data: a “red shift” in which official vote counts in competitive electoral contests were consistently and significantly to the right of polling results, including both pre-election and exit polls.

Unfortunately the standard response to our forensic red-flagging of such patterns was “the polls are ‘off’ again; they must have oversampled Democrats.” It did not seem to occur to anyone to actually examine the polling samples or make any impression when we did analyze the samples and found that they had not in fact oversampled Democrats. But any explanation that might point to corruption of the computerized vote counting mechanism was strictly verboten. One suspect election after another managed to pass the stuffed-nose smell test based on the premise, as unshakable as it was irrational, that election rigging could never happen here in the beacon of democracy.
Polls and vote counts form a feedback loop, and corruption of one ultimately expresses itself in corruption of the other.

Now the polls tracking the upcoming election (“E2014”) are telling us to expect a resounding Republican victory, including control of the US Senate and reinforcement of the GOP House majority. Such results on November 4, 2014, will therefore not be shocking, as was the GOP sweep in 2010, which none of the pollsters predicted. No alarm will sound, even though there would be ample reason to scratch our heads that a party with which a dwindling minority of voters identifies would be rewarded for intransigent political behavior that has dragged Congress down to single-digit levels of approval (lowest in history) by having its control over that very same Congress strengthened. Odd, yes, but just what the polls have been predicting, so no surprise at all.

Everything fits neatly – too neatly. Polls and vote counts form a feedback loop, and corruption of one ultimately expresses itself in corruption of the other. Pollsters stay in business by predicting election outcomes accurately. A “Certificate of Methodological Purity” may make a nice wall ornament, but matters not a whit when it comes to success within the highly competitive polling profession. If election returns in competitive races were being systematically manipulated in one direction over a period of several biennial elections, we would expect pollsters to make methodological adjustments necessary to match those returns. Indeed, it would be nothing short of professional suicide not to make those adjustments and turn whatever methodological handsprings were required to continue “getting elections right.”

Enter the likely voter cutoff model, or LVCM for short. Introduced by Gallup about 10 years ago (after Gallup came under the control of a right-wing, Christianist heir), the LVCM has gathered adherents until it is now all but universally employed. The LVCM uses a series of screening questions – about past voting history, residential stability, intention of voting, and the like – to qualify and disqualify respondents from the sample. The problem with surveying registered voters without screening for likelihood of voting is obvious: You wind up surveying a significant number of voters whose responses register on the survey, but who then don’t vote. If this didn’t-vote constituency has a partisan slant it throws off the poll relative to the election results – generally to the left, since as you move to the right on the political spectrum the likelihood of voting rises.

But the problem with the LVCM as a corrective is that it far overshoots the mark. That is, it eliminates individuals from the sample who will in fact cast a vote, and the respondents/voters so eliminated, as a group, are acknowledged by all to be to the left of those who remain in the sample, skewing the sample to the right (a sound methodology, employed for a brief time by The New York Times/CBS poll, would solve the participation problem by down-weighting, but not eliminating, the responses of interviewees less likely to vote). So the LVCM – which disproportionately eliminates members of the Democratic constituency, including many who will in fact go on to cast a vote, by falsely assigning them a zero percent chance of voting – should get honestly tabulated elections consistently wrong. It should over-predict the Republican vote and under-predict the Democratic vote – by just about enough to cover the margins in the kind of tight races that determine the control of Congress and key state legislatures.
Basic logic tells us that the methodological contortion known as the likely voter cutoff model can get election results so consistently right only if those election results are consistently wrong – that is, shifted to the right in the darkness of cyberspace.

Instead it performs brilliantly and has therefore been universally adopted by pollsters, no questions asked, setting expectations not just for individual electoral outcomes, but for broad political trends, contributing to perceptions of political mojo and driving political dynamics – rightward, of course. In fact, the most “successful” likely voter cutoff models are now the ones that are strictest in limiting participation, including those that eliminate all respondents who cannot attest that they have voted in the three preceding biennial elections, cutting off a slew of young, poor and transient voters.

There is something very wrong with this picture and very basic logic tells us that the methodological contortion known as the LVCM can get election results so consistently right only if those election results are consistently wrong – that is, shifted to the right in the darkness of cyberspace.

A moment to let that sink in, before adding that, if the LVCM shift is not enough to distort the picture and catch up with the “red-shifted” vote counts, polling (and exit polling) samples are also generally weighted by partisanship or party ID. The problem with this is that these party ID numbers are drawn from prior elections’ final exit polls – exit polls that were “adjusted” in virtually every case rightward to conform to vote counts that were to the right of the actual exit polls, the unshakable assumption being that the vote counts are gospel and the exit polls therefore wrong.

In the process of “adjustment”- also known as “forcing” – the demographics (including party ID, age, race etc.) are dragged along for the ride and shift to the right. These then become the new benchmarks and baselines for current polling, shifting the samples to the right and enabling prior election manipulations to mask forensic and statistical evidence of current and future election manipulations. Specifically, the dramatically red-shifted and highly suspect 2010 election sets the sampling model for the upcoming 2014 election (“off-year” elections model for off-year elections and presidential elections model for presidential elections).

To sum up, we have a right-shifting, tunable fudge factor in the LVCM, now universally employed with great success to predict electoral outcomes, particularly when tuned to its highest degree of distortion. And we have the incorporation of past election manipulations into current polling samples, again pushing the results to the right. These methodological contortions and distortions could not be successful absent a consistent concomitant distortion of the vote counts in competitive races – noncompetitive races tend neither to be polled (no horserace interest) nor rigged (an outcome reversal wouldn’t pass the smell test).

Since polls and election outcomes are, after some shaky years following the advent of computerized vote counting, now in close agreement, everything looks just fine. But it is a consistency brought about by the polling profession’s imperative to find a way to mirror or predict vote counts (imagine, if you will, the professional fate of a pollster stubbornly employing undistorted methodology, who insisted that his/her polls were right and both the official vote counts and all the other pollsters wrong!). It is a consistency which, though achieved without malice on the part of the pollsters, is capable of concealing computerized election theft on a scale grand enough to equate to a rolling coup. On Election Day, accurate polls should be seen as a red flag.
Reprinted with permisioon of Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.

Afghanistan to Far Surpass USA in Vote Counting Integrity

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reprinted from The Daily Kos
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/09/17/1330466/-Afghanistan-to-Surpass-USA-in-Vote-Counting-Integrity

John Kerry has insisted that every single ballot be audited in the recent Afghanistan election.

Contrast this with a recent and typical American election in Virginia, in which not a single ballot (or memory card or line of computer code) is counted, audited, or examined by a human being. An election that could be rigged with zero risk for huge reward. An election whose politically seismic result was described by the Times as “unimaginable” but nonetheless accepted on blind faith, not so much as a single eyebrow raised or question asked about the secret vote counting system that produced it. A system that would never in a million years have passed muster in Afghanistan.

Find out why our electoral system is at grave risk and cannot be accepted by the American people as the bedrock protocol of our democracy. Find out why observable vote counting must be part of any plan hoping to address the institutional corruption of our republic.

By Jonathan Simon
Author of Code Red: Computerized Election Theft and The New American Century

From the  Comics Pages of the July 12th New York Times comes the following:

KABUL, Afghanistan — Secretary of State John Kerry announced Saturday that Afghanistan would audit all eight million votes cast in a runoff presidential election last month . . . The audit, intended to resolve allegations of widespread fraud, is to begin almost immediately, he said, and will be supervised by international monitors.

“Every single ballot that was cast will be audited,” Mr. Kerry said.

John Kerry.  Insisting that every single ballot be audited.  In Afghanistan.  Because America cares about democracy.  In Afghanistan.

When this same (I think) John Kerry ignored our pleas and fell all over himself to concede Ohio and the presidency in 2004 (in an election as forensically red-flagged as anything Afghanistan has ever seen), I don’t recall “every single ballot cast” being audited.

In fact not one single ballot cast in Ohio was legitimately audited. Not a single memory card examined.  Let alone servers in Chattanooga, Tennessee, set up by Karl Rove’s own IT guru, the late Mike Connell, to “process” the Ohio vote.  And that was just Ohio, where the “late” vote, ostensibly counted on those servers, made a fool out of the exit polls (“they must have oversampled Democrats again”) and put Bush back in the White House.  Bizarre statistical patterns all across Afghanistan (I mean America) were ignored, dismissed, chalked up to “conspiracy theory.”  International monitors were politely invited to leave the country:  “This is America, the Beacon of Democracy! Why in God’s name would we ever need international monitors?”

I am not talking here about a re-do of E2004, nor about the cornucopia of fruit from that poison tree, which of course includes Justices Roberts and Alito and a slew of 5 – 4 SCOTUS (and lower court) decisions such as Citizens United.  Yes, America would be a very different place, but oh well.

No, I am talking here about the on-going insanity that is the American computerized vote counting system.  I am talking about an election this June in which Eric Cantor, the far-right Majority Leader of the US House, was unseated in a Virginia Republican primary by David Brat, a far-far-far-right Tea Partier who trailed by 30%+ in every poll.  A typical American election, very un-Afghanistanian, in which not a single ballot (or memory card or line of computer code) was ever counted, audited, or examined by a human being.  An election that could be rigged with zero risk for huge reward.  An election whose politically seismic result was described by the Times as “unimaginable” but nonetheless accepted on blind faith, not so much as a single eyebrow raised or question asked about the secret vote counting system that produced it.  An electoral system that would never in a million years have passed muster in Afghanistan.

And I am talking about all our elections since the computers took over and moved the counting into the pitch dark of cyberspace.  And most of all I am talking about our elections yet to come, beginning with 2014. I am talking about our future.

I have written a book about this: CODE RED: Computerized Election Theft and The New American Century.  It is about what has happened to American elections, American politics, and America since computers took over the counting of votes.  It is readable: in extensive laboratory testing not a single eye has yet to glaze over.  The technical is cordoned off into the Appendix while the main part tells the story, answers questions, offers insights and ideas for action.

Here are some of the questions CODE RED asks (and answers):

Haven’t there always been attempts to steal elections?  Why is now any different?

How do you know the computers on which we vote are so susceptible to fraud?

If you wanted to alter the outcome of an election, give me some examples of how you might do it?

How did America ever come to approve and accept such a dangerous system?

You say that the system is indisputably vulnerable and dangerous, but what makes you so certain that it has actually been corrupted and elections have actually been stolen?

Why has there been so little response from the “immune system”—election administrators, losing candidates, the media?  You would think they would be all over this.

Who are these corporations that count our votes?  What makes you think they care who wins elections?

How about audits?  Can they be effective?

Can we trust Internet Voting?

Given the recent revelations about NSA surveillance, along with other signs that American democracy is deteriorating irrespective of which party governs, would an honest vote counting system even matter anymore?

What can be done?  Is there any real prospect of observable and honest elections in the United States?

The answers are, along with much else, in CODE RED, which is available from Amazon in both Print (http://www.amazon.com/…) and Kindle (http://www.amazon.com/…) editions or from the www.CODERED2014.com website.

CODE RED tells a story and this is how it concludes:

“There are genuinely difficult problems facing us as a nation and as a species in the years to come:  climate change, over-population, food and resource distribution, weapons control, protection of privacy, and all manner of ecological challenges, just to name a few. . . .

“Compared to these challenges, the basic counting of votes—in an observable way that ensures the legitimacy of our elections and vouchsafes the public an undistorted voice in the making of all these hard choices—is an easy assignment.  We need only to break a spell that has been cast on us—a spell of convenience, passivity, helplessness.  We need only remember that democracy is not something that we watch, it is something that we do.”

CODE RED is really about saving our democracy and our country.  Now, before it is all gone.  Please read it, review it, share it discuss it.  There’s so much consciousness to be raised here in America, and so little time.

Computerized Election Theft and the New American Century

By

(Image: Binary codes via Shutterstock)

(Image: Binary codes via Shutterstock)

Copyright, Truthout.org. Reprinted with permission

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/26754-computerized-election-theft-and-the-new-american-century

Is it futile to combat computerized vote-counting fraud, given the more general disenfranchisement of the American public? This and the emerging battlefield of corporate versus public interest is explored in this adapted excerpt from “CODE RED” by Jonathan D. Simon.

Many despairing observers of The New American Century have asked me whether – given the recent revelations about NSA surveillance, along with other signs that American democracy is deteriorating irrespective of which party governs – an honest vote counting system would even matter anymore.  A fair question to which I believe the ultimate, if uneasy, answer is “Yes.”

There was a brief glimpse during the Occupy movement of what public anger at American Systemic Injustice might come to if it found a way to assemble, to come out of its isolated private homes and apartments and shelters and cubicles into the public squares of the nation. It was a powerful image, one that so shook US rulers in their corporate and governmental corridors of power that they soon resorted to a federally-coordinated blitzkrieg to empty those squares and kill Occupy before it multiplied any further and before the Bastille was in any real danger.

Perhaps the most penetrating lesson to be drawn from the Occupy experience is the disclosure of a previously unrecognized divide in the American body politic: that of the “99%” and the “1%.” Throughout American history our enduring system of representative democracy has thrived on the two-party dialectic. Certainly for living generations, the vision we have of politics is that of the Democratic and Republican parties carrying the ark into battle for their relatively evenly matched constituencies, taking turns advancing an agenda as the political pendulum swung.

That is still the image of American politics you’ll see in The New York Times or on CNN: a never-ending political Super Bowl. It is easy enough, if you listen to the play-by-play announcers, not to notice a very important change in the game, a tectonic realignment of which Occupy gave us a hint and which subsequent developments have confirmed. The battle that is coming to characterize The New American Century is that between the Elites  (called “the 1%” by Occupy, but more accurately the corporate class that would replace democracy with dominion) and Everyone Else.  And this battle, as Edward Snowden has brought so dramatically to our attention, is largely about information.

Knowledge is indeed power: In the case of the surveillance state, the power to intimidate, the power indeed to blackmail, the power to infiltrate and sabotage any perceived threat, stifle any organized or ultimately individual dissent.  And the battle lines are indeed simple: a ruling elite, corporate and governmental, that is attempting to know as much as possible about you and me while seeing to it that we know as little as possible about them. Of course this is not unprecedented; history offers up its share of J. Edgar Hoovers.  But the Information Age has turned a limited and rather selective battle into what amounts to total war. In a very real sense, this war is not over land or even treasure, but over knowledge, The Public has become The Enemy.

Ironically, the weapon that has been handing the ruling elite one victory after another in this war is fear, specifically fear of “terrorism” (though as an American you were 3,000 times as likely to be killed by an American with a gun last year as by a terrorist).  With the ghastly and iconic images of planes puncturing towers and bodies leaping from fiery windows – precisely the “new Pearl Harbor” imagined in 1997 by right-wing think tank PNAC (Project for the New American Century) – seared into every American’s brain, the surrender of privacy on every front becomes an easy sale. Whatever it takes to keep us mythically “safe” in a “war” rather brilliantly conjured to be without end.

When finally exposed by the “treasonous” Snowden, the NSA took pains to reassure us that it’s “only gathering data” and won’t actually read our emails and listen in on our phone calls unless it really feels it needs to. For example, if you were trying to organize a new Occupy movement, or threatening the “eco-terrorism” of opposing Monsanto, or perhaps getting serious about a third-party or independent challenge to the D-R power duopoly.

This is the bone structure of The New American Century, whatever its face and skin may look like. Corporate America has a stranglehold on both major parties; the MSM (corporate-owned) is cheerfully along for the ride; threatening opposition movements like Occupy are infiltrated and, where necessary, obliterated. Where does that leave The People?  Where does that leave the 99% on the day it figures out it is the 99%?

It leaves us with the electoral process. With the chance – in a fair, observably counted election – to elect to office candidates outside the power duopoly, who have refused to feed at the corporate trough and who are pledged to bring genuine change to the system and seriously address American Systemic Injustice.

Of course there are other obstacles beside rigged vote counts: money, media, lies, infiltration, assassination. But at least there would be a fighter’s chance!  Money faces a law of diminishing returns when it is spent in obscene amounts to buy votes and elections; there are means of communicating messages outside the mainstream media; lies can be exposed; infiltration, threats and even assassination overcome – as we have seen elsewhere around the world and throughout history – when a cause is just and vital and when the forces of greed, repression and control have overplayed their hand. In primaries and in independent challenges, candidates with the courage to oppose the forces of wealth and “order” smothering our democracy could stand for election before an electorate that the ruling elite had finally pushed too far.

At that point, we had better be counting the votes  in public view.  It is absurdly naive to believe that the corporate totalitarians, who have hardly blanched at subverting every other mechanism of democracy, would, with their own computers counting the votes in secret, go gentle into the good electoral night.

We are suffering from a virulent disease and will need strong medicine.  But let us not say it’s all so rotten that elections no longer matter.  Because after elections, all that is left is revolution, and, even if we could imagine one here in the Land of Genetically Modified Milk and Honey, such events are not generally festive, but chaotic and traumatic. Indeed, it was memory of such traumas that doubtless gave birth to history’s first elections. So let us neither mistake the lines of battle nor fail to recognize the crucial part electoral integrity – beginning with the observable counting of votes  – is destined to play in an age in which the most critical battle lines are all about what can be seen and what cannot.

 

What do you believe is happening with American elections?

By

A: Computerized vote counting has opened the door, over the past decade, to large-scale fraud and election theft. Virtually all the vote counting equipment is produced and programmed by a few corporations with right-wing ties. There is strong and pervasive forensic evidence that votecounts are being shifted to the right, altering many election outcomes. Political intransigence strangely seems to be electorally rewarded rather than punished. As a result, even as the pendulum appears to swing, American politics has veered, inexorably and often inexplicably, to the right. This amounts to a rolling coup that is transforming America while disenfranchising an unsuspecting public.

Will Afghanistan Surpass the USA in Voting Integrity?

By

From the Comic Pages of the July 12th New York Times comes the following:

KABUL, Afghanistan —Secretary of State John Kerry announced Saturday that Afghanistan would audit all eight million votes cast in a runoff presidential election last month . . .

The audit, intended to resolve allegations of widespread fraud, is to begin almost immediately, he said, and will be supervised by international monitors.

“Every single ballot that was cast will be audited,” Mr. Kerry said. (emphasis mine)

John Kerry. Insisting that every single ballot be audited. In Afghanistan. Because America cares about democracy. In Afghanistan.

When this same (I think) John Kerry ignored our pleas and fell all over himself to concede Ohio and the presidency in 2004 (in an election as forensically red-flagged as anything Afghanistan has ever seen), I don’t recall “every single ballot cast” being audited.

In fact not one single ballot cast in Ohio was legitimately audited. Not a single memory card examined.   Let alone servers in Chattanooga, Tennessee, set up by Karl Rove’s own IT guru, the late Mike Connell, to “process” the Ohio vote. And that was just Ohio, where the “late” vote, ostensibly counted on those servers, made a fool out of the exit polls (“they must have oversampled Democrats again”) and put Bush back in the White House. Bizarre statistical patterns all across Afghanistan (I mean America) were ignored, dismissed, chalked up to “conspiracy theory.” International monitors were politely invited to leave the country: “This is America, the Beacon of Democracy! Why in God’s name would we ever need international monitors?”

I am not talking here about a re-do of E2004, nor about the cornucopia of fruit from that poison tree, which of course includes Justices Roberts and Alito and a slew of 5 – 4 SCOTUS (and lower court) decisions such as Citizens United. Yes, America would be a very different place, but oh well.

No, I am talking here about the thriving insanity that is the American computerized vote counting system. I am talking about an election this June in which Eric Cantor, the far-right Majority Leader of the US House, was unseated in a Virginia Republican primary by David Brat, a far-far-far-right Tea Partier who trailed by 30%+ in every poll. A typical American election, very un-Afghanistanian, in which not a single ballot (or memory card or line of computer code) was ever counted, audited, or examined by a human being. An election that could be rigged with zero risk for huge reward. An election whose politically seismic result was described by the Times as “unimaginable” but nonetheless accepted on blind faith, not so much as a single eyebrow raised or question asked about the secret vote counting system that produced it. A system that would never in a million years have passed muster in Afghanistan.

And I am talking about all our elections since the computers took over and moved the counting into the pitch dark of cyberspace. And most of all I am talking about our elections yet to come, beginning with 2014. I am talking about our future.

I have written a book about this: CODE RED: Computerized Election Theft and The New American Century. It is about what has happened to American elections, American politics, and America since computers took over the counting of votes. It is readable: in extensive laboratory testing not a single eye has yet to glaze over. The technical is cordoned off into the Appendix while the main part tells the story, answers questions, offers insights and ideas for action.

Here are some of the questions CODE RED asks (and answers):

  • Haven’t there always been attempts to steal elections? Why is now any different?
  • How do you know the computers on which we vote are so susceptible to fraud?
  • If you wanted to alter the outcome of an election, give me some examples of how you might do it?
  • How did America ever come to approve and accept such a dangerous system?
  • You say that the system is indisputably vulnerable and dangerous, but what makes you so certain that it has actually been corrupted and elections have actually been stolen?
  • Why has there been so little response from the “immune system”—election administrators, losing candidates, the media? You would think they would be all over this.
  • Who are these corporations that count our votes? What makes you think they care who wins elections?
  • How about audits? Can they be effective?
  • Can we trust Internet Voting?
  • Given the recent revelations about NSA surveillance, along with other signs that American democracy is deteriorating irrespective of which party governs, would an honest vote counting system even matter anymore?
  • What can be done? Is there any real prospect of observable and honest elections in the United States?

The answers are, along with much else, in CODE RED, which is available from Amazon in both Print (http://www.amazon.com/dp/1500319856) and Kindle (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00A0QDJP2) editions.

CODE RED tells a story and this is how it concludes:

There are genuinely difficult problems facing us as a nation and as a species in the years to come: climate change, over-population, food and resource distribution, weapons control, protection of privacy, and all manner of ecological challenges, just to name a few. . . .

Compared to these challenges, the basic counting of votes—in an observable way that ensures the legitimacy of our elections and vouchsafes the public an undistorted voice in the making of all these hard choices—is an easy assignment. We need only to break a spell that has been cast on us—a spell of convenience, passivity, helplessness. We need only remember that democracy is not something that we watch, it is something that we do.

CODE RED is really about saving our democracy and our country. Now, before it is all gone. Please read it, review it, share it, discuss it. There’s so much consciousness to be raised here in America, and so little time.

Jonathan Simon

Executive Director

Election Defense Alliance

 

E2012: The Good, The Bad, and The Ironic

By

E2012—another Democratic victory, a lot of cheering in the streets, living rooms, and even some Election Integrity “war rooms” across America—a lot like E2008. Change you could believe in. Safe to go back in the water. Concerns about election theft greatly overblown. But that was before E2010, when the Tea Party swept in, Democrats and moderates were sent packing, and what seems to be a very long-term blockade of both federal and state governments was installed by those same red-shifted votecounts that had somehow escaped general notice two years earlier when they weren’t red-shifted enough to keep Obama out of the White House. Who, in December 2008, saw E2010 coming? Who, in December 2012, is thinking E2014? (We did. We are. We hope you are too.) What actually happened on Election Night 2012 remains unclear. In terms of outcome, while the Democrats took what were regarded as the major in-play prizes of the White House and Senate (adding to their narrow majority in the latter), the Republicans maintained a solid grip on the US House (despite Congressional approval ratings hovering in the single digits and despite an overall Democratic victory in the national popular vote for the House, only the fourth occurrence of this win-the-vote-lose-the-House phenomenon in over 100 years) as well as on a sizeable majority of statehouses. In effect little changed in the actual political infrastructure as a result of E2012, though the election was momentarily seen as a repudiation of extreme right-wing politics and of the impact of vast corporate and Super-PAC expenditures on voter choice. It is also worth noting that, much as in E2008, it required a dismal campaign run by a feckless, tone-deaf, and unpopular candidate trying desperately and all-too-transparently to Etch-A-Sketch away an indelible impression of extremism left over from the “severely conservative” primary season, not to mention a series of gaffes by GOP Senate candidates ranging from the borderline moronic to the instantly fatal, to bring about even this tepid electoral result that did little more than maintain the status quo. But the real riddle of E2012 is what was Karl Rove doing on FOX News at the witching hour making a complete and very uncharacteristic fool of himself? The question remains unanswered. Shrouded still in mystery is whether a planned massive electronic rig was disarmed and, if so, how and why, at what stage, and totally or partially. Please click here for full article

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From the Blog

GA-6 Handel Campaign Flyer w/Absentee Ballot App

Jon Ossoff won the GA-6 June 20 runoff Mail-In Vote 64% to 36%. Some speculated that it was because his campaign had promoted mail-in voting among supporters. No Ossoff campaign literature linked to mail-in voting could be found, but the above flyer was sent by the Handel campaign.