November 2007 archive

It’s nice to know that there are still Progressive Dems out there who actually do live up to their 2006 campaign promises.

Secretary of State Debra Bowen has filed suit against Election Systems & Software, Inc. (ES&S) for nearly $15 million after a four-month investigation revealed the company had repeatedly violated state law.

Bowen, who unseated incumbent Bruce McPherson in 2006 by a narrow 3% (officially), campaigned on a Progressive platform whose centerpiece called for cleaning up the California voting system.  True to her word, she is now aggressively pursuing claims of eVote fraud.

Secretary Bowen is suing ES&S for $9.72 million in penalties for selling 972 machines that contained hardware changes that were never submitted to, or reviewed by, the Secretary of State. Furthermore, she is seeking nearly $5 million to reimburse the five counties that bought the machines believing they were buying certified voting equipment.

“ES&S ignored the law over and over and over again, and it got caught,” said Bowen, the state’s top elections officer. “California law is very clear on this issue. I am not going to stand on the sidelines and watch a voting system vendor come into this state, ignore the laws, and make millions of dollars from California’s taxpayers in the process.”

Bowen claims ES&S fraudulently substituted almost a thousand rigged boxes in five northern California counties, including San Francisco County:      

The sales in question involve ES&S’s AutoMARK ballot-marking devices that 14 California counties use to comply with the federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA) requirement that voters with disabilities have a way to cast ballots privately and independently. Unlike direct recording electronic (DRE) devices, the AutoMARK prints a voted ballot that is counted by an optical scanner along with other paper ballots.

   In July 2007, Secretary Bowen learned that ES&S had sold AutoMARK A200s – a version of the AutoMARK A100 that had been altered without authorization from the Secretary of State – to five counties in 2006. The counties collectively spent about $5 million for the equipment: Colusa bought 20 machines, Marin bought 130, Merced bought 104, San Francisco bought 558, and Solano bought 160. Elections officials in the five counties believed they were purchasing the certified AutoMARK A100s when, in fact, they had purchased AutoMARK A200s.

Bowen has also gone after ES&S in Los Angeles, where she decertified the company’s InkaVote boxes that had been scheduled for use in February’s Presidential primary/electoral college referendum:

Both of these actions have come as a result of an an unprecedented top to bottom review of California voting systems.

This is exactly what she promised to do as Secretary of State and she is delivering in a big way. Echoing language she used on the campaign trail last year, she said in a statement (PDF):

   

“California voters are entitled to have their votes counted exactly as they were cast. This top-to-bottom review is designed with one goal in mind: to ensure that California’s voters cast their ballots on voting systems that are secure, accurate, reliable, and accessible.“

Thank you, Secretary Bowen, for keeping your promise.

Fifteen years ago, I represented a fine young reporter who wrote a heartbreaking series of stories about a three-year-old victim of child abuse, and, later, about the fate of her younger sister.  The reason for the representation is largely irrelevant ~ it had much more to do with a vindictive prosecutor (hacked off about earlier stories my client had written) than with anything my client had written with regard to the little girl. Indeed, what my client had done with regard to the child abuse case was just shy of heroic.

During the course of that representation, I wrote an Op-Ed for the local newspaper. The reason for the piece was advocacy, of course, but it was also because the story itself had so touched my soul.  On the Sunday it was scheduled to appear, I flipped to the Op-Ed page and was so disappointed to find that it not there.  It wasn’t there because the thoughtful editor of that section of the paper had put it on the first page, as a friend I had called, in tears, so kindly pointed out.

Ahhh…it always hurts when something which seemed so promising comes crashing down around you, well…not me…but you know what I mean.  Even more so when the person who proposes the something promising seems very cavalier in bringing it down.  Oh well…let’s see the end of the Great Dem/Libertarian Alliance even before it really began!

It’s time to add another star to the flag. We’re never leaving Iraq. Ever. The Sun will go red giant in about five billion years, and we’ll still be in Iraq.

TPM Muckraker:

So it begins. After years of obfuscation and denial on the length of the U.S.’s stay in Iraq, the White House and the Maliki government have released a joint declaration of “principles” for “friendship and cooperation.” Apparently President Bush and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki signed the declaration during a morning teleconference.

As TPMM  points out, the agreement doesn’t explicitly discuss a military presence, and when it does refer to our protecting a “democratic Iraq”:

A “democratic Iraq” here means the Shiite-led Iraqi government. The current political arrangement will receive U.S. military protection against coups or any other internal subversion. That’s something the Iraqi government wants desperately: not only is it massively unpopular, even among Iraqi Shiites, but the increasing U.S.-Sunni security cooperation strikes the Shiite government — with some justification — as a recipe for a future coup.

In other words, Iraq’s “government” will remain our puppet. Should they have the temerity to attempt to do anything of which we disapprove, we can simply threaten to withdraw our protection. Needless to say, this will not be popular with most Iraqis, but when have their opinions- or lives- mattered, anyway?

When MLDB diaried this, this morning, his linked article was a little different from the one I read. Here’s what I consider key, as reported by the Associated Press:

The two senior Iraqi officials said Iraqi authorities had discussed the broad outlines of the proposal with U.S. military and diplomatic representatives. The Americans appeared generally favorable subject to negotiations on the details, which include preferential treatment for American investments, according to the Iraqi officials involved in the discussions.

As I said in MLDB’s diary:

Let’s be clear: this is Naomi Klein’s disaster capitalism. Let’s be doubly clear: we, the taxpayers, will be paying for an exclusive security force whose sole mission will be the protection of the private corporations who will own and operate Iraq.

(more)

Good afternoon! I am a Procrastinating Pickle and this is an open thread. Have at it, kidz!

I read a headline this morning that claimed that LCpl Justin Sharratt has been exonerated in the Haditha massacre.  The definition of exonerated is freed from any question of guilt; “is absolved from all blame”; “was now clear of the charge of cowardice”; “his official honor is vindicated”.  

I also listened intently to a Pundit Review Radio show featuring Justin and his father.

His father is upset because the press hasn’t jumped all over Justin’s exoneration.  He says that he is going to release 1800 pages of evidence that was previously marked classified that is going to clear all of the Haditha Marines in our hearts and minds. He claims they were operating within their ordered Rules of Engagement. To my knowledge the ROE that the Marines were operating under that day have never been made clear to the American people.  He claims that the Iraqi witnesses lied and refused to come to America to testify because they would now be in jail for perjury.  He claims that Jack Murtha lost it over the Haditha incident to advance his political career and not because he was a past Marine just shown photos of children shot in the head by American Marines.

I wait patiently for this mind blowing 1800 pages of classified evidence to be revealed and if I owe any apologies for my anger and outrage I will be forthcoming with any and all.  I’m sad that I deleted the most graphic photos of three small children shot in the head from my photo files because after I had written a diary of outrage I came to a place where seeing them everytime I opened my photo file stopped being a healthy thing for me.  I can’t find them on the net anymore.  I think I swiped them out of the TIME Haditha article.  If you have any better ones than I have up here I would really appreciate the additions. We won’t see official photos for a very long time because they are considered a national security risk like everything else is by these fuckers in the White House.  Here is a link after the commercial to the CNN report from last year describing drastic differences between what those photos that were shown to CNN seem to indicate and the story that the Marines involved told.

I think I know why the press hasn’t jumped all over Justin’s exoneration.  It’s because it isn’t that credible of an exoneration.  The press is often found lacking but I can tell from the way this father speaks that he has been doing everything to attempt to get the press to carry his son’s exoneration on the front page and there are reasons why they haven’t jumped all over this and it’s probably because for the most part the evidence is still a he said she said deal.  Justin was probably “exonerated” due to a lack of enough incriminating evidence and dead toddlers tell no tales.