US elections: broken machines could throw Michigan recount into chaos
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/201 ... ry-clinton
Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
by seemslikeadream » Tue Dec 06, 2016 12:46 pm
US elections: broken machines could throw Michigan recount into chaos
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/201 ... ry-clinton
by Wombaticus Rex » Tue Dec 06, 2016 3:16 pm
seemslikeadream » Mon Dec 05, 2016 5:17 pm wrote:a whole lotta stupid shit on this board lately....Full Retard. ...how do you decide which ones you figure are worth your condemnation?
let me know when someone tries to shoot up the place because of "Hamilton Electors"
by Searcher08 » Tue Dec 06, 2016 10:45 pm
seemslikeadream » Mon Dec 05, 2016 10:17 pm wrote:Wombaticus Rex » Mon Dec 05, 2016 4:50 pm wrote:Levi Guerra, 19, is an elector from Vancouver, Washington and the latest to join the renegade bipartisan group of "Hamilton Electors" planning to block Trump from the presidency when the Electoral College votes December 19.
Instead of supporting Hillary Clinton (who Washington voted for), Guerra will cast her vote for a Republican compromise candidate.
Wow, okay, so just as dumb as I thought.
This is alarmingly stupid shit. These are not remotely rational human beings. This country has gone Full Retard.
#ClownWorld2017
Actual, literal self-flagellation in public is probably ~4 months off.
a whole lotta stupid shit on this board lately....Full Retard. ...how do you decide which ones you figure are worth your condemnation?
let me know when someone tries to shoot up the place because of "Hamilton Electors"
by seemslikeadream » Thu Dec 08, 2016 2:03 pm
Wombaticus Rex » Tue Dec 06, 2016 2:16 pm wrote:seemslikeadream » Mon Dec 05, 2016 5:17 pm wrote:a whole lotta stupid shit on this board lately....Full Retard. ...how do you decide which ones you figure are worth your condemnation?
let me know when someone tries to shoot up the place because of "Hamilton Electors"
Juxtaposition creates the illusion of meaning -- you might as well be talking about the relative virtues of UPS and STDs.
Besides, I condemn all of you on a fairly regular basis, right? I think I'm very egalitarian with my contempt.
I really do think the "Hamilton Electors" might be the single dumbest thing I've seen this year, though.
So far. There's still time.
Faithless electors': What will happen if more decide not to vote for Trump?
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By Eric Black | 12/07/16
'Faithless electors': What will happen if more decide not to vote for Trump?
REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton
President-elect Donald Trump speaking at a USA Thank You Tour event at Crown Coliseum in Fayetteville, North Carolina, on Tuesday.
Christopher Suprun, a Republican elector from Dallas, Texas (and by “elector” we mean here one of the actual 538 people who will cast electoral votes in the real, final, constitutional step in the process of choosing a new president) announced Monday in an op-ed in the New York Times that he will not cast his electoral vote for Donald Trump.Why I Will Not Cast My Electoral Vote for Donald Trump
By CHRISTOPHER SUPRUNDEC. 5, 2016
Credit Mike McQuade
DALLAS — I am a Republican presidential elector, one of the 538 people asked to choose officially the president of the United States. Since the election, people have asked me to change my vote based on policy disagreements with Donald J. Trump. In some cases, they cite the popular vote difference. I do not think presidents-elect should be disqualified for policy disagreements. I do not think they should be disqualified because they won the Electoral College instead of the popular vote. However, now I am asked to cast a vote on Dec. 19 for someone who shows daily he is not qualified for the office.
Fifteen years ago, as a firefighter, I was part of the response to the Sept. 11 attacks against our nation. That attack and this year’s election may seem unrelated, but for me the relationship becomes clearer every day.
George W. Bush is an imperfect man, but he led us through the tragic days following the attacks. His leadership showed that America was a great nation. That was also the last time I remember the nation united. I watch Mr. Trump fail to unite America and drive a wedge between us.
Mr. Trump goes out of his way to attack the cast of “Saturday Night Live” for bias. He tweets day and night, but waited two days to offer sympathy to the Ohio State community after an attack there. He does not encourage civil discourse, but chooses to stoke fear and create outrage.
This is unacceptable. For me, America is that shining city on a hill that Ronald Reagan envisioned. It has problems. It has challenges. These can be met and overcome just as our nation overcame Sept. 11.
The United States was set up as a republic. Alexander Hamilton provided a blueprint for states’ votes. Federalist 68 argued that an Electoral College should determine if candidates are qualified, not engaged in demagogy, and independent from foreign influence. Mr. Trump shows us again and again that he does not meet these standards. Given his own public statements, it isn’t clear how the Electoral College can ignore these issues, and so it should reject him.
I have poured countless hours into serving the party of Lincoln and electing its candidates. I will pour many more into being more faithful to my party than some in its leadership. But I owe no debt to a party. I owe a debt to my children to leave them a nation they can trust.
Mr. Trump lacks the foreign policy experience and demeanor needed to be commander in chief. During the campaign more than 50 Republican former national security officials and foreign policy experts co-signed a letter opposing him. In their words, “he would be a dangerous president.” During the campaign Mr. Trump even said Russia should hack Hillary Clinton’s emails. This encouragement of an illegal act has troubled many members of Congress and troubles me.
Hamilton also reminded us that a president cannot be a demagogue. Mr. Trump urged violence against protesters at his rallies during the campaign. He speaks of retribution against his critics. He has surrounded himself with advisers such as Stephen K. Bannon, who claims to be a Leninist and lauds villains and their thirst for power, including Darth Vader. “Rogue One,” the latest “Star Wars” installment, arrives later this month. I am not taking my children to see it to celebrate evil, but to show them that light can overcome it.
Gen. Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump’s pick for national security adviser, has his own checkered past about rules. He installed a secret internet connection in his Pentagon office despite rules to the contrary. Sound familiar?
Finally, Mr. Trump does not understand that the Constitution expressly forbids a president to receive payments or gifts from foreign governments. We have reports that Mr. Trump’s organization has business dealings in Argentina, Bahrain, Taiwan and elsewhere. Mr. Trump could be impeached in his first year given his dismissive responses to financial conflicts of interest. He has played fast and loose with the law for years. He may have violated the Cuban embargo, and there are reports of improprieties involving his foundation and actions he took against minority tenants in New York. Mr. Trump still seems to think that pattern of behavior can continue.
The election of the next president is not yet a done deal. Electors of conscience can still do the right thing for the good of the country. Presidential electors have the legal right and a constitutional duty to vote their conscience. I believe electors should unify behind a Republican alternative, an honorable and qualified man or woman such as Gov. John Kasich of Ohio. I pray my fellow electors will do their job and join with me in discovering who that person should be.
Fifteen years ago, I swore an oath to defend my country and Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. On Dec. 19, I will do it again.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/05/opini ... trump.html
Even though Suprun was chosen as an elector by the Texas Republican Party in the clear expectation that he would vote for the Republican nominee, Suprun considers Trump unqualified and unfit to be president. And he is riding a never-Trump boomlet that wants to argue that the last, best hope to prevent his election is to get electors, in states that Trump carried, to refuse to vote for him in the (sort of nonexistent) Electoral College.
The legal argument is that the weird job of presidential elector was put into the Constitution to empower a group of people to use their judgment about who was fit to be president, not just to rubber stamp the result of the popular vote in their home state.
As a historical matter of what the framers of the Constitution had in mind, he’s right, although that understanding of the role of electors went out of fashion long ago.
So far as I know, Suprun is the only elector to so far make a public announcement of his intention to become a “faithless elector,” which is the traditional term for electors who don’t vote the way they are supposed to, according to the Electoral College system as evolved.
But, given the Trump situation, there are other electors who feel as Suprun does, and who are considering acting on that feeling. The “faithless elector” deal has happened before, although never in a way that changed the outcome of an election, and I’m highly skeptical it will happen this time. But a great many unexpected things have happened this year.
The situation is further complicated because some states have enacted laws binding the electors to vote for the nominee of their party, if that party wins the state. Others have not.
306 electors are pledged to Trump
Pending the outcome of several recounts in fairly close states, 306 electors are pledged to vote for Trump. It takes 270 electoral votes to win the presidency via the Electoral College. In the (still, to me, unlikely) event that enough other Republican electors were to follow Suprun’s example to pull Trump’s total below 270, we would have one heck of a constitutional crisis and possibly blood in the streets.
Lawrence Lessig
But a high-powered legal team is working hard to resurrect the right of electors to use their own judgment, and they are in talks with several who want an alternative to voting for Trump. Those electors are calling themselves “Hamilton Electors,” which is a reference to Alexander Hamilton, one of the framers of the Constitution and the author of one of the “Federalist Papers” that explained the framers’ thinking in turning the choice of the president over to a group of electors.To the People of the State of New York:
THE mode of appointment of the Chief Magistrate of the United States is almost the only part of the system, of any consequence, which has escaped without severe censure, or which has received the slightest mark of approbation from its opponents. The most plausible of these, who has appeared in print, has even deigned to admit that the election of the President is pretty well guarded.1 I venture somewhat further, and hesitate not to affirm, that if the manner of it be not perfect, it is at least excellent. It unites in an eminent degree all the advantages, the union of which was to be wished for.
It was desirable that the sense of the people should operate in the choice of the person to whom so important a trust was to be confided. This end will be answered by committing the right of making it, not to any preestablished body, but to men chosen by the people for the special purpose, and at the particular conjuncture.
It was equally desirable, that the immediate election should be made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation, and to a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice. A small number of persons, selected by their fellow-citizens from the general mass, will be most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations.
It was also peculiarly desirable to afford as little opportunity as possible to tumult and disorder. This evil was not least to be dreaded in the election of a magistrate, who was to have so important an agency in the administration of the government as the President of the United States. But the precautions which have been so happily concerted in the system under consideration, promise an effectual security against this mischief. The choice of SEVERAL, to form an intermediate body of electors, will be much less apt to convulse the community with any extraordinary or violent movements, than the choice of ONE who was himself to be the final object of the public wishes. And as the electors, chosen in each State, are to assemble and vote in the State in which they are chosen, this detached and divided situation will expose them much less to heats and ferments, which might be communicated from them to the people, than if they were all to be convened at one time, in one place.
Nothing was more to be desired than that every practicable obstacle should be opposed to cabal, intrigue, and corruption. These most deadly adversaries of republican government might naturally have been expected to make their approaches from more than one querter, but chiefly from the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils. How could they better gratify this, than by raising a creature of their own to the chief magistracy of the Union? But the convention have guarded against all danger of this sort, with the most provident and judicious attention. They have not made the appointment of the President to depend on any preexisting bodies of men, who might be tampered with beforehand to prostitute their votes; but they have referred it in the first instance to an immediate act of the people of America, to be exerted in the choice of persons for the temporary and sole purpose of making the appointment. And they have excluded from eligibility to this trust, all those who from situation might be suspected of too great devotion to the President in office. No senator, representative, or other person holding a place of trust or profit under the United States, can be of the numbers of the electors. Thus without corrupting the body of the people, the immediate agents in the election will at least enter upon the task free from any sinister bias. Their transient existence, and their detached situation, already taken notice of, afford a satisfactory prospect of their continuing so, to the conclusion of it. The business of corruption, when it is to embrace so considerable a number of men, requires time as well as means. Nor would it be found easy suddenly to embark them, dispersed as they would be over thirteen States, in any combinations founded upon motives, which though they could not properly be denominated corrupt, might yet be of a nature to mislead them from their duty.
Another and no less important desideratum was, that the Executive should be independent for his continuance in office on all but the people themselves. He might otherwise be tempted to sacrifice his duty to his complaisance for those whose favor was necessary to the duration of his official consequence. This advantage will also be secured, by making his re-election to depend on a special body of representatives, deputed by the society for the single purpose of making the important choice.
All these advantages will happily combine in the plan devised by the convention; which is, that the people of each State shall choose a number of persons as electors, equal to the number of senators and representatives of such State in the national government, who shall assemble within the State, and vote for some fit person as President. Their votes, thus given, are to be transmitted to the seat of the national government, and the person who may happen to have a majority of the whole number of votes will be the President. But as a majority of the votes might not always happen to centre in one man, and as it might be unsafe to permit less than a majority to be conclusive, it is provided that, in such a contingency, the House of Representatives shall select out of the candidates who shall have the five highest number of votes, the man who in their opinion may be best qualified for the office.
The process of election affords a moral certainty, that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications. Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single State; but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit, to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole Union, or of so considerable a portion of it as would be necessary to make him a successful candidate for the distinguished office of President of the United States. It will not be too strong to say, that there will be a constant probability of seeing the station filled by characters pre-eminent for ability and virtue. And this will be thought no inconsiderable recommendation of the Constitution, by those who are able to estimate the share which the executive in every government must necessarily have in its good or ill administration. Though we cannot acquiesce in the political heresy of the poet who says: "For forms of government let fools contest That which is best administered is best,'' yet we may safely pronounce, that the true test of a good government is its aptitude and tendency to produce a good administration.
The Vice-President is to be chosen in the same manner with the President; with this difference, that the Senate is to do, in respect to the former, what is to be done by the House of Representatives, in respect to the latter.
The appointment of an extraordinary person, as Vice-President, has been objected to as superfluous, if not mischievous. It has been alleged, that it would have been preferable to have authorized the Senate to elect out of their own body an officer answering that description. But two considerations seem to justify the ideas of the convention in this respect. One is, that to secure at all times the possibility of a definite resolution of the body, it is necessary that the President should have only a casting vote. And to take the senator of any State from his seat as senator, to place him in that of President of the Senate, would be to exchange, in regard to the State from which he came, a constant for a contingent vote. The other consideration is, that as the Vice-President may occasionally become a substitute for the President, in the supreme executive magistracy, all the reasons which recommend the mode of election prescribed for the one, apply with great if not with equal force to the manner of appointing the other. It is remarkable that in this, as in most other instances, the objection which is made would lie against the constitution of this State. We have a Lieutenant-Governor, chosen by the people at large, who presides in the Senate, and is the constitutional substitute for the Governor, in casualties similar to those which would authorize the Vice-President to exercise the authorities and discharge the duties of the President.
PUBLIUS.
1 Vide FEDERAL FARMER
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed68.asp
The leading member of the legal team is Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, holder of an endowed chair and a progressive activist. Lessig, by the way, was briefly an announced candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination last year, but ended his campaign before the Iowa caucuses. Here’s Lessig’s piece, describing some elements of the argument he wants to make and offering his assistance to any electors who want to exercise their freedom to vote their conscience.The Electors Trust
The Electors Trust
As Politico reported last night, we’ve launched The Electors Trust, a project of EqualCitizens.US.
The objective of the Electors Trust is to give electors free and confidential legal services, to defend their constitutional right “to exercise,” as Justice Jackson put it in Ray v. Blair (1952), “an independent and nonpartisan judgment as to the [person] best qualified for the Nation’s highest offices.” Many states have laws that purport to limit federal electors. As Ray v. Blair makes clear, any such state power is extraordinarily limited.
Mark Lemley, a partner at Durie Tangri and a professor at Stanford (and an old friend) has volunteered to head the legal project. Electors will be represented by Durie Tangri, and no one, outside of the firm, will have any knowledge about who those electors are. With their permission, the electors can allow others to know that they are considering a vote of conscience. But that information will not include either their identity or their state. Our primary objective is to provide a safe and confidential legal context in which electors can seek advice and support, and depending on the facts, an opportunity to litigate to defend their freedom.
This project joins an active field of others doing similar work. Our aim is to complement, not replace, that work. Our hope is also to raise funds that can be used to help support their work, and other work being considered. Hamilton Electors have been working to recruit electors to support a “reasonable Republican” as an alternative to Donald Trump. The Hamilton Defenders have been pulling together an extraordinary range of pro bono legal and organizational talent to defend the freedom of electors in the states. MakeDemocracyMatter.org gives citizens a way to connect with electors. We add to that work the ability to guarantee elector anonymity, and we hope, substantial financial backing to defend their freedom.
We don’t have a particular agenda for electors—beyond giving them the legal assurance they might need to be able to act according to their conscience. I have described my own view of the ethics of the decision they have to make. But this project does not proselytize. Having lived the anti-corruption fight for more than a decade, and having grown up in Trump-country, I have respect for, and at least some understanding of, the people I disagree with. Nothing in our work aims to denigrate or to sow any hatred of them or anyone.
But so long as our Constitution vests in these citizens this extraordinary power, we believe they should be supported as they seek in good faith to exercise it. The Electors Trust will support them in that.
We have no idea if there are 3 or 30 who will accept this offer. The chance that there is one is reason enough to try. I am grateful to everyone who has worked so hard to pull this effort together so quickly. If you’re an elector, you can reach our attorneys at ElectorsTrust@durietangri.com.
https://medium.com/@lessig/the-electors ... .b5zctgp60
Laurence Tribe, also a Harvard law professor and perhaps the most prominent of contemporary liberal legal lions, tweeted on Monday that he will provide pro bono (free of charge) legal representation to any elector who follows Suprun’s lead in asserting the right to exercise their own judgment in casting their electoral vote. A California law firm is offering its free assistance to the Hamiltonians, those wishing to make the argument, and a couple of Democratic electors from Colorado have filed suit making the argument, which is weird because Clinton won Colorado.Law Firm Offering Free Legal Advice To Electors Who Don’t Want To Vote For Trump
There are 538 people with the fate of the election in their hands, and they can now seek counsel from high-powered lawyers.
12/06/2016 05:42 pm ET
Ryan Grim
Washington bureau chief for The Huffington Post
CHIP SOMODEVILLA VIA GETTY IMAGES
Harvard Law School professor and former 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Lawrence Lessig (right) discusses campaign finance reform with Norman Ornstein. Lessig is heading a new project to give free legal counsel to faithless electors.
WASHINGTON ― A new organization is offering pro bono legal assistance to any Electoral College member who decides to break with the will of the people in his or her state, in hopes of derailing President-elect Donald Trump before he is sworn in.
The vote to determine who will become president is set to take place on Dec. 19. Christopher Suprun, a paramedic who lives in Texas and is one of the 538 members of the Electoral College, announced this week that he will not cast his vote for the president-elect.
Larry Lessig, a Harvard Law School professor heading the project, told The Huffington Post that the law firm Durie Tangri handles intake and may wind up representing Suprun. Durie Tangri generally plans to offer confidential advice to anonymous electors, but Lessing said Suprun’s case was different.
“He came to us just as he published his piece in the Times,” he said. “Our assumption is we’re talking to people who want to be anonymous, so he’s an exception. The whole community is going to step in and do what they can to help him.”
Lessig, who has been a prolific online fundraiser in the past, said his group is raising funds in addition to counting on some substantial early commitments.
“The motivation was the recognition that there were going to be a lot of electors who were considering what we believe is their constitutional right, to vote their conscience. Whether it makes sense to do it depends on who else is doing it,” Lessig said, adding that Durie Tangri would be willing to tell electors how many other electors had committed to voting against Trump.
The law firm also plans to partner with groups doing work on the ground.
Trump needs 270 electors to support him when they gather in state capitals around the country later this month. He won enough states to give him the support of 306, so anti-Trump forces need to persuade 36 more electors. That effort is underway, with Ohio Gov. John Kasich being named as a potential alternative. Trump annihilated Kasich in the Republican primary.
The Electoral College itself is weighted toward conservative, rural areas of the country. Each state is granted a number of electors that equals how many senators they have plus how many House representatives they have. But senators are not apportioned by population ― rather, each state gets two.
That means California, which has a population nearly 70 times larger than that of Wyoming, has only 18.3 times as many electors ― 55 to 3. Trump’s Electoral College win, though, was sizable enough that it would survive readjusting for population, although it would be much narrower. It would not survive, however, if the election were decided by the popular vote, which Clinton currently leads by more than 2.5 million.
(A coalition of public interest groups is calling for a fix to the Electoral College with a massive petition, which you can find here.)
The American system of government was established to be reflective of the will of population, but with a series of buffers to guard against mob rule. A myriad of layers were put between the people and the outcome of elections. Until a constitutional amendment, senators were elected not by a statewide vote, but by state legislatures. And up until fairly recently, parties chose presidential nominees at a convention without primaries or caucuses playing a significant role. The Iowa caucus, which feels like something created by the Founding Fathers, didn’t start until 1972.
Over the years, the system has extended the franchise from white, male property owners to all citizens older than 18 (except, importantly, convicted felons in many states).
Some states bind electors to vote for the candidate their state chose, but others only require a pledge. Lessig said the state laws that set up a legal requirement are clearly unconstitutional, citing the controlling 1952 Supreme Court case Ray v. Blair.
“No one faithful to our history can deny that the plan originally contemplated, what is implicit in its text, that electors would be free agents, to exercise an independent and nonpartisan judgment as to the men best qualified for the Nation’s highest offices,” Justice Robert Jackson wrote in that case.
That doesn’t mean it can be a flimsy reason, Lessig said. “If you’re an elector, you have to give a moral justification for deviating from a pledge you made. There has to be an overwhelmingly strong reason,” he said.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/law ... ac58070394“Faithless electors” file lawsuit against Colorado to open door for anti-Trump movement
Andrew Kenney
Posted on December 6, 20163:04 pm Categories Denver news
Two Democratic electors have filed a lawsuit as part of a long-shot strategy to defeat Donald Trump’s presidency at the electoral college.
It’s a complicated plan, but here goes: U.S. presidents are not directly elected by the voters, but instead by the “electors” that each state sends to the electoral college.
These electors are expected to vote as their state’s voters did, but the electors don’t really have to, at least according to federal law. In fact, four of the Democratic electors from Colorado are trying to start a revolution. They say they’ll support a Republican alternative, instead of Hillary Clinton, and they want Trump’s would-be electors to join them in a compromise. If they can deny Trump the required 270 electoral votes necessary to win, the presidential contest would go the the U.S. House of Representatives.
One catch: Colorado and several other states make it illegal to disobey the voters and become a “faithless” elector. In fact, electors have to sign an affidavit saying they’ll support the winner of the state’s popular vote, and it’s a misdemeanor under Colorado law for a public officer — which the electors will be — to disregard the election code.
FOR YOU: With Trump catching up in the polls, Colorado looks like a swing state again
The Secretary of State has promised to “remove” any elector who fails to do so, according to the lawsuit. They also may face a misdemeanor under Colorado law, according to Lynn Bartels, spokeswoman for the secretary of state.
Polly Baca, a former state senator, and Robert Nemanich, a math teacher, are suing the state of Colorado to get rid of that restriction.
The United States’ 538 electors will make their votes on Dec. 19, less than two weeks from today. The Colorado electors meet in the governor’s office of the state capitol, and they get $5 for their troubles.
The lawsuit, which names Gov. John Hickenlooper, Attorney General Cynthia Coffman and Secretary of State Wayne Williams, was filed in federal district court Tuesday afternoon, Dec. 6. The central thrust is that the state law violates the U.S. Constitution and the original conception of how the electoral college would work. The plaintiffs, represented by attorney Jason Wesoky, argue that it’s tantamount to “forced speech.”
Their filing states that electors “are entitled to exercise their judgment and free will to vote for whomever they believe to be the most qualified and fit for the offices of President and Vice President, whether those candidates are Democrats, Republicans, or from a third party.”
The lawsuit seeks a temporary restraining order that would freeze enforcement of the law in Colorado. A victory for the rogue electors would allow Colorado’s nine voters to switch from Democratic to a third party or another Republican. If the law is declared unconstitutional, it perhaps could allow for other states’ laws to be neutralized.
Thirty states have laws binding electors to candidates, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
It’s not really clear how many Republicans would go along with this. One Republican elector in Texas announced he would not vote for Trump, and another resigned to allow a faithful elector to take his place.
Trump currently has 306 electoral votes to Clinton’s 232, according to CNN. Whomever gets 270 wins, which means that 37 electors would have to defect to derail Trump.
The last time an elector crossed party lines was in 1972, when an elector who was supposed to go for Republican Richard Nixon instead supported Libertarian John Hospers, according to NCSL.
Secretary of State Wayne Williams does not think this is cute.
Here is his statement in its entirety:
Since 1959, Colorado law has required electors to vote for their pledged candidates. Coloradans cast their votes based on these pledges. Unfortunately two faithless electors — prior to even taking office — have arrogantly thumbed their noses at Colorado’s voters and have announced their intent to violate Colorado law.
Instead of honoring the will of the Coloradans who voted for them, these two faithless electors seek to conspire with electors from other states to elect a president who did not receive a single vote in November. Indeed, the very Federalist 68 they cite cautions us that “every practical obstacle should be opposed to cabal, intrigue, and corruption.” Yet that is exactly what the electors here have succumbed to: cabal, intrigue and corruption. The court should reject this illegal conspiracy.
Make no mistake, this is not some noble effort to fight some unjust or unconstitutional law; rather, this is an arrogant attempt by two faithless electors to elevate their personal desires over the entire will of the people of Colorado. And in so doing, they seek to violate Colorado law and their own pledges. The very notion of two Colorado electors ignoring Colorado’s popular vote in an effort to sell their vote to electors in other states is odious to everything we hold dear about the right to vote. It is this type of evil that President Franklin Roosevelt warned us about when he cautioned that voters — not elected officials such as these faithless electors — are “the ultimate rulers of our democracy.”
Simply stated, there is no honor in their actions, and my office will vigorously defend the will of the people of Colorado over two faithless individuals who refuse to uphold their pledge to give voice to Colorado’s electorate at the national level.
Jason Wesoky, an attorney for the electors, said Trump is exactly the type of candidate the founders had in mind when they created the electoral college.
“The founders themselves, as outlined in Hamilton 68, clearly disagree with the secretary of state,” he said. “The intent of the framers was to have a small group of electors have an opportunity to deliberate and investigate who would be the most fit and qualified person, and they should be removed from the heat and ferment of the people so they would rise about the influence of a demagogue.
“If you look up the dictionary definition of a demagogue, you would be challenged to find someone who fits it more to a tee than Donald Trump,” he added.
That dictionary definition, by the way, is, “a leader who makes use of popular prejudices and false claims and promises in order to gain power.”
http://www.denverite.com/colorado-presi ... ent-24424/
I believe you’ll be seeing more news about this every day for a while and, whichever outcome you might be hoping for, you can decide for yourself whether it has any chance.
Laurence Tribe
I am a long-time critic of the Electoral College. Here is my piece summarizing 10 reason why it’s a bad system, of which number one is that it creates the possibility that the loser of the popular vote will win the election, as happened this year for the fourth time in U.S. history. In the current instance, the margin of Hillary Clinton’s popular vote victory, currently 2.65 million votes, is by far the largest margin ever in these popular-vote-winner-electoral-vote-loser scenarios. Looking at the demographic trends, there is reason to believe that these loser-winner scenarios will become more common in the future.10 reasons why the Electoral College is a problem
By Eric Black | 10/16/12
MinnPost illustration by Jaime Anderson
One in a series of articles. You can read the whole series here.
Sticking with the Electoral College system, but not yet plunging into the surprising too-little-discussed history of why the Framers put it in the Constitution, I want first to dash off a quick list of ten problems and potential problems with the Electoral College system:
Problem No. 1
It creates the possibility for the loser of the popular vote to win the electoral vote. This is more than a theoretical possibility. It has happened at least four times out of the 56 presidential elections, or more than 7 percent of the time, which is not such a small percentage, and it created a hideous mess every time. The most recent occurrence was 2000.
Problem No. 2
It distorts the presidential campaign, as alluded to yesterday, by incentivizing the parties to write off the more than 40 states (plus the District of Columbia) that they know they either can’t win or can’t lose. Among the states that, in recent history, don’t get campaign visits (other than for fundraising) or TV ads (which is most of what all that fundraising pays for and the main method by which the campaign and their “independent,” “uncoordinated” allies seek to persuade the persuadable voters in the persuadable states) are the three most populous states (California, Texas and New York, which among them make up more than 25 percent of the U.S. population), the geographically biggest state (Alaska) and the best state (Minnesota, which, despite missing out on the ads and the campaign visits, usually leads the nation in voter turnout anyway, so there).
Problem No. 3
The Electoral College system further distorts the presidential campaign by causing the candidates to grant extra weight to the parochial needs of the swing states. If you have to carry Florida to win, it elevates the already ever-present need candidates feel to pander to elderly voters, Cuban-Americans, orange-growers and any other group that can deliver a bloc of Floridians. The same thing with Iowa and ethanol subsidies and other agriculture-friendly policies, except even more so because Iowa is not only a swing state over recent cycles but has become since 1976 the key first state in the presidential nominating process. . (But that last bit about the nominating process, of course, is not rooted in the Constitution.)
Since the selection of Paul Ryan as Mitt Romney’s running-mate, how many stories have you read that said Ryan’s controversial plan to change Medicare could be especially costly to the ticket because so many of the swing states have above-average portions of senior voters? Pandering to large groups of voters is not a pretty aspect of democracy, but pandering to groups just because they happen to be concentrated in “swing states” is even uglier. Who can explain how this can be a good thing?
Problem No. 4
For the same reason, it distorts governance. A first-term president who expects to have a tough reelection fight (as they all at least expect to) but who wanted to establish diplomatic and trade relations with Cuba (broken in 1960) would have to consider the possibility that such a policy might cost him Florida and therefore a second term. Perhaps this helps explain why long after Washington normalized relations with the Soviet Union, China and other governments that formerly or presently call themselves Communists, Cuba remains on the do-not-call list.
Problem No. 5
The Electoral College system further distorts the one-person, one-vote principle of democracy because electoral votes are not distributed according to population. Every state gets one electoral vote for each member of its delegation to the House of Representatives (this by itself would be a rough measure of its population) and each state also gets two “bonus” electors representing its two senators.
This causes significant overrepresentation of small states in the “College.” In the most extreme case, using 2010 Census figures and the new distribution of House seats based on that census, an individual citizen in Wyoming has more than triple the weight in electoral votes as an individual in California. Yes, you read that right. In fact, it’s closer to quadruple than triple. Can this be a good thing?
If we could do nothing more than allocate the electoral votes on a population basis, it would make the system substantially more democratic. But we can’t do that, at least not without amending the Constitution, because the apportionment formula is embedded in the Constitution as one more inducements that the Framers felt was necessary to attract support of small states for ratification.
Problem No. 6
The Electoral College creates the possibility of a 269-269 tie vote, and in almost every recent election there has been a relatively credible scenario for such an outcome. (Here’s a recent CNN piece going over the ways that we could end up there this year and a Nate Silver article on the same subject.) The rules of the Electoral College system for dealing with a tie are bizarre and scary and create a fairly plausible scenario by which no one would be elected president in time for Inauguration Day.
Imperfect Union: The Constitutional roots of the mess we're inThe only tie in Electoral College history was in 1800, a totally bizarre situation, in the days before formal tickets, and back in the days when several states still did not even hold a popular vote in the presidential selection process. (The Constitution did not and still does not require that any popular vote be conducted for president.) In that 1800 election, Thomas Jefferson tied with his own running mate Aaron Burr. Better not try to cram that whole saga in here right now. It led to the 12th amendment (ratified 1804), which changed the Framers’ original language so that each elector could indicate which candidate they supported for president and which for vice president, thereby eliminating the possibility that any presidential candidate will end up in a tie with his own running mate. But that didn’t solve the serious problems inherent in the tie scenario.
Problem No. 7
Although our system, as evolved, makes it very hard for third parties to win elections and almost impossible for a third party to win the presidency, the Electoral College system makes it quite possible for a small third-party showing in a single state or two to change the outcome of the whole national election.
This happened in 2000, when Ralph Nader, running as the Green Party nominee, finished third in the popular vote with just 2.74 percent, and received just 1.6 percent in Florida, but those votes (plus a number of other weird factors about which some people are still arguing) probably shifted the state from Democratic nominee Al Gore to Republican George W. Bush. And, because of winner-take-all, that one state also tipped the outcome of the national election.
In most recent cycles, there has been at least one halfway credible scenario under which a small third party can tip a key state and perhaps the whole election. Here’s a Fox News piece about the possibility that Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson could play that role in 2012. Johnson, by the way, will be on the ballot in 48 states. (According to this New York Times piece, Republican state officials in Michigan "blocked Mr. Johnson from the ballot after he filed proper paperwork three minutes after his filing deadline, and Romney campaign aides participated in unsuccessful efforts to keep him off the ballot in other states as well.)
There’s an even weirder scenario in which former Congressman Virgil Goode, the nominee of the tiny, right-wing Constitution Party, costs Mitt Romney the presidency by drawing votes in Virginia (which happens to be the state Goode represented in Congress, so he has a name there). Although the Constitution Party doesn’t even show up in national polls, when Goode’s name is included in Virginia polls this year, he has scored as much as 9 percent. I doubt he’ll get anywhere near 9, but Virginia is considered very close and has been designated a key swing state worth 13 winner-take-all electoral votes. Maybe that’s why a couple of lefty parties helped Goode get the signatures he needed to get on the ballot in Virginia.
Of course, even in a pure popular vote system (unless you have ranked choice voting) minor parties have the potential to change the outcome. But the Electoral College, paired with the winner-take-all aspect, greatly increases the leverage. I’m not predicting that any of these scenarios will come true in 2012, but the Electoral College system makes such shenanigans possible, and they happen more often that you might realize. (And by the way, if the name Virgil Goode rang a bell but you can’t place it, Goode was the congressman who made the biggest fool of himself objecting to both the election of Minnesota U.S. Rep Keith Ellison – first Muslim ever in Congress -- and to Ellison’s decision to take his oath of office on a Qu’ran. The Qu’ran, by the way, had belonged to Thomas Jefferson.)
Problem No. 8
The Electoral College system prevented Dick Cheney from becoming vice president. Well, no, it actually didn’t, but it would have if we had taken the letter and the intention behind the words in the Constitution seriously.
Donkey holding Ohio
MinnPost illustration by Jaime Anderson
The Constitution says that an elector cannot vote for a presidential and vice presidential candidate both of whom come from the same state as him/herself (the elector, that is). This rule actually made sense when the Framers put it in there but stopped making sense almost immediately. (To explain this, we’ll eventually have to get to the story of how the Framers thought this contraption was going to work.) But it’s still in there. George W. Bush was a Texan. In 2000, when he became Bush’s running mate, Cheney had been living and voting and paying taxes for five years in Texas where he eked out a living as CEO of Halliburton.
If you had to say which state he “inhabited,” at that point in his life, you could not say anything other than “Texas.” This became awkward when the Bush-Cheney ticket carried Texas. The Constitution (in both the original and as changed by Amendment XII) technically prohibit the Texas electors from voting for both Bush and Cheney. And the electoral vote was so close that without the Texas votes, Cheney would not have had a majority.
It’s true that shortly before the election, Cheney obtained a Wyoming driver’s license and put his Dallas home on the market (he had a vacation home in Wyoming, which is the state he used to represent in Congress). And the courts decided that was good enough to make him a non-Texan for electoral vote purposes. It would have been silly to disqualify Cheney over this, but the issue is at least one more bizarre legacy of the Framers’ contraption and the fact that we are still (wink, wink, nod, nod) bound by the rules ratified in 1789 and 1804.
Problem No. 9
In case of a tie, or if no candidate receives a majority of all electoral votes cast for president, the choice of president is thrown in the House of Representatives but the election is conducted on a one-state one-vote basis. (Yes, Wyoming – population 563,000 in the 2010 census -- would have equal say in the selection of the president with California – 37 million.) And to win, a candidate must receive the support of an absolute majority of states.
But states that have an even number of House members may deadlock. (Minnesota, with its current delegation of four Democrats and four Republicans, would be a good candidate for this fate.) A deadlocked state cannot vote at all for a presidential candidate. But, to produce a winner, one candidate would still have to win 26 states, even though several states would presumably be deadlocked.
If no presidential candidate can get to 26, there is no constitutional mechanism for producing a winner. The vice president (whose selection in this scenario would be thrown into the Senate) could serve indefinitely as acting president. This has never happened, although it has come close. If we wait long enough, it will happen someday.
Problem No. 10
And here’s a really crazy part, which sort of underscores the craziness of our practice of abiding by the Framers’ language. When the Framers put that crazy structure, where the presidential election would be thrown from the Electoral College into the House for a one-state one-vote choice of the next president, they believed this would actually happen on a regular basis. Which is why you need to come back here tomorrow for the installment on what the Framers thought they were doing when they came up with the Electoral College system (which, as I’ve already mentioned, had pretty much nothing to do with how it has turned out).
https://www.minnpost.com/eric-black-ink ... ge-problem
But the Electoral College system is in the Constitution and it would be unimaginably hard to get it out, given the high bar for amendments, the current partisan and ideological polarization, and the likelihood that the Electoral College system will continue to favor Republican nominees. You probably won’t get a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress, followed by ratification by the legislatures of three-fourths of the states, to change the Constitution in a way that Republicans would believe harms their chances of winning future presidential election.
So my purpose here is to try to put the Lessig/Suprun/Tribe-and-others' challenge into historical/constitutional perspective and then watch with interest to see how far it goes.
Divining the framers' intentions
The idea that the key to interpreting the Constitution is to divine what the framers intended gets more and more ludicrous with the passage of time. Many of the framers were great men (all men, of course, and all white), but many of their ideas cannot be reconciled with modern reality. Their vision of the role of the presidential elector is an excellent example.
In fact, when the framers invented the role of presidential elector, they clearly did intend for the electors to be able to vote based on their own judgment of who would be the best president. That function of the role of presidential elector has obviously withered over time. But the constitutional language has not changed materially.
If you believe — as we are all taught to believe no matter how absurd it becomes as the centuries since the founding go by — that the correct way to interpret constitutional language is to investigate what the language was intended to mean at the time it was written and ratified, then Suprun and Lessig have a pretty strong argument. In historical terms. It’s hard to dispute that the men who created the job of presidential elector meant for those electors to exercise their own judgment, which is what Suprun proposes to do. Here’s the historical argument for that proposition:
The framers created an office of president, for various reasons. It was an office with no serious precedent at the time, other than some similarity to kings. But after recently overthrowing the rule of a king and establishing a democracy (really, 13 separate loosely confederated democracies before 1789), the idea of concentrating so much power in a single individual seemed fraught with peril and the method of choosing presidents was highly problematic.
The framers favored some democracy, but were leery of too much of it. In their system, there would be four power centers in the new national government: the House, the Senate, the president and the Supreme Court. Only one of those (the House) would be subject to direct election (and even then, largely limited to white, male property owners). All of the other big federal jobs would be filled by means of indirect democracy. In the case of the presidency, they came up with the Electoral College (which, by the way, is never called a “college” in the Constitution. And it’s not a college. But the weird usage has become common over the years.)
There were no national political parties in 1787-89, no national media, no tradition of candidates traipsing around the then-much-smaller country, sharing their vision and begging for votes. Gentlemen like George Washington would have deemed it highly improper to say or do anything, at least publicly, to advance their own election. (Presidential candidates didn’t start actively campaigning for the job until roughly the William Jennings Bryan candidacy of 1896.)
Even if they had considered holding a national election in the 1780s, the residents of the states knew little about potential presidents from other states, they had little means of learning about them, and they weren’t organized into national political parties that would guide their choice. They could have arranged for the president to be chosen by the Congress, but the framers were interested in checks and balances across branches.
After Washington, who?
Everyone knew that the first president, no matter what method of appointment or election was used, would be Gen. George Washington, the almost universally admired hero of the revolution and the presiding officer over the Constitutional Convention itself. But, in this era before national parties and national media, would there ever again be men so well known and trusted in all 13 (going on 50) states? The framers had no way of knowing.
So they came up with a crazy-sounding plan. In each state, the Legislature would appoint a group of “electors,” using whatever method they liked. There was certainly no requirement that the matter be put to a vote of the population.
The only job of the electors was to elect a president. They would meet, separately in each state, and vote for two men (one of whom must be from a state different from their own) who they thought would make a good president.
If anyone was named on a majority of ballots, he would become president, and the runner-up would become vice president. If, after the inevitable end of the George Washington era, no one was named on a majority of ballots, the names of the top five finishers would be forwarded to the House of Representatives, which would choose from among them on – this is fairly unbelievable to modern ears – a one-state, one-vote basis. So the smallest state had as much say as the biggest. That, by the way, is still in the Constitution. If the election is thrown into the House, the single House member from Wyoming, Cynthia Lummis (until Jan. 3, when she will be replaced by Liz Cheney — yes, that Liz Cheney — would have a voice equal to the combined 53 House members from California.)
Still, if the “Hamilton Electors” succeed in pulling Trump below 270 electoral votes, the choice of a president will be thrown into the House.
Back in the 1780s, the state societies were so dominant, compared to the national whole, that the framers felt they had to force the electors to give at least one of their two votes to someone from another state. Later, when the 12th Amendment was adopted to clarify that electors should vote for one person for president and a second person for vice president, the system still forbade any elector to vote for two men from their own state.
In fact, in the first two presidential elections, while every elector included Washington in his list of two, the second vote was scattered among 11 men, which underscores that this was occurring in a time when there were no party tickets.
On the second round, in 1792, the electors (132 of them) all voted for a second Washington term, but their second votes were scattered among four recipients. The party system was starting to emerge, which led to the 12th Amendment system of partisan ticket voting.
That was the last major constitutional change in the system, but the amendment did nothing to specify that electors were required to vote for their party’s ticket nor that they had to vote for the ticket that carried the popular vote in their state.
The Constitution still says nothing that requires electors to do anything other than vote for a candidate for president and another for vice president, nor is there any federal law that binds electors to the outcome of the popular vote in their home states. If it was that automatic, why would you even need electors?
(In fact, if you can stand one last bit of ancient U.S. political history which I find amazing whenever I remember it, many states didn’t hold popular votes at all for president in the early years, nor were they, nor are they, constitutionally required to do so now. The states gradually got on the let-the-voters-vote bandwagon, but New York and Georgia, both them among the original 13 states, didn’t hold a popular vote for president until 1828. Even more amazing, South Carolina, also an original state, never held a presidential popular vote until 1868, the 21st presidential election. It’s unimaginable that any state now would do away with the presidential popular vote, but it would be constitutional.)
Over the years, the modern system took hold. Specifically the electors were appointed by their parties and were expected (or, in many cases, bound by state law) to vote for their party’s ticket if their party carried the plurality of votes in their state.
Constitution never amended on this point
Still, the Constitution was not amended to make this a requirement, which sets things up for Suprun, Lessig, Tribe and the Hamiltonians to make their argument that the Constitution still means what it meant when it was written and created the position of presidential “elector.”
If that’s the case, we’ll have to see how many electors are interested in following Suprun’s example.
If that number is big enough to pull Donald Trump below the magic 270 electoral vote number, and assuming that these Republican electors have not all switched their votes to Hillary Clinton, then the election would be thrown into the House of Representatives. That hasn’t happened since 1824 (and the House in that case, chose John Quincy Adams, the runner-up in both the popular and electoral vote).
I’ve run on too long and should stop. These scenarios seem so unlikely. But there’s one last detail you need to know to think through this crazy possibility of the faithless electors pulling Trump below 270 electoral votes.
If that happens the choice of the president is thrown into the House, and members of the House would have to vote for one of the top three finishers in the electoral vote. Three. It’s in the Constitution and, of course, unless we get a 269-269 tie, at least three candidates must get at least one vote, and the House members would have to choose from one of the three. How do we get from two to three?
First of all, the electors are not constitutionally limited to voting for either nominee nor for anyone who ran for president. If you take the Hamiltonian argument seriously, they can vote for any natural-born citizen who they think would be a good president.
Of course, if there were enough faithless electors to deny Trump 270 electoral votes, and all of them switched to Clinton, she would be elected (perhaps after the blood in the streets part and assuming the Constitution means what it says).
But the reporting on the Lessig movement suggests that that’s not the way things are heading.
Any native-born citizen over 35
The electors are not constitutionally required to vote for either major party nominee. They can vote for any native-born citizen age 35 or older. If enough “faithless electors” unite behind someone else to prevent any candidate from reaching 270 — even if that third candidate got only a few electoral votes – then all three names would be forwarded to the House as possible presidents.
Who might such a third candidate be? The public speculation has mentioned Gov. John Kasich of Ohio, a moderate who might even attract support from some Democrats, if it were clear that Hillary Clinton couldn’t be elected.
If it were to get to the point where three names are forwarded from the Electoral College to the U.S. House, it would act on a one-state, one-vote basis.
When someone gets the vote of 26 House delegations, that’s your new president. If they keep trying, but can’t reach a conclusion by inauguration Day, the vice president is sworn in as acting president. (Under this scenario, the choice of the vice president was thrown into the Senate and is less likely to reach deadlock, since only the top two finishers for veep are forwarded to the Senate.)
Most states have Republican majorities in their House delegations. But House members from both parties get to vote. If things reached this unlikely scenario, would the Republicans members of the House stick together and decide to elect Trump — who is, after all, their party’s nominee and who carried almost all states with majority Republican House delegations? They would have the option of doing that, and it seems quite likely to me that, even if they could, they wouldn’t set aside their party’s nominating process.
But it’s possible to imagine deals being made between Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans to throw the state’s support to the third-place electoral vote finisher.
Or might some of them think about a candidate who cuts such a moderate figure that he or she could attract support from both parties, maybe even some Democrats, if they have given up on Clinton’s chances? I said above that John Kasich’s name has been mentioned. In his Times op-ed piece announcing his intention to go “faithless,” which I linked to at the top of this filibuster, Texas Elector Suprun wrote:
I believe electors should unify behind a Republican alternative, an honorable and qualified man or woman such as Gov. John Kasich of Ohio. I pray my fellow electors will do their job and join with me in discovering who that person should be.
Politico, which has been following the faithless elector story closely, reported on Monday that Kasich is under discussion as a recipient of support from those involved in this effort. On Tuesday it reported that Kasich asked electors to not vote for him.
By the way, the electors are scheduled to meet in their respective states and cast their ballots on Dec. 19.
https://www.minnpost.com/eric-black-ink ... vote-trump
by seemslikeadream » Thu Dec 08, 2016 8:27 pm
Florida voters sue for recount: A call to address election issues? (+video)
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2 ... sues-video
Constitutional Lawyer: It's an "Outrage" That Judge Halted Michigan Presidential Election Recount
https://www.democracynow.org/2016/12/8/ ... trage_that
7 Election Integrity and Cyber Security Experts Say Stopping Michigan Recount Is a Corrupt Exercise of Power
“Americans will never know the truth about what happened.”
http://www.alternet.org/7-election-inte ... cise-power
by seemslikeadream » Fri Dec 09, 2016 1:07 pm
ELECTION 2016
Voting Rights Activists Pursue Federal Lawsuit in Wisc. After Discovering Way to Hack Into Ballot Scanners
The state said machines weren't accessible online, but they have cellular modem connectivity.
By Chris Sautter, Jake Schlacter / Medium December 8, 2016
We’re one week into the historic Wisconsin recount, prompted in no small part by widespread concerns about the reliability of electronic voting machines and their susceptibility to tampering, fraud, and computer hacking. The difference in Wisconsin is currently about 22,000 votes, or 0.75%. Patriotic, democracy-loving Americans share a common value of wanting to see that every vote is counted fairly, accurately, and honestly, especially in such a close and crucial election as this one.
Let’s get to know these machines better. The optical scanning computers used in Wisconsin and other states, especially the infamous ES&S DS-200, too often fail to count votes where voter intent could be discerned by hand. These are officially called “undervotes” or “overvotes,” but in many instances could be called “not counted votes.” A lightly marked ballot filled out by an elderly or handicapped person, a checkmark instead of a filled-in oval, or even a ballot cast using the wrong pen color can be missed or “no votes” in a machine count but real, legal votes in a hand count. In Florida, a shocking 1.67% of the people wearing an “I Voted” sticker didn’t actually. In Michigan, where the margin is only 11,000 votes, there are 75,000 not counted votes. Hand counts will identify and include legal votes missed by the machine; anyone who says otherwise is simply wrong.
Back to Wisconsin. The disparity between machine counting and hand counting is why the Stein and Clinton campaigns petitioned last week for a judicial order that would require all counties to recount paper ballots by hand. Last Tuesday, the judge affirmed that truth while denying the order. She urged each county to count by hand but failed to require it. Forty-seven of Wisconsin’s 72 counties chose the faster and more reliable method of hand counting the ballots. Contrary to popular belief, recounting a single race is faster by hand, when ballots can be easily sorted, stacked, and counted, than it is to feed thousands of ballots through the machines one at a time. But that means 25 counties are using the same unreliable machines for their recount as on election night.
The disparity in methods means that the machine-counted votes in those 25 counties are counted less than the hand-counted votes in the other 47. This violates the Equal Protection Clause and was the central holding in Bush v. Gore, that similar ballots must be counted in the same way. Since hand counts are being used in many of Wisconsin’s rural and predominantly white counties and machines are being used in many counties with large minority populations like Milwaukee and Racine, the failure to use a hand recount in all counties creates uneven results and racial disparities in how votes are counted.
That alone is reason for a federal lawsuit, and indeed, several Republican SuperPACs have sued in federal court to stop the recount on those very grounds. Not to make sure that every vote is counted fairly, mind you, but for the very partisan reason of making sure that Donald Trump stays the declared winner, never mind the voters’ intent.
The Jill Stein campaign — or failing that, We The People — must file a federal lawsuit immediately to force all Wisconsin counties to count by hand. Failure to do so could cost Americans the recount we need to ensure that every vote is counted fairly. 150,000 American voters donated to Jill Stein so she could bring about a fair recount on everyone’s behalf. If a lawsuit to get the votes counted fairly costs more money, Americans will donate more money.
Racial disparities and uneven vote counting methods aren’t the only problems that a federal lawsuit is needed to fix. Let’s recap some of what else observers have seen so far:
• In St. Croix County, recount observers discovered that tamper-protection seals on five voting machines used in the recount were broken. Officials later confirmed they were broken before Election Day as well. The same officials declined to conduct a hand count of all ballots and instead recounted ballots using those five machines.
• In Waukesha, a county with a history of troubled elections, officials are failing to reconcile the poll list in each ward, counting votes where the voter’s signature is missing from the poll book, and allowing ballot remakes that can’t be matched to originals. In other words, Waukesha is counting ballots that shouldn’t be counted.
• In Racine County, election officials are rejecting ballots by absentee/in-person voters whose ballot envelope does not contain a witness signature. Other counties are accepting identical ballots on the grounds that such voters have been witnessed by election officials. This disparate practice is also a violation of Wisconsin law and the Equal Protection Clause.
• The DS-200s create digital ballot images when they scan each ballot — images that are public records. Since it’s the scanned ballot images rather than the paper ballot itself that these machines are counting, to destroy the image is to destroy the chain of custody. That’s exactly what officials in Brown County are doing. Officials in Fond Du Lac County are refusing to make the images available to observers to compare to the machine totals.
• And yes, despite FBI Director James Comey’s testimony to Congress on September 28th, many of Wisconsin’s (and America’s) voting machines are connected to the Internet. The ES&S DS-200, in use in 15 Wisconsin counties, comes installed with a cellular modem to transmit results via the Internet on election night. Election observers in Wisconsin have confirmed that several counties, including the large counties of Milwaukee and Waukesha, use this capability. This also requires that the central county tabulator, which receives the transmitted results, is on the Internet, too. We suspect this is not an intermittent connection but that the county server is connected for longer periods, including during pre-election testing. Each county has discretion to create its own procedures, so whether or not these 15 systems are operated with even basic security precautions is a function of the people and practices in place in 15 separate offices, with little if any outside oversight. This opens up all the nightmare scenarios for tampering and hacking in our elections that computer scientists have warned us about. Against an adversary with nation-state cyberwarfare capabilities, all bets are off.
Uncertainty about our voting system’s exposure to hacking is poisonous to democracy, especially in an upset election like this one. The most urgent issue in America right now is to be able to confirm that every vote was counted fairly, accurately, and honestly, and if not, for patriotic Americans to raise bloody hell about it.
This is why the Jill Stein and Roque De La Fuente campaigns petitioned for a recount in Wisconsin, and it’s why 150,000 Americans donated $7.2M (and counting) to make it happen. Americans care whether our votes were counted honestly! The only way to know for sure is to have a hand count of the paper ballots. If there’s a problem with the machines but we use the machines to count and recount for us, we’ll never know.
The recount in Wisconsin can’t be allowed to proceed as a farce. A federal lawsuit to force all counties to hand count their ballots should be filed at once. The Jill Stein campaign should bring this, or if they are stretched too thin by outrageous administrative fees imposed by partisan election officials, or countersuits brought by Republican SuperPACs, the burden falls to us, the American people who cast the votes and called for and paid for this recount, to see it through.
And while it is urgent to file this lawsuit immediately, let no one say that there isn’t enough time to accurately, fairly, and honestly count America’s votes. Our democracy depends on nothing less.
http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/v ... ack-ballot
by Iamwhomiam » Fri Dec 09, 2016 2:39 pm
by Morty » Mon Dec 12, 2016 6:50 pm
It's over: Green Party candidate Jill Stein concedes Michigan recount is a bust
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... z4SfN5hoAq
Recount complete: Donald Trump wins Wisconsin
Trump picks up 162 votes
Updated: 4:29 PM CST Dec 12, 2016
Republican Donald Trump's victory in Wisconsin has been reaffirmed following a presidential recount that showed him defeating Democrat Hillary Clinton by more than 22,000 votes.
Trump picked up a net 162 votes as a result of the recount that the Wisconsin Elections Commission certified Monday. Green Party candidate Jill Stein requested and paid for the recount that began Dec. 1.
But after recounting nearly 3 million ballots, little changed. The final results changed by fewer than 1,800 votes.
The recount showed Trump gained 874 votes, Clinton gained 712 votes and Stein gained 66 votes.
Stein has also tried to get statewide recounts in Michigan and Pennsylvania, but courts have stopped them. The federal deadline to certify the vote is Tuesday.
The Elections Commission said recount results were certified 24 hours earlier than expected.
Wisconsin's recount uncovered no widespread problems or hacking as Stein had suggested, without evidence, that there might be.
Two of the commissioners were split on the question of whether it was all worth it
"I thought it was an abuse of the system. We had no choice in it. That's what the law says. That doesn't mean the law is correct. I personally, as a voter, would like to see the legislature revisit it," Election Commissioner Donald Millis said.
"I'm personally very happy it was done because now, not only Wisconsin, but the world, knows out system has integrity," Elections Commission Board Chairman Mark Thomsen said.
by seemslikeadream » Mon Dec 12, 2016 6:53 pm
GREG PALAST: GOP Wrongly Purged More Than 1 Million Votes, Changing Election Outcome
Posted Nov. 23, 2016
MP3 Interview with Greg Palast, investigative journalist and author, conducted by Scott Harris
stolen
The victory of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in the 2016 U.S. election was a shock to his supporters and opponents alike due to the critical mass of statewide and national polls that had confidently predicted a win for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Exit polls, too, had forecast that Clinton would be the next president, but discrepancies between exit polling and actual vote totals led many observers to suspect that the election outcome was somehow rigged in favor of the GOP.
Civil rights advocates had long charged that the Republican party had effectively instituted voter suppression laws in 21 states after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 2013 gutted a key section of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. These new laws included restrictive voter ID regulations, reduction in the days and hours of early voting, obstacles placed on registering new voters and accessing absentee ballots – all designed critics charged, to make it more difficult for minority and young citizens to vote. While some of these laws were challenged and overturned, opponents charge that the chaotic changes in election rules led to confusion and lower voter turnout.
Greg Palast is an investigative reporter and award-winning author who uncovered the 2000 Republican voter purge in Florida that led to what many charge was a stolen election, where the U.S. Supreme Court intervened in the disputed vote count, and appointed George W. Bush as president. In his new documentary film titled, "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: A Tale of Billionaires and Ballot Bandits," Palast investigates a multi-state system known as Crosscheck, supposedly designed to check for voters who had registered more than once, and to prevent fraudulent multiple voting. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Palast, who explains why he believes that the Crosscheck system was employed to wrongly purge some 1.1 million Americans of color from the voter rolls, many in crucial GOP-controlled battleground states that could have changed the outcome of the election. [Rush transcript]
GREG PALAST: One of the biggest factors and the loss of Hillary Clinton – and remember, it's not a loss – this is one of the things we have to understand: While Clinton not only won the popular vote, she won those exit polls in everyone of the swing states. Which is odd, because our State Department considers exit polls the gold standard of a measure of whether an election is honest. So, if the official numbers, as they did in Peru, in Ukraine, and in Serbia disagree with the exit polls, the official vote is discounted as fraudulent. So what happened here? Do we have a fraudulent vote? And the answer is yes. And here's why. How could it be different? How could people walk out and have a different count? We have about five million votes, six million votes in America which are never counted. And you go, "What?" "Yes!"
People go in and something: Their names are missing from the voter rolls, so they're given something called a provisional ballot. And then the ballot is thrown out because they're not on the voter rolls, they're not on the voter rolls. We have ballots which are invalidated and thrown out. And then absentee ballots, invalidated and thrown out or what they call spoilage. There's about five million of these votes. And the chance your vote will "spoil" or be invalidated," according to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, is about 900 percent higher if you are black than if you're white. This is the core.
So when people walk out to the exit pollsters, they answer honestly who they voted for. What they can't answer is, "Did your vote count?" About six million votes didn't count. Overwhelmingly, those are minority voters who voted for Hillary Clinton. Now, how does that happen? How do these votes get invalidated?
That's where we get to this new game called Crosscheck that's in the film, "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy." Actually all these games are, but this is the center of the investigation in the film. A lot of discussion in the papers today and yesterday, about a guy called Kris Kobach, who is the probable Homeland Security chief for Trump, one of his earlier and most stalwart allies. Quite a brilliant guy, currently the secretary of state of Kansas, which has put him in charge of voter rolls there. Who cares about Kansas, except that he was able to convince the other Republican voting officials – 30 other secretaries of state – to give him their entire voter rolls so he could hunt for the "double voters." And he stuck them all in the computer and he literally took all the names of American voters in Republican states, ran them through a computer and did nothing more than – NOTHING MORE – than match their first name and their last name. And completely ignore the fact, that for example, it was a Maria Christina Hernandez and Maria Isabelle Hernandez, that was meant to be one single voter. And you'd say, "Well, they can't be one voter, they're two different names." It doesn't matter, they both stood to lose their vote.
And so the result is that they knocked off about 12 percent of the people, about 1.1 million voters showed up on Tuesday, and their names are not on the voter rolls. So they either went away discouraged, or they filled out these provisional ballots. And if you're name's not on the voter rolls, even if it's removed for the wrong reason, you can't have your ballot counted. You lose your vote.
BETWEEN THE LINES: Well, Greg, what are the prospects that there'll be some kind of investigation given the evidence you've accumulated of this Crosscheck system and the millions of votes that were expunged from the rolls that had a profound effect on the results of the 2016 election? Is there interest in Congress on investigating this? Any other third party organization stepping up to take a good look at what you've found here?
GREG PALAST: The Congressional Black Caucus has demanded an investigation by the Justice Department. (Rep.) Alcee Hastings (of Florida) actually handed my documentation copy of the film "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy" and a copy of my Rolling Stone articles to the attorney general, put it in her hands, and said, "Not you got it. You can't say you didn't get it. I want indictments." He said that before the election, by the way. And (Rep.) Keith Ellison has signed on to maybe become chairman of the Democratic Party; we could say maybe that will blast things open. ACLU is preparing litigation. The NAACP in North Carolina under Rev. William Barber has already filed a suit citing Crosscheck. Suits are being formulated in Ohio. And I hope that there will be congressional hearings.
But I gotta tell you, the problem is the U.S. press really, really hates this subject. You can't get a word of this in the New York Times or the Washington Post, the vestige of the American elite. They are literally afraid to touch the subject.
Greg Palast's new documentary film is titled, "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: A Tale of Billionaires and Ballot Bandits." For more information, visit Greg Palast's journalism website at gregpalast.com.
Related Links:
http://www.btlonline.org/2016/seg/16120 ... alast.html
by stillrobertpaulsen » Wed Dec 14, 2016 3:14 pm
seemslikeadream » Thu Dec 08, 2016 7:27 pm wrote:7 Election Integrity and Cyber Security Experts Say Stopping Michigan Recount Is a Corrupt Exercise of Power
“Americans will never know the truth about what happened.”
http://www.alternet.org/7-election-inte ... cise-power
by Belligerent Savant » Wed Dec 14, 2016 3:28 pm
by stillrobertpaulsen » Wed Dec 14, 2016 5:34 pm
Belligerent Savant » Wed Dec 14, 2016 2:28 pm wrote:“Americans will never know the truth about what happened.”
Allow me to tweak that a bit:
“Americans will never know the truth about what has been happening for some time -- not only during this year's election process -- with both parties (or rather, the 2 parties masquerading as distinct in increasingly tenuous terms) as complicit perpetrators.”
by stillrobertpaulsen » Sat Dec 24, 2016 7:55 pm
seemslikeadream » Mon Dec 12, 2016 5:53 pm wrote:GREG PALAST: GOP Wrongly Purged More Than 1 Million Votes, Changing Election Outcome
Posted Nov. 23, 2016
GREG PALAST: The Congressional Black Caucus has demanded an investigation by the Justice Department. (Rep.) Alcee Hastings (of Florida) actually handed my documentation copy of the film "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy" and a copy of my Rolling Stone articles to the attorney general, put it in her hands, and said, "Not you got it. You can't say you didn't get it. I want indictments." He said that before the election, by the way. And (Rep.) Keith Ellison has signed on to maybe become chairman of the Democratic Party; we could say maybe that will blast things open. ACLU is preparing litigation. The NAACP in North Carolina under Rev. William Barber has already filed a suit citing Crosscheck. Suits are being formulated in Ohio. And I hope that there will be congressional hearings.
But I gotta tell you, the problem is the U.S. press really, really hates this subject. You can't get a word of this in the New York Times or the Washington Post, the vestige of the American elite. They are literally afraid to touch the subject.
http://www.btlonline.org/2016/seg/16120 ... alast.html
North Carolina is no longer a democracy: report
North Carolina can no longer be considered a democracy, according to a new report from the Electoral Integrity Project (EIP), which rated the state's overall electoral integrity at the same levels of those in authoritarian states and "pseudo-democracies" such as Cuba, Indonesia and Sierra Leone.
The state scored 58 out of 100, with ratings so poor on the measures of legal framework and voter registration that it tracked closely with those in Iran and Venezuela. The state got a score of 7 out of 100 for the integrity of voting district boundaries.
According to the report, North Carolina was the worst state for unfair districting in the United States and the worst ever analyzed by the EIP in the world. These ratings mean that the state can no longer be considered a democracy.
The EIP, created in 2012, uses a system measuring 50 elements to the election process including legal framework, access to polling and how ballots are counted. Since it's creation, the EIP has measured 213 elections in 153 countries.
Some issues listed in the state of North Carolina included a large number of unopposed incumbent state legislators in the general election, poor districting that the EIP said displaces power and the GOP's veto-proof control as a majority in the state.
by stillrobertpaulsen » Wed Dec 28, 2016 3:50 pm
The Republican Sabotage of the
Vote Recounts in Michigan and Wisconsin
Sunday, December 18, 2016
By Greg Palast for Truthout
Before the Electoral College votes, they should know this.
Michigan officials declared in late November that Trump won the state's count by 10,704 votes. But hold on – a record 75,355 ballots were not counted.
The uncounted ballots came mostly from Detroit and Flint, majority-Black cities that vote Democratic.
According to the machines that read their ballots, these voters waited in line, sometimes for hours, yet did not choose a president. Really?
This week, I drove through a snowstorm to Lansing to hear the official explanation from Ruth Johnson, the Republican secretary of state. I was directed to official flack-catcher Fred Woodhams who told me, "You know, I think when you look at the unfavorability ratings that were reported for both major-party candidates, it's probably not that surprising."
Sleuthing about in Detroit, I found another explanation: bubbles.
Bubbles?
Michigan votes on paper ballots. If you don't fill the bubble completely, the machine records that you didn't vote for president.
Susan, a systems analyst who took part in the hand recount initiated by Jill Stein, told me, "I saw a lot of red ink. I saw a lot of checkmarks. We saw a lot of ballots that weren't originally counted, because those don't scan into the machine." (I can only use her first name because she's terrified of retribution from Trump followers in the white suburb where she lives.)
Other ballots were not counted because the machines thought the voter chose two presidential candidates.
How come more ballots were uncounted in Detroit and Flint than in the white 'burbs and rural counties? Are the machines themselves racist?
No, but they are old, and in some cases, busted. An astonishing 87 machines broke down in Detroit, responsible for counting tens of thousands of ballots. Many more were simply faulty and uncalibrated.
I met with Carlos Garcia, University of Michigan multimedia specialist, who, on Election Day, joined a crowd waiting over two hours for the busted machine to be fixed.
Some voters left; others filled out ballots that were chucked, uncounted, into the bottom of machine. When the machine was fixed, Carlos explained, "Any new scanned ballots were falling in on top of the old ones." It would not be possible to recount those dumped ballots.
This is not an unheard of phenomenon: I know two voters who lost their vote in another state (California) because they didn't fill in the bubble – my parents! Meet mom and dad in my film, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vi2DBJtOoSI
How did Detroit end up with the crap machines?
Detroit is bankrupt, so every expenditure must be approved by "emergency" overlords appointed by the Republican governor. The GOP operatives refused the city's pre-election pleas to fix and replace the busted machines.
"We had the rollout [of new machines] in our budget," Detroit City Clerk Janice Winfrey said. "No money was appropriated by the state."
Same in Flint. GOP state officials cut the budget for water service there, resulting in the contamination of the city's water supply with lead. The budget cuts also poisoned the presidential race.
The Human Eye Count
There is, however, an extraordinary machine that can read the ballots, whether the bubbles are filled or checked, whether in black ink or red, to determine the voters' intent: the human eye.
That's why Dr. Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, paid millions of dollars for a human eyeball count of the uncounted votes. While labeled a "recount," its real purpose is to count the 75,355 votes never counted in the first place.
Count those ballots, mostly in Detroit and Flint, and Trump's victory could vanish.
Adding to the pile of uncounted ballots are the large numbers of invalidated straight-ticket votes in Detroit. In Michigan, you can choose to make one mark that casts your vote for every Democrat (or Republican) for every office. Voters know that they can vote the Democratic ballot but write in a protest name – popular were "Bernie Sanders" and "Mickey Mouse" – but their ballot, they knew, would count for Clinton.
However, the Detroit machines simply invalidated the ballots with protest write-ins because the old Opti-Scans wrongly tallied these as "over-votes" (i.e., voting for two candidates). The human eye would catch this mistake.
But Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette stymied Stein's human eye count. The Republican pol issued an order saying that no one could look at the ballots cast in precincts where the number of votes and voters did not match – exactly the places where you'd want to look for the missing votes. He also ordered a ban on counting ballots from precincts where the seals on the machines had been broken – in other words, where there is evidence of tampering. Again, those are the machines that most need investigating. The result: The recount crews were denied access to more than half of all Detroit precincts (59 percent).
I met with Stein, who told me she was stunned by this overt sabotage of the recount. "It's shocking to think that the discounting of these votes may be making the critical difference in the outcome of the election," she said.
This story was repeated in Wisconsin, which uses the same Opti-Scan system as Michigan. There, the uncounted votes, sometimes called "spoiled" or "invalidated" ballots, were concentrated in Black-majority Milwaukee. Stein put up over $3 million of donated funds for the human eye review in Wisconsin, but GOP state officials authorized Milwaukee County to recount simply by running the ballots through the same blind machines. Not surprisingly, this instant replay produced the same questionable result.
Adding Un-Votes to the Uncounted
Stein was also disturbed by the number of voters who never got to cast ballots. "Whether it's because of the chaos [because] some polling centers are closed, and then some are moved, and there's all kinds of mix-ups," she said. "So, a lot of people are filling out provisional ballots, or they were being tossed off the voter rolls by Interstate Crosscheck."
Interstate Crosscheck is a list that was created by Donald Trump supporter and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach to hunt down and imprison voters who illegally voted or registered in two states in one election.
An eye-popping 449,092 Michiganders are on the Crosscheck suspect list. The list, which my team uncovered in an investigation for Rolling Stone, cost at least 50,000 of the state's voters their registrations. Disproportionately, the purged voters were Blacks, Latinos and that other solid Democratic demographic, Muslim Americans. (Dearborn, Michigan, has the highest concentration of Arab Americans in the US.)
The Michigan Secretary of State's spokesman Woodhams told me the purpose of the mass purge was, "to clean our voter lists and ensure that there's no vulnerability for fraud. We've been very aggressive in closing vulnerabilities and loopholes to fraud."
While Woodhams did not know of a single conviction for double-voting in Michigan, the "aggression" in purging the lists was clear. I showed him part of the Michigan purge list that he thought was confidential. The "double voters" are found by simply matching first and last names. Michael Bernard Brown is supposed to be the same voter as Michael Anthony Brown. Michael Timothy Brown is supposed to be the same voter as Michael Johnnie Brown.
Woodhams assured me the GOP used the Trump-Kobach list with care, more or less. He said, "I'm sure that there are some false positives. But we go through it thoroughly, and we're not just canceling people."
As to the racial profiling inherent in the list? Did he agree with our experts that by tagging thousands of voters named Jose Garcia and Michael Brown there would be a bias in his purge list?
The GOP spokesman replied, "I've known a lot of white Browns."
Jill Stein didn't buy it. Responding to both Michigan's and Trump's claim that voter rolls are loaded with fraudulent double voters, Stein said, "It's the opposite of what he is saying: not people who are voting fraudulently and illegally, but actually legitimate voters who have had their right to vote taken away from them by Kris Kobach and by Donald Trump."
Crosscheck likely cost tens of thousands their vote in Pennsylvania as well.
"It is a Jim Crow system, and it all needs to be fixed," Stein concluded. "It's not rocket science. This is just plain, basic democracy."
by Morty » Wed Dec 28, 2016 7:13 pm
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