Calif: we have a strange situation...vote for an anti-gun Dem?

[Jim March]

Right, that's pretty weird. But it may come down to that in the race for California Secretary of State in November.

First, let's understand that I'm writing personally, not connected to Black Box Voting.

Preliminary results show Sen. Debra Bowen-D beating Sen. Ortiz-D in the Democratic primaries:

http://vote.ss.ca.gov/Returns/sec/00.htm

Bowen is leading 2:1 over Ortiz with 25% of the vote in. Ortiz only wants this gig because she's termed out of the legislature and needs a seat.

Assuming that holds, do we want Bowen or McPherson-R (incumbent) in the November vote?

I'm here to tell you guys, as weird as this sounds, Bowen is the answer.

First, this position has nothing to do with the RKBA.

Second, even if you want to factor that in, and I agree it's important because those who trust us with arms are more trustworthy overall, McPherson is little better than Bowen on our issue. He's a Santa Cruz liberal from a newspaper family and as a legislator was no friend. The best I can say is that as head of the Senate Public Safety committee he was fair-minded about allowing debate.

McPherson isn't a bad guy. But he doesn't "get it" regarding the security of our vote.

Bowen does.

I've posted some rather shocking material on Diebold here:

http://thehighroad.org/showthread.php?t=204185

Take a look. It's just a starting point.

McPherson has ignored this kind of data. As head of the California Senate Elections Committee, Bowen hasn't.

On 3-29-06 Bowen's state legislative committee held a hearing into what was going wrong with voting machines, focusing on how obviously bad gear got certified at the Federal level (a necessary step before California and 37 other states will even look at a voting machine). All four major vendors refused to participate but two of the three federally approved test labs agreed to show up including Wyle labs, one of the two labs commonly hired by Diebold.

Bowen had done her homework and in a nearly four-hour session took them skillfully apart. Details that emerged from that hearing prove "from the horse's mouth" that the voting system approval and checkout process is in tatters. See this for a six-page condensed summary we call "Showdown In California":

http://www.bbvforums.org/cgi-bin/forums/board-auth.cgi?file=/2197/27598.html

...or if you can digest the whole thing:

http://www.blackboxvoting.org/itahearing.pdf

In the full transcript there is a mention of how the old Federal oversight agency (watching the test labs!) called NASED is shifting it's duties over to a new agency called the EAC for "Election Assistance Commission", except the labs themselves decry how the EAC hasn't come up to speed quickly.

This is supported by an interview by Rolling Stone magazine in 2004 with DeForest Soaries, a Republican minister who was quickly horrified by how sloppy the Federal oversight process had become:

http://rollingstone.com/nationalaffairs

I'll publish the text of that interview below as it will probably shift off of that URL soon.

So where does that leave us?

Privately manufactured voting machines count out vote on software that only one group of people is allowed to review due to "trade secrets", and that's the Federally approved testing labs. As Bowen was able to discover, the labs aren't doing their jobs. We know the most about Diebold and hence can document how they went wrong the best BUT! that doesn't mean the other manufacturers are any better.

McPherson is sticking his fingers in his ears going "LALALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU" while Bowen is paying attention.

If Bowen gets into the office of SecState in California, she'll have access to documents being withheld from public view regarding voting system certification at the state level. Her current public records requests into McPherson's office on these matters are being completely blown off.

So yeah. I'm going to end up asking you to vote for an ideologically anti-self-defense candidate for this office. I never expected to have to do that, it's the damnest thing, but so is this fiasco facing us.

Bowen is literally the nation's hope to expose what's wrong with the American election system.

 

[bigun15]

...why us?

 

[Jim March]

Land of fruits and nuts I guess.

Sigh.

Look, there ARE some Dems that hold anti-self-defense beliefs out of internally honest conviction. They're wrong, but they're not always worthy of derision.

I respect sheriff Hennesy in San Francisco who has issued zero CCW permits far more clowns like Rupf in Contra Costa or Blanas in Sacramento who issue some, mostly to cronies.

Hennesy is *wrong* but he's not a crook.

That's about where Bowen is at.

 

[Jim March]

Here's the Rolling Stone interview - it's a shocker.

------------
http://rollingstone.com/nationalaffairs

6/6/06, 3:29 pm EST
Voting Reform: Without It, the Next Election Is Also Doomed

2004 Election Interview: The Rev. DeForest Soaries

Republican DeForest Soaries served as the first chair of the federal Election Assistance Commission, set up in the wake of the Florida fiasco of 2000 to oversee ongoing reform of American voting. The agency was constantly underfunded: “We really had to put together a federal agency with spit,” Soaries says, “when that agency was supposed to bring about reforms in voting for federal elections.”The EAC was supposed to ensure that the billions in federal funds spent on new voting technology was spent wisely: “There are legitimate questions in circulation about the integrity of electronic voting,” he says, “and the reality is that no one really knows the answers. Because we don’t have enough research, and the research budget that was authorized by the Congress for the EAC to get to the bottom of these issues was completely zeroed out in the appropriations. The EAC itself was only authorized through last year. So what serious person would accept an appointment to a federal agency that’s no longer authorized?”

Soaries resigned a year ago in disgust, calling the Bush administration and the Republican-controlled Congress uncommitted to improving America’s sorry election apparatus. This May, National Affairs Daily talked with Soaries, who is speaking out after a year of self-imposed silence.

ROLLING STONE: What led you to resign?

DeForest Soaries: It wasn’t until I worked in Washington on an issue as generic as this that I realized how pitiful and perhaps how hopeless Washington really is. For God’s sake…if any issue should be the catalyst for bipartisan cooperation, this is the issue: voting.

It was probably the worst experience of my life. I found that there is very little interest in Washington for true election reform. That neither the White House nor either house of the Congress seems to be as committed to guaranteeing democratic participation in this country as we seem to be in other countries. It’s an embarrassment that we don’t have a broad enough consensus among political leaders that true reform should take place. I could count the members of Congress on one hand that took these issues seriously.

RS: What explains that?
DS: My sense was that most of the elected officials in Washington — in their heart of hearts — really believe that the system can’t be too bad because it produced them. And when people in power can stay in power they do very little to tinker with the apparatus that put them in power. We’ve seen it time after time after time. We know that the Daly machine produced certain results predictably. We know that there are certain Republican districts that could elect a Republican cow if they ran ‘em. It’s not about Democrat or Republican, black or white. It’s about power.

RS: Were there any attempts to politicize the work of the EAC?

DS: The one time I got a call from the White House trying to invade this space, I pushed back, and they never called again. There were people in the White House who thought that because I was a Republican that I cared more than I did about Republican politics. Alright? It only happened once. Early in my term.

RS: What’s the biggest problem with American elections?

DS: Voting in this country has essentially been relegated to a very fledging group of election officials, who receive no training and operate on shoestring budgets on one hand, and political consultants whose job is to get their candidates elected on the other. And when you have that kind of scenario, it’s really hard to describe yourself as a vibrant democracy. It’s an embarrassment.

RS: Were you troubled by the 2004 presidential election?

DS: Here’s what I found troubling. Look at Ohio. Is a two-hour line appropriate or inappropriate? We don’t have an answer to that question. What we say is that democracy means that you have the right to vote without intimidation and undue burdens. But if you stand in line for six hours, technically, today there is no document, no standard, no law that says that that’s wrong. And the problem is this is six years after Florida 2000! What number of votes is an acceptable number to lose in any race? We don’t have a performance rate for machines. If we discovered that of 10,000 Diebold machines model XYZ, 1,000 break down during the day, is that acceptable or unacceptable? If it were a toaster we could tell you, it were a tire we could tell you. If a certain tire malfunctions a certain number of times then they have a recall.

We have no basis for having a recall of any particular type of voting equipment because there are no standards. And when we do have standards, even these standards are required to be voluntary. So is a one percent error rate good? Is a two percent error rate good? 5,000 votes cast, only 4,000 counted? Is that success or failure?

So when you ask me about Ohio, you can recite to me the worst data that anyone has unearthed in Ohio, I would have to say to you — very technically — so what? What does it violate?

It may violate your sensibilities, it may violate my sensitivities, it may violate someone else’s sense of fair play. But the Secretary of State of Ohio has proven that you can get straight through an election by saying: We broke no law. You see the problem?
-- TD

 

[Preacherman]

Thanks for the heads-up, Jim. I've always said, I don't vote for the party, I vote for the individual. If a Democrat is a "better bet" than a Republican, overall, I have no problem voting for him/her.

How can this news be spread around? Any chance of getting Bowen to make a public commitment to challenge the electronic voting scams? Any possibility of getting the press involved to publicize the issue, and her stance, and the background to it?

 

[Jim March]

Believe me, we're working on it.

 

[feedthehogs]

I respect sheriff Hennesy in San Francisco who has issued zero CCW permits far more clowns like Rupf in Contra Costa or Blanas in Sacramento who issue some, mostly to cronies.

Any public official who denys a person the right of self protection deserves neither respect or admiration.

 

[Jim March]

Heh. Never said I liked Hennesy . It's a matter of scale. Hennessy is acting within his stated beliefs. He's wrong, but at least he's honest about it...you know where he stands.

The others mentioned are two-faced. That's worse.