Hey Sequoia's Optical Scan and MIKE HUEBSCH SECRETARY Division of Administrative Services no thanks.

[midnight]

A team that requires an audit....

[midnight]

1. Our system of voting can create votes the way our banks can create money-out of thin air..

Last edited Wed Jun 6, 2012, 12:21 PM - Edit history (1)

Let's not be afraid to audit the system we are now being told not to question.....

[midnight]

2. How many people like 80 year old Romana know nothing about computer source code? Time to speak up

"The reason I offer this explanation is that, with the enormous amount of attention this has received over the weekend, many people are offering my statements at the press conference that the 'numbers jibed' as validation they are correct and I can vouch for their accuracy.
"As I told Kathy when I was called into the room — I am 80 years old and I don’t understand anything about computers. I don’t know where the numbers Kathy was showing me ultimately came from, but they seemed to add up.
"I am still very, very confused about why the canvass was finalized before I was informed of the Brookfield error and it wasn’t even until the press conference was happening that I learned it was this enormous mistake that could swing the whole election.
"I was never shown anything that would verify Kathy’s statement about the missing vote, and with how events unfolded and people citing me as an authority on this now, I feel like I must speak up."http://menomoneefalls.patch.com/articles/democratic-member-of-board-of-canvassers-county-clerk-failed-to-tell-us-of-her-mistake#video-5620493

[mojowork_n]

3. Privatization of government services, the gift that keeps on giving?

It does give one pause.

As far as I could tell, the race went from....

Narrow Walker Lead

to

Race Too Close to Call

to

RECORD turnout

to

...If You Blinked, You Missed It. It's All Over but for the Crowing.

I was expecting a long, long night. Didn't even tune to a news
channel until after the first segment of The Daily Show:

"Madison Men"

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-june-5-2012/madison-men

The comedy writers' take on the whole recall should have
provided a clue..... the rest of the U.S. -- and as it turned out,
the majority of Wisconsin residents, too (?) -- had no idea why we
were all doing this. Or the Democratic Party's message about the
purpose of this election got totally buried under the heavy, wet
fog of 'dead babies, gonna take your deer rifles away, the rest
of the state's gonna turn in to Milwaukee if Barret wins....' With a
little added push and assist from the consent manufacturers
running news departments and editorial boards, at who knows
how many media outlets.

The Republicans had so much money to spend (100 dollars a pop
for "renting" real estate in peoples' front lawns, for HUUUUGE lawn
signs?) maybe there was enough left over for a few vote-tabulating
tricks.

FAUX News had called the election for Snotty Scotty while the polls
were still open, before 6 pm I think. ....Based on "exit poll" results.

How they could have possibly summoned the confidence to make that
prediction, before even one ballot had been counted, defied credibility.

But they turned out to be right.

....The wing nuts all got to turn out, en masse, to "verify the recall"
and actually volunteered to go over pages and pages and pages of
recall petitions. Too bad we're not going to get a chance to see
anyone 'verify' the actual vote.

[midnight]

4. I think Ed Garvey explains some of the issues surrounding the polls....

http://www.fightingbob.com/weblog.cfm?postID=4356

https://bdgrdemocracy.wordpress.com/2012/02/02/the-marquette-franklin-poll-what-wasnt-reported-in-the-media/

[mojowork_n]

5. Thanks, the part about the Bradley Foundation/UW-Madison/Milw. Journal-Sentinel.....

...was certainly interesting. From your first link:

About a year ago, we discovered that the far-right Bradley Foundation front, the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute (WPRI), made a deal to "partner" with the political science department at UW Madison. The Poli Sci department agreed to conduct WPRI polls with questions provided by WPRI. WPRI and Political Science agreed that the agreement and all polling would be outside the reach of open records laws. Incredible. Reporters who routinely use Open Records to get information wouldn't think of asking Marquette Law School about their brand new polling operation. Keeping all the relevant data outside the reach of the public is not pants on fire it is "building burning down!" And they agreed that a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter would have first crack at revealing the poll's results. A scoop so to speak.

....But I wasn't really thinking about the exit polling or the accuracy or possible bias of the poll takers; I was more
focused on how -- with more than 3 hours to go, while the polls were still open -- FAUX News could have come to
the conclusion that the race was over, and our side had lost.

...I was listening to Stephanie Miller on Chicago Progressive Radio (online),
earlier this morning, and got led back to a story that was posted here. From our friends
and neighbors over at the D.U. Minnesota Group:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1059686

I couldn't help noticing that the name, Kathy Nickolaus, popped up again in quite a prominent
role:

Forty-six Wisconsin counties and 3,000 voting machines are being controlled by a two-person company operating out of a strip mall in Minnesota

_snip_

Uh…down the hall from Michelle Bachman's campaign office

That's a whole lot of Wisconsin counties, 46. More than half the total, I'm pretty sure.
(How many do we have, 75?)

From that link in the Minn. Group:

In June 2011, the Wisconsin County Clerks Association held their annual summer conference in Ladysmith. Seventy-five county clerks from across the state came together to, among other things, “assist the legislators in developing sound legislation that affects county clerks and county government by providing accurate and useful information.” WCCA Legislation Committee chair at the time was Kathy Nickolaus.

....By law, voting machines must be publicly tested prior to every election. A Programmable Read Only Memory (P.R.O.M.) pack or cartridge is used to reprogram the machines with the details of the current election. Clerks receive two PROM packs from Command Central: A PRE-LAT, which is used a week or so before the election for the public test, and an “Official” pack used on Election Day. Whoever programs the PROM packs has the ability to inject all the machines with a virus that will flip votes only on Election Day. With two different PROM packs in play, it’s easy to see how public tests could be flawless and the machines could still flip votes Election Day.

In his report of his experience with the November 2010 gubernatorial election for Scott Walker, John Washburn, an election integrity investigator and professional software tester for almost 20 years, states, “I have been to dozens of voting system test sessions and have never seen any of this faux ‘testing’ actually test the voting system software correctly. This is the professional opinion of a software tester testing software since 1994.”

Which is a roundabout way of going back to my original question -- when it came to the signatures on all the recall petitions, it became open season for Tea Party volunteers to pore over the lists of names, to file away and do with whatever they chose, in order to "verify" the recall.

But it doesn't seem likely that anything similar will ever happen with the actual vote totals in the election. Touchscreen voting machines don't leave a paper trail and in the middle of last summer -- when the first round of recall voting had just started -- Kathy Nickolaus helped to push through a "new lamps for old" agreement through which that two-person company operating out of the strip mall near Michelle Bachman's campaign office supplied TWO touchscreen voting machines, for free, in exchange for ONE optical-scanner voting machine (1,500 of them, all together?), to 46 different Wisconsin counties.

.....Nah, nothing to see there. Let's just move along, shall we? (And move "forward" with our new/old political leaders. It's not as if any of them have been indicted for any fraudulent activity, yet, or been the focus of any actual criminal investigations. ...Oh, wait -- oops -- never mind.)

[midnight]

6. Thank you so much.... Hardly can believe this because of what happened in the last year...

Last year my polling place had their ballot bags ripped open, and last spring they replaced our voting machines with these sequoia opti scan. I wonder why this is not being investigated. Congress women Tammy Baldwin has asked for the DOJ to step in last year.

[mojowork_n]

7. No time to even check it today

Busy schedule for me, but if you've got a minute take a look
at Brad Friedman's website:

http://www.bradblog.com/

Don't know what's up there -- don't know if Brad has seen any
of these reports about the NEW for OLD voting machine swap --
but he's been following election integrity issues for a long time.

....It all just seems way too convenient, as far as CUI BONO
goes. The Pukes couldn't have written a better script for this
election.