#unhackthevote

[maewestside]

TRUMPUTIN: HOW TO SPOT A DICTATOR IN FIVE EASY STEPS… by Heidi Siegmund Cuda, aka @maewestside

I’m praying for them, you know. All of them. Not between gritted teeth but with a grace I’ve learned from spiritual allies. I pause to grace, close my eyes and send healing thoughts into the universe, praying those perpetrating crimes against humanity are relieved of their spiritual maladies. The RNC was hacked and the files are holding pols hostage. At some point, they’ll have to do what’s right. I pray it’s soon.

In the meantime, I’ve been studying how a dictator comes to power, and I’ve mapped it out in Five Easy Steps so we can all recognize the signs:

1. “LYING IS THE MESSAGE”: While reading David Frum’s brilliant and prescient essay in The Atlantic from January 30, 2017, in which he predicts what America will look like in 2021 in stunning detail if we do not resist, he quotes a Russian journalist named Masha Gessen. Gessen notes that “lying is the message,” and by that she means when a dictator lies with the ease of breathing it’s to “assert power over truth.” The first lesson I learned in 2016 from a member of the Resistance who grew up in Romania: “It starts with the silencing of truth.” Today, as each Network gave “Trumputin” facetime, we witnessed the blather of nothing. As Gessen told Deutsche Welle regarding Putin, “the former spy has remained in the Kremlin despite a declining economy, diplomatic isolation and nearly continuous allegations of corruption and human rights abuses because of his ability to ‘have words mean nothing. He just keeps talking… it’s meant to create the impression that he knows what he’s talking about. But it’s also meant to drown you in meaningless stuff.’” Hmm.

Read the David Frum “Atlantic” article here:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/03/how-to-build-an-autocracy/513872/

2. DISINFORMATION HIGHWAY: Now that we’ve established those with authoritarian leanings have no trouble lying about everything, the next step is to ensure the lies are amplified by the Disinformation Highway. A dictator utilizes multiple fronts to amplify lies: botnets, State News agencies, paid flacks and political loyalists/opportunists/consultants. There’s a lot of money in lies: as cognitive thinkers spend hours researching and refuting the lies, those on the corruption payola keep up the “theatre craft,” the tornado that creates the fog and the fury so beautifully described by Mike Mariani in Vanity Fair. Lying is a soulless gig. The truth always prevails eventually, but havoc is wreaked in the meantime.

To learn how the Kremlin creates chaos and to see if you can spot some right here at home, check out Mike Mariani’s Vanity Fair essay:

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/03/is-trumps-chaos-a-move-from-the-kremlins-playbook

3. POWER GRAB: As the lies, subterfuge and the hacks on State News chip away at truth, bite by bite, and the Disinformation Highway piles up with bumper-car bots, riding roughshod over facts, what is really taking place is the consolidation of power. While cognitive thinkers cry foul, unqualified, but extremely loyal henchman are being installed into power at the highest levels. Dictators rush to replace talent and integrity with toadies and sycophants, who share in common a history of shade but offer their leaders the assurance they’ll do their bidding at any cost. When one’s moral compass is already blinky, what’s another three, four acts of corruption. Pockets will be lined, and thus, the corrupted are banking on a soft landing. That is until, the dictators turn on them and then it’s flee or plea.

4. MAFIA STATE: When a government is comprised of members of organized crime that’s what’s known as “a mafia state.” In America, we haven’t been immune to corruption, but it’s always been countered by the fact that, ultimately, we are a country of law and order. But when a leader is cultivated, financed and backed by the mob, it gets sticky. As we watch Special Counsel Mueller and his team of prosecutors navigate their way carefully, indictment by indictment, guilty plea by guilty plea, to take down a global crime syndicate, we see how naïve America has been in thinking it couldn’t happen here. We are watching our allies being alienated and dictators being praised. This is what a mafia state looks like. When a leader casts shade on our top intelligence agencies, that’s the markings of a dictator, shaping a mafia state.

For more on how it’s done, read this Deutsche Welle explainer: https://www.dw.com/en/vladimir-putin-how-a-spy-rose-to-power-and-held-on-to-it/a-43030900

5. VOTER TAMPERING: Dictators need to control all outcomes and this includes the voting systems. A dictator ensures victory at the ballot box in myriad ways: intimidation, stuffing the ballot box, voter suppression, hacking voter rolls, redistricting, hacking electronic voting databases, hacking the machines, and using bot networks to blast voters with so much false information that they will either stay home or vote for the dictator who paid hackers to advertise directly to a voter’s preconceived biases. Cognitive thinkers know about the data breaches, but we still are at the early stages of understanding just how much this digital arms race, to quote digital activist Professor David Carroll, is harming Democracy everywhere. Stay vigilant, read the latest indictment from Team Mueller and know that if we show up in gigantic numbers at the polls, we may yet have a chance to salvage Democracy. 

Ohm.

***

Heidi Siegmund Cuda is an investigative producer, mother and activist. Her short film, “Rigged,” debuted at the 2017 Orcas Island Film Festival: http://www.orcasfilmfest.com/rigged

[twowaypr]

Wow, kudos, people!

[bountyofbeads]

https://www.gq.com/story/voting-machine-companies-want-paper-ballots/amp?__twitter_impression=true

VP at ES&S: "There's a big recognition today that auditing is important, and to do a proper audit you need a piece of paper.”

Agreed. And it shouldn’t be a barcode ballot. #ncpol

The Biggest U.S. Voting Machine Manufacturer Is Worried About Election Security

LUKE DARBY | Published June 23, 2019 3:58 PM | GQ | Posted June 24, 2019 |

Election Systems & Software is pushing Congress to require paper records for voting machines.

As the 2020 elections keep looming on the horizon, concern over voting security is only growing. Multiple bills to improve and tighten election security have stalled in the Senate, but they've all been blocked by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who insists that the 2018 election are evidence that no further action is required. "Thanks to efforts across the federal government, in 2018, we were ready," he said in prepared remarks in May.

At least one industry doesn't have McConnell's confidence: voting machine manufacturers. Election Systems & Software, the biggest election equipment manufacturer in the country, has been "quietly lobbying Congress" to require all voting equipment to produce paper records. It's a surprising about-face for an industry that's been selling paper-free, difficult to audit machines for years. Per CNN:

"There's a big recognition today that auditing is important, and to do a proper audit you need a piece of paper," Kathy Rogers, Election Systems & Software senior vice president of government relations, told CNN. "I'll tell you it's a decision that came at a cost. We've lost a few sales because of it. But we think it's the right thing to do," Rogers said.

Without paper records, there are very few ways to audit and verify contested elections. Georgia is currently poised to become the first state to rely entirely on electronic ballots, a move that's being pushed by current Governor Brian Kemp who oversaw his own 2018 election as secretary of state, something many critics called an obvious conflict of interest.

Of course, Election Systems & Software has a strong financial incentive to push for updating its machines and systems. As CNN points out, the state of South Carolina just signed a $51 million contract with the company. But as reporter Ryan Grim wrote on Twitter, "When the biggest voting machine company tells you we should have paper ballot backups because they’re too vulnerable to a hack, maybe it’s time to listen."

[shihtzuman]

Emoluments Clause originally shared:

#BREAKING:Thanks to a #SupremeCourt decision gutting key provisions of the Voting Rights Act,GA.@GOP election officials plan to CLOSE 75% of polling stations in a predominantly black county--a Dem stronghold.#SAD

#TheResistance #unhackthevote #CNN #MSNBC

https://twitter.com/Emolclause/status/1031167753103794176

[antislack]

5% error rate shows Machine Count to matching hand count. This is how what little you do have is taken from you by those who defame and insult you and steal from your communities.

#unhackthevote

[emolclause-blog]

#BREAKING:Thanks to a #SupremeCourt decision gutting key provisions of the Voting Rights Act,GA.@GOP election officials plan to CLOSE 75% of polling stations in a predominantly black county--a Dem stronghold.#SAD

https://twitter.com/Emolclause/status/1031167753103794176

[2plan22]

RT @mikefarb1: #unhackthevote Truml pressuring Federal Judge to drop Lawsuit! WTF! https://t.co/SDa7tajrp5 2PLAN22 http://twitter.com/2PLAN22/status/862439459354267650

#unhackthevote Truml pressuring Federal Judge to drop Lawsuit! WTF! https://t.co/SDa7tajrp5

— MikeFarb (@mikefarb1) May 10, 2017

[ronnychieng]

RT @mikefarb1: #unhackthevote Bot Tutorial Thread A Step By Step Walkthrough Of How To Spot a Bot Tools to Analyze an Account Thread

#unhackthevote Bot Tutorial Thread A Step By Step Walkthrough Of How To Spot a Bot Tools to Analyze an Account Thread

— MikeFarb (@mikefarb1) March 3, 2019

via Twitter https://twitter.com/ronnychieng August 20, 2019 at 10:01AM

[jacquelinemoleski]

Tweeted

Why is @senatemajldr and his Senate @GOP cohorts STALLING on #AmyKlobuchar's ELECTION SECURITY BILL?#TheResistance #MitchMcConnell #DitchMitch #unhackthevote #CNN #MSNBC #FoxNews #Yahoo #TuesdayThoughts #FBRParty https://t.co/sccXCn5vlC

— Emoluments Clause (@Emolclause) June 25, 2019

[cljrealty]

Tweeted

#unhackthevote If you designed a Social Media platform that significantly enabled foreign actors to influence a Presidentail Election wouldn’t you be working night and day to make sure that can’t happen again? I would. I wouldn’t sleep at night until it was fixed. Thread

— MikeFarb (@mikefarb1) February 21, 2019

[maewestside]

PRESIDENT TROLL GOES CLUBBIN’... by heidi siegmund cuda, aka @maewestside

Among the things I learned as a nightlife columnist for the Los Angeles Times, nothing clears a dance floor faster than playing Nico at last call. Lights up, party’s over.

Among the things I’ve learned as a free press activist on Twitter, nothing kills a thread faster than an oily botnet of fake resistors. They’re like throwing a stink bomb on a dance floor. A serious bumout. No one wants to stick around when the trolls show up. After two years of this shite, I block and move on but the thing is, bots are inflicting real damage to democracy.

Unlike 2016, when Russia was programming fake love for Putin’s Apprentice, aka Donald J. Troll, the latest bots appear to be part of the Resistance. They appear to be anti-Trump; but they’re really anti-democracy. And you will know them by their trail of divisiveness. Anyone trying to divide the Resistance is not one of us. They’re bot. 

Working on a recent Congressional campaign with a stellar grassroots team and a brilliant candidate, we faced troll-venom daily. We faced constant personal attacks and of particular note was the hits we’d take when we had good news to share--out would come the coordinated Twitter bots. They’d show up as soon as we posted our good news, and they’d start spreading negative juju. Hateful, racist, ignorant lies, often cloaked with the pretense of defending democracy or lobbying for another candidate. Because we have friends in high and low places, it was easy to determine many weren’t real people at all, but part of an elaborate scheme to depress and suppress the organic narrative with disruptive dialogue. Geolocators revealed the trolls weren’t local. In fact, they were from all over the world, part of a botnet, a zombie network.

The term botnet, short for robot network, can refer to automated accounts that are legitimate, deployed to publish headlines and amplify real stories. But the malicious Twitter bots I’m referring to produce false narratives and fake followers for anyone willing to pay for them. They not only feign popularity for the buyer, they manipulate debates and twist public opinion in perfidious ways that are difficult to prove and prevent. Despite Twitter’s recent bot sweep--it was all quiet on the western front for a few weeks--I’m watching the return of these joykiller bots as we near the mid-terms. Particularly alarming: if a candidate appears to be popular due to botnet boosting, real people think they’re backing a winner. In fact, they’re backing a fraud (or someone who has no problem paying for fraudulent activities).

Troll armies are a cunning, cheaptrick by bad actors. The reason Russia pushed them hot and heavy in 2016 is they’re effective. Bots influence the dynamic of real discussions and opinions and ultimately, impact real elections.

As a veteran investigative reporter, I knew something was amiss back in 2016. There simply wasn’t that much hate in the world. I’ve brought cameras and pens into people’s homes for 30 years and know most people are good and kind and just trying to get by. I read Mueller’s troll farm indictment through tears. Everything I knew to be true was right there in black and white. Our intelligence agencies, fighting for democracy.

So what does President Troll do as the Mueller investigation zeroes in on truth? He clubs his detractors by churlishly taking away security clearances, and his best boys and gals are diminished to crude catchphrases when they’re no longer obsequious flatterers.

Oh what a tangled web.

I moved to Los Angeles in the ‘90s to write a book with Ice T. Among his mantras that always stuck with me: “Freedom of speech… just watch what you say.”

The fact is, we’re in a disinformation war and President Troll is clubbin’ everything and everyone that gets in the way of his tangled web of deceit. When he revoked the security clearance belonging to John Brennan today, the light of liberty dimmed just a bit more.

So here’s a question: Are we going to go gently into this dark night, handing over democracy without a fight? Or will we fight the power?

As voters showed up in record numbers this week, while neo-not-zees not so much (as I’ve written a million times, halfwits can always be dredged up during a ratings sag), the numbers appear to be on the side of democracy.

Let’s do something very American. Let’s face the music and dance.

****

Author Heidi Siegmund Cuda is an investigative reporter, filmmaker, political consultant and mother.

[denisinwales]

RT @jacksnowknows: We need to learn from our mistakes, or history will repeat itself. Congrats to #unhackthevote for their research into bot activity. They uncovered that RWNJs deployed Kremlin-style bot armies to drive stories from pop-up websites against Franken. https://t.co/WFgg989JAm

We need to learn from our mistakes, or history will repeat itself. Congrats to #unhackthevote for their research into bot activity. They uncovered that RWNJs deployed Kremlin-style bot armies to drive stories from pop-up websites against Franken.https://t.co/WFgg989JAm

— 🇺🇸🌊Jack☘️Snow❄️🇺🇸 (@jacksnowknows) February 19, 2018

from Twitter https://twitter.com/UKProgressive February 19, 2018 at 11:04PM via IFTTT

[bountyofbeads]

Justice officials were briefed months ago on allegations against operative at the center of N.C. election fraud scandal

https://wapo.st/2FpUVhE

Justice officials were briefed months ago on allegations against operative at the center of N.C. election fraud scandal

By Beth Reinhard | January 11 at 9:51 PM EST | Washington Post | Posted January 12, 2019 |

Nine months before allegations of absentee ballot fraud tainted a congressional race in North Carolina, the state elections board gave officials from the Justice Department’s main office evidence that the political operative at the center of the scandal had used similar tactics in 2016.

On Jan. 31, 2018, the chief of the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, which oversees prosecutions of election crimes, met in Raleigh with state officials and U.S. attorney Robert Higdon, according to an elections board spokesman.

The following day, the state officials sent a public integrity lawyer an eight-page memo describing interviews with two campaign workers who said they were paid during the 2016 election to hand-deliver mail-in ballots to political operative Leslie McCrae Dowless. Under North Carolina law, only voters or their close relatives or guardians may deliver or mail in ballots. The memo also summarized interviews with three Bladen County voters who filed complaints saying those campaign workers had sought their ballots.

The meeting and follow-up email, obtained by The Washington Post under a public records request, are the first public indications that officials with the Justice Department in Washington were made aware of the allegations against Dowless. Dowless has emerged in recent weeks as a key figure in the absentee ballot scandal in Republican Mark Harris’s 2018 congressional bid. State elections officials and some voters have expressed frustration that federal prosecutors with the U.S. attorney’s office in North Carolina did not act more aggressively to pursue earlier complaints against Dowless and potentially stop him from working on campaigns.

Dowless worked for one of Harris’s campaign vendors, and the state elections board has declined to certify his narrow win in the 9th Congressional District amid allegations that ballot tampering may have affected the results. Dowless did not respond to messages seeking comment and has previously declined interview requests.

“I really expected something would be done about this,” said Linda Johnson-Baldwin, a retired principal and one of the three voters who filed complaints about absentee ballot collection in 2016. Told her complaint was shared with the Justice Department, she added, “I didn’t even know it went that far. So was anything done about it?”

A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment. An FBI spokeswoman in Raleigh did not return phone calls. A spokesman for Higdon also declined to comment. 

The other two voters who filed complaints, Brenda Register and Heather Register, who are not related, also said they never heard from federal law enforcement after giving interviews to state elections investigators.

Josh Lawson, general counsel for the state elections board, said he saw little indication that federal prosecutors pursued the Dowless matter. “Meetings did not result in prosecutions or substantial work in the district before the election,” he said.

Other emails obtained by The Post shed additional light on state elections officials’ entreaties to federal prosecutors and the FBI.

After the primary in May of last year, elections officials provided the FBI with records that they said suggested “new efforts by ‘MD,’ ” an apparent reference to Dowless. That communication was referenced in a reminder email Joan Fleming, a state elections investigator, sent to an FBI agent on Oct. 3, a month before the midterm election.

“For this election, Bladen County’s ABS requests are off the charts,” Fleming wrote to FBI agent Julia Hanish, using shorthand for absentee ballots.

The email address misspelled Hanish’s name, using two N’s, and it was unclear whether the email was received. An email sent to that address seeking comment bounced back.

After the November election, reports that unusually high numbers of mail-in ballots were requested in the county but not returned fueled questions about the integrity of the congressional election. State elections investigators have spoken with witnesses who link Dowless to the irregularities, people familiar with the probe have said.

Harris has denied knowledge of any wrongdoing by Dowless during the campaign.

The Jan. 31 meeting in Raleigh included a broad discussion of campaign practices in North Carolina, including the 2016 allegations in Bladen County, state elections board spokesman Pat Gannon said. The elections board had initially referred those allegations to the U.S. attorney’s office a year earlier, warning that those activities “if not addressed will likely continue for future elections.”

The email sent the following day included a transcript of Dowless’s testimony at an elections board hearing in December 2016. Dowless acknowledged that his campaign workers collected absentee ballots in violation of state law but said that he had not told them to do so and that he later ordered them to return the ballots.

On Feb. 28, 2018, state elections officials met again with federal law enforcement authorities to discuss suspicious campaign activities in Bladen County, Gannon confirmed. Hanish and two prosecutors from Higdon’s office attended the meeting.

Marshall Tutor, a state elections board investigator who worked with Fleming on probing election irregularities, said he thought the case referred to prosecutors was strong.

“You dig and dig and dig, and then nothing comes of it, which is quite frustrating,” Tutor said in an interview. He retired in March.

[mikiefresh]

Tweeted

#unhackthevote Wall Street Journal killed stories of Trumps Mob Ties before the election. Murdoch clearly stearing the news.https://t.co/CjSMkexqq7

— MikeFarb (@mikefarb1) December 20, 2017

[aulunthe]

More than 250 Trump Organization Subdomains are in Communication with Computers in Russia!!