How do you know if you haven't checked?

I feel like a mom telling a child to look in his room for his missing shoes.

This article is very concerning.  Govt official say there is no evidence, but what evidence has been gathered?

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/dhs-doesnt-want-to-know-about-vote-hacks

DHS officials from former secretary Jeh Johnson to acting Director of Cyber Division Samuel Liles may be adamant that machines were not affected, but the agency has not in fact opened up a single voting machine since November to check.

“Although we continue to judge all newly available information, DHS has not fundamentally altered our prior assessments,” the department told TPM.

Computer scientists have been critical of that decision. “They have performed computer forensics on no election equipment whatsoever,” said J. Alex Halderman, who testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee last week about the vulnerability of election systems. “That would be one of the most direct ways of establishing in the equipment whether it’s been penetrated by attackers. We have not taken every step we could.”

David Dill, a voting systems expert and professor of computer science at Stanford University quoted in the report, said hackers can easily breach election systems regardless of whether they’re able to coordinate widely enough to alter a general election result.

“I don’t know why they wouldn’t try to hack voting machines and I don’t know what would stop them,” Dill told TPM. “Any statement that says ‘We haven’t see evidence of X’ also means ‘We haven’t lifted a finger to investigate.’”

Why do we have to consistently ask our government to do their job?!

Barbra Streisand is Nuts

This is what I have become.  I am now sending rambling emails grappling with my gut feeling.

I really wish that movie guy's voice said "Barbra Streisand is Nuts" in this trailer

BURR: Are you confident that no votes cast in the 2016 presidential election were altered?
COMEY: I'm confident. When I left as director I had seen no indication of that whatsoever.
                        -from here

Later in the hearing, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark) asked Clapper, “the intelligence community says, ‘It would be extremely difficult for someone – including a nation-state actor to alter actual ballot counts or election results by cyberattack or intrusion,’ and you say to that earlier today as well that we have no evidence that vote tallies were altered or manipulated in anyway?”

“That’s correct,” Clapper said.
                        -from here

Jeh Johnson: "I know of no evidence that through cyber intrusion, votes were altered or suppressed in some way."  -this particular quote is only quoted in rightwing online presence??  I just noticed this.  I got it from the Hill opinion blog below (spin link)

Oh good!  Here’s a spin that Republicans are taking…Obama’s Homeland Security was trying to hack into voter registration systems in some states… Cybersecurity experts have confirmed…oh really?  So vague.  However…this WSJ story might be interesting if I could read it..well, it looks like it was a nothingburger (can’t believe I'm using that term-Twitterhead)

Ok, so this is why I still have reservations after three different people in the federal government claim that no votes were altered.  God, this is insane…

From what I have read, some of these machines did not have the security features turned on –such as an auditing function.  How much jurisdiction and authority does the federal government have over state elections systems?  How do they check or verify the votes?  I don’t know if I should believe, but via @mikefarb I have seen places in Wisconsin and I think Georgia where the tallies were inconsistent.  The federal government is doing an audit on all of these machines???  How did they have the time?  How can they if the feature is turned off?  So yes, Feds can say with confidence they have seen nothing to indicate altered votes, but what measures have they taken to investigate each county/state?  They have information already with 50 states and however many counties?  I’m fully for mail in/paper ballot at this point.

Also…another thought.  Maybe the question of whether Kremlin hacked is the problem.  Maybe Kremlin helped, but maybe someone inside the US hacked.  That’s a little wacko, but just a thought.  Why did Republican voter data firm leave 198 million voter data exposed online for three days?

Why did Jeh Johnson’s attempt to designate our elections systems as critical govt infrastructure meet with opposition (and why was it not that already? I think I saw due to view of too much federal intrusion).  Johnson said he did it anyway. ? 

Also this exchange is weird, but only because I don’t understand it (at 33:02, Schiff, but more specifically around 33:44 and something about pollsters and social scientists) This article states that said designation would have given states priority if they sought help in possible cyberattacks.. huh??  Our voting machines are not a priority?

I’m considering becoming a poll worker.  I don’t know if I should be a democrat or republican election judge.  Do the democrats oversee the republicans and vice versa or do democrats sign up to be republican election judges because they think they are corrupt and the same for republicans?  Why is there a partisan distinction?  

I need to research this Senate Intelligence Committee hearing

Vote Notes

Here is some information about the current state of how our votes, our official voice, is being handled and how exiting polls are helpful in determining voter fraud.  Red and Blue shifts, Hacking, Corporate owned voting machines and ballot boxes, auditing equipment turned off, votes being destroyed before the normal destruction date...

Excerpts from:  Can we count election results... by Steven Rosenfeld, Alternet

Covertly, there was not just the open question of whether Russia would hack into election computer systems—voter rolls is one system, vote counting machinery another—but some real evidence that it might have happened in North Carolina.
What people heard about were scrambled voter registration database files in Democratic stronghold counties. What they didn’t hear about but what alarmed some computer scientists who track voting machinery, was the vendor that maintains North Carolina’s voter files was in all probability the “unnamed” Florida-based company hacked by the Russians. You can be sure nobody is quarantining those computer systems for immediate examination by computer security experts.
Jonathon Simons ...calls this one-way pattern the “red shift.” The bottom line, he said, is that both data sets—the exit polls released in real time on Tuesday, not “adjusted” later on to match the vote count, and reported results from election officials—cannot be reconciled. One has to be wrong, which raises questions about the polling, the machinery’s accuracy or vote count tampering. But without a transparent vote-counting process, people with questions run into a brick wall.
“We call a shift towards Republicans a 'red shift,' and a shift toward Democratic candidates a 'blue shift.' We are seeing no blue shifts in this election,” Simon wrote Friday. “This is a familiar pattern, indicative of electronic rigging, but in this case even more dramatic than usual.”
“With all that has been said and written about the vulnerability of the computers that count our votes in secret, one must ask why these votes and states shifted?” he continued. “And why the outcome-changing results are simply accepted as accurate and honest. There is every reason to investigate and then recount key states by hand where possible. This is too often not possible, because some of these results come from paperless, touchscreen computers. And even where possible, with optical scanners, it is just not done.”

Excerpts from a Steven Rosenfeld Interview with Jonathon Simon

SR: Let's go through this piece by piece, because it's a lot for people to really understand. You get the raw state-by-state exit polls that are commissioned by a big consortium of national media organizations. What did you find this year, that happened this week? What do you see in the raw data?JS: Of course, we don't get the raw data. The raw data would be... we have three definitions here. There's raw data, which is the actual questionnaires and the simple numerical toning up of answers on the questionnaire. That is never publicly released. It's if you want to characterize it as such, it's what's inside the sausage of exit polls, and we are not privileged to see that. I've had one opportunity in my life through an inside source to actually look at some of the raw data, but that's a very rare thing. It's not generally accessible to the public. Many of us have clambered for the public release of that raw data, certainly in the aftermath of the 2004 election and have been denied it.
just in this particular election, they bought machines in Ohio that had a feature in them that was basically capable of self auditing. It was a security feature. The Republican secretary of state of Ohio allowed the counties to switch off that feature. You have to ask why. You bought it and it had that feature. They said, Well, it would create chaos. You look at things like that and say hmm. You scratch your head and say, what is going on here? What may be happening in that darkness of cyberspace that the exit polls are giving us a pretty good hint about, but the vote counting system itself completely conceals?

The fact is, we are denied, when I saw we, the candidates, the public, very often election administrators, by the rules of their states, are denied access to the actual hard evidence we call it, that would allow a determination of whether the election has been accurately counted or perhaps has been illegitimately counted and manipulated. As a matter of fact, in quite a few states and usually under Republican control, but the Democrats have not been tremendously cooperative about this either. The trend has been for ballots to be removed from public record status so that they are no longer susceptible to four-year requests and similar public information requests, Freedom of Information Act requests. They are getting less transparent, not more so.

What we're left with is a system that was accepted more or less without real proof.
If that's what democracy is worth to us, then we deserve what we get. Democracy requires support. It requires citizen support. It requires an investment of care and an investment of vigilance and an investment of participation more than deciding, Yeah, I'm going to vote or I'm not going to vote. It requires the fulfillment of a duty to be part of the public that counts and observe the counting of the votes so we don't have the ludicrous situation where we hand our ballots to a magician who takes them behind a curtain, you hear them shred the ballots, comes out and tells you so-and-so won. This is what we've got now and it's what we've accepted. We spend more money in two weeks in Iraq then would cost us for 30 years to hand-count our elections. 

I see

So this is how this animal gets made?
I'm sharpening everything
everything is splayed
my accumulation is a riot
spilling out all over
no more free smiles
no more free breaths of fresh air
all my joy hidden for a select few
giving evil eyes all around
until I root all you fuckers out

Day 3

esp is on the fritz

My anger is not only about this, but...

On Tuesday November 8, the country proved its misogyny runs deeper than most of us could have ever imagined. We chose to elect a man who has admitted to sexual assault over the most qualified candidate in history, who happens to be a woman. And to be a woman who has to come to terms with that fact is deeply, deeply painful. 

                                                                                            --Jessica Samakow

more to come