On today’s BradCast: Accurate reporting matters. So do accurately tabulated elections. So does accurately reporting about elections and their results and allegations made about attempts to “hack” American elections. [Audio link to show follow below.]
While the U.S. corporate media have ever-so-slightly improved since they fell hook, line and sinker for the George W. Bush Administration’s government propaganda following 9/11 — resulting in the Iraq War and all that has come, and is still coming ever since — they’re not doing much better when it comes to Trump’s saber rattling over Iran’s non-existent “nuclear weapons program”, or their coverage of the government’s claims concerning Russia’s alleged “hacking” of election systems in 2016. (Or, as MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow unhelpfully describes it over and over, “Russia’s attack on our election!”)
We try, today, to help clarify what the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security and the corporate media did not, when it came to DHS’ erroneous allegation in late September that the “Russian government” attempted to hack voter registration systems in 21 states and that “no votes were manipulated or changed” in the 2016 election. (For example, as we noted at the time, days later, DHS admitted they were wrong about Wisconsin, and California’s Democratic Sec. of State said further investigation revealed that claims “turned out to be bad information from DHS.” As to whther any votes were changed in 2016, the DHS admitted over the Summer that they don’t know, because they never actually checked!)
But, hey, if it takes concerns, accurate or otherwise, about “Russia hacking” our elections to wake up the nation and its government to the very real threats posed by electronic voting, tabulation and registration systems we’ll take it! We’ve worked for nearly 15 years here at The BRAD BLOG and on The BradCast to warn about that threat — whether it comes from Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, ISIS, France, Germany, some guy in Little Rock, Arkansas or any election official or insider anywhere in the nation!
So, on related matters, and what we will all look forward to as the 2018 election cycle begins, we’re joined by longtime Orange County, CA Registrar of Voters NEAL KELLEY, following the first meeting of the new DHS Election Infrastructure Coordinating Council, created after President Obama’s Directive in January declaring the nation’s election systems, in all 50 states, to be recognized as “Critical Infrastructure” by the U.S. Government.
Kelley, a member of the new 27-member council which convened in D.C. over the weekend for the first time, joins us to explain what this panel actually is; what the designation as “critical infrastructure” actually means in practical terms for the nation’s voting, tabulation and registration systems; how this commission was set up, who appointed its members, and how it differs from Trump’s phony “Election Integrity” Commission; whether the “critical infrastructure” designation intrudes on states’ Constitutional independence in running their own elections; whether the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (or EAC, on which Kelley is also an Advisory Board member) should be defunded, as Republicans in Congress have long sought; how DHS dropped the ball on 2016 and its aftermath; and, while we have him here, whether or not Orange County will ever replace its 100% unverifiable Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting systems with a verifiable paper ballot system. (See my own disastrous experience with the OC’s voting system back in 2011 here.)
We also get Kelley’s reaction to a newly-signed CA law (AB-840), supported by Democrats and virulently opposed by many Election Integrity advocates, that allows County Registrars to completely ignore millions of provisional and Vote-by-Mail ballots when conducting their state-mandated 1% post-election manual “audits”.
Finally, speaking of Trump’s phony voter fraud commission (which is decidedly distinct from the DHS panel that Kelley now sits on!), we’ve got several pieces of troubling news today, including the recently reported child pornography arrest of one of its researchers, and the sudden death on Monday of one of the Commission’s very few Democratic appointees…
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