On today’s BradCast, not that we enjoy saying “we told ya so,” but, yeah, another election result goes south on 100% unverifiable Diebold touch-screen systems in a key election for Democrats, as we’ve been warning for weeks (years, really). And, yes, the disgraced Bill O’Reilly has finally been fired by Fox ‘News’. [Audio link to full show follows below.]
In Tuesday’s U.S. House special election in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District, Democratic candidate Jon Ossoff appears to have soundly defeated a split Republican field in a very Republican district, in the “jungle primary” race for a House seat held by the GOP since 1978 and recently vacated by Trump’s appointment of Rep. Tom Price as Director of Health and Human Services.
However, the final results of Tuesday’s contest, as taken from the state’s 100% unverifiable Diebold touch-screen voting systems, report that Ossoff just failed to go over the 50% threshold by which he would have won the seat outright. Instead, he’ll compete in a run-off in June against the second place finisher on Tuesday, Republican Karen Handel, former GA Sec. of State.
So, are the reported results accurate? It is impossible, in fact, to know, as I’ve long been warning. That fact is made even more maddening by the fact that a reported central tabulator “error”, said to have been caused by a faulty memory card from one of the voting machines, stopped all results from being reported for hours in Fulton County, as Ossoff results were stuck at 50.3%.
At the time, all counties in the district but Fulton (Handel’s home county) had reported 100% percent of their results. Hours later, after the computer tabulator problem was said to have been corrected, and results started coming in again from Fulton, Ossoff’s numbers dropped to 48.6%, below the threshold that would have prevented a run-off.
So, was the election stolen? Or was the all-too familiar problem during the tally just a routine error on the state’s unverifiable, easily-manipulated, oft-failed voting system? The state’s Diebold voting systems and tabulators were first installed in 2002. They are, shamefully, still used today, despite multiple massive vulnerabilities, including one that allows results to be flipped without detection, as first reported by The BRAD BLOG as early as 2006. At the very least, as I noted last night on Twitter during the hours long freak-out over the reported faulty memory card(s): “If I’m Ossoff, I get to court and have ALL of those memory cards in Fulton locked down and sequestered for forensic inspection.”
Adding to the concerns in that GA-06 election: The reported “massive data breach” last month at the facility which programs both the voting machines and the state’s electronic pollbook systems and, over the weekend, the theft of a number of those e-pollbooks from a poll workers car. (Widely mis-reported as a theft of “voting machines”.)
I discuss all of the above, in much more detail (including the political fallout from the race, which is still very bad for Trump and the GOP), on today’s show — and take a number of calls about it all of it as well.
Also today: Bill O’Reilly, the biggest star on Fox “News” since it’s inception, has finally been fired, following the latest round of multiple sexual harassment allegations against him, millions of dollars in settlements paid by both him and Fox to his accusers, and dozens of advertisers who pulled out of the show following the latest round of allegations. (Here’s the recent BradCast where I discussed the latest allegations with Media Matters’ Eric Boehlert late last week, and where he pretty much predicted what has finally happened today.)
Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for the latest Green News Report‘, with toxic oil and chemical spills, new heat records, and some otherwise encouraging news about London’s iconic black cabs…
The events in Fulton County call to mind an election that we know for a fact was electronically stolen.
As noted by Jeff Faux in The Global Class War, late on election night in 1988 the immensely popular progressive Mexican Presidential candidate Cuauhtemoc Cardenas Solarzano led the PRI’s Carlos Salinas de Gortari by a wide margin.
Salinas, who has been linked to the drug cartels, was the handpicked, pro-NAFTA successor to President Miguel de la Madrid.
The computer central tabulation of the nation’s optical scan voting system was under the control of Mexico’s Federal Election Commission (FEC), a branch of the Ministry of Interior.
Late on election night, the system reportedly crashed. Hours later, when the system came back online, the FEC reported that Salinas had won.
Long after the event, by way of his memoir, according to Ginger Thompson of The New York Times, former President de la Madrid confirmed that the 1988 Mexican presidential election had been stolen.
While de la Madrid suggested that they had simply panicked when adverse results were coming in, it is likely that the rigging had been pre-planned. The day before the election, Mexico’s Ministry of Interior banned exit-polls.
It might have been possible to determine whether the 1998 election had been stolen by a hand-count of electronically scanned paper ballots. That possibility was eliminated when, after the election, the Mexican Congress, controlled by the PRI and right-wing National Action Party (PAN), voted to burn all election records. “The only hard evidence of the fraud committed that July night,” the Times‘s Ginger Thompson wrote, “went up in smoke.”
Of course, in this case, thanks to Georgia’s reliance upon 100% unverifiable touch screens, there is no “hard evidence” (paper ballots) that could confirm or refute the accuracy of the “official count.”