On today’s BradCast, we open the phone to callers to discuss another very busy news week, though most want to talk about election integrity. That’s good. [Audio link to show follows below.]
Among the stories we cover before we get to listener calls: The Trump Administration is blocking members of Congress — both Democratic and Republican — from taking military flights down to Puerto Rico, for some reason, where the disaster for 3.5 million U.S. citizens following Hurricane Maria is said to be quickly deteriorating. Meanwhile, Trump continues to sing his own praises for his handling of the disaster, while using his Twitter account to tweet about the NFL instead of offering help or support for the storm victims.
Then, the state of Wisconsin finally decertifies its terrible, two-decade old Optech Eagle paper ballot tabulators which will only read marks in pencil (not pen). That, despite many WI municipalities which used those same machines to both tally and then ‘recount’ the 2016 Presidential election, rather than ever count ballots by hand. Those machines may well be replaced by 100% unverifiable touch-screen systems. Also, though the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security informed the state late last week that Russia attempted to hack their voting system last year, it turns out DHS now admits has no such evidence.
Here in California, where DHS told the state the same thing last week (and apparently got it wrong there as well), Democrats in the state assembly recently passed a bill, AB-840, that will make stealing elections easier, by removing nearly half of the ballots cast from the state’s 1% post-election hand ‘audit’. Governor Jerry Brown (D) is now deciding whether to sign the bill, which election integrity advocates and voting system experts are begging him to veto instead, describing AB-840 as a “roadmap to fraud”. You can contact the Governor with your opinion on whether he should sign or veto right here.
Callers ring in on all of that today, and challenge me on a point or two regarding voting and election fraud, before Desi Doyen joins us for the latest Green News Report, on the rapidly devolving humanitarian crisis in Puerto Rico, and even some good news about coal for the Pacific Northwest (and for all of us, in truth)…
I can’t help but be skeptical about the abrupt DHS 180 degree reversal of its prior position that Russia tried to hack into state election systems.
Can anyone be confident that this “reversal” was not engineered by the White House?
Past events in which the White House and then Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA) undermined the investigations of his own House Intelligence Committee, I think it premature to accept the “reversal” at face value.
I agree completely that this reversal by DHS smells funny. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s another effort to nurture an environment if distrust and uncertainty – ‘fake news’.
Ernie @ 1:
Nothing wrong with skepticism, of course. But if you dig into the details reported by the state of Wisconsin’s Michael Haas, and compare them to the info now from CA’s Sec. of State reporting the same thing, it sounds legit.
WI went out of their way to get details on what happened, and the details came back with specific IP addresses attempting to “scan” a totally different state agency (the state Department of Workforce Development in that case). After that, CA’s SoS attempted to learn details as well, and got back details identifying computers at CA’s Department of Technology, rather than the Sec. of State’s Office (where the Voter Registration database lives) as expected.
In both cases, election officials (non-partisan in WI, Dem in CA) reached out to DHS, rather than DHS coming to them with the info. If this was meant as a Trum Admin cover up, one wouldn’t expect them to sit and hope that a state came to them to ask for details. It seems they would also go to the other 19 states that, just days earlier, the very same people had informed those states about being attempted hack victims.
Now, of course, both WI and CA election officials have every reason to try and protect the integrity of their system by claiming they weren’t hacked. But, in both of those cases, the systems were NOT said to have been hacked, just scanned for vulnerabilities. And, in both cases, as I understandn it, the systems were not penetrated. So, that should have been something both states would not be embarassed about, but proud of! So, it seems unlikely either would simply be lying to save face.
The other reason the reports from both CA and WI appear to have the patina of credibility (at least to me), is that they are similar to what has been found in the past whenever more specific details have been sought regarding supposed hacks or hack attempts by Russia. See, for example, the lack of any actual evidence presented in the Intelligence Community’s January report concluding (but offering zero evidence) that Russia was behind the Podesta and DNC stolen email docs. Why wouldn’t they include any evidence in such a report? (It could easily be done w/o giving away sources or methods). Or, see the private security company’s exceedingly weak claims that the IC’s reports were apparently based upon, since DHS nor FBI ever did their own probe of the DNC machines. Also, see the fact that DHS never bothered to actually examine any voting machines or count any ballots, which would be the easiest way to hack an election. Why didn’t they?
To date, all such reports have proven much less damning after inspection by actual independent cyber security experts.
Doesn’t mean Russia didn’t do it. Just means that the evidence given to the public, so far, upon independent scrutiny, continues to be much less (understatement) than it was originally sold as.
There are many more such examples (see Greenwald at The Intercept for a few), but given we are a year after all of this was supposed to have taken place, it’s troubling that there has been ZERO hard evidence presented to the public for these extremely extraordinary claims. Skepticism is warranted everywhere on this story, if you ask me.