Ever since Minnesota Republican Congresswoman Michele Bachmann’s poisonous comments on Hardball ten days ago, it has looked increasingly possible that her deep red district might turn blue next week.
Her Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL) party opponent, Elwyn Tinklenberg, a former mayor and state transportation commissioner, has raised more than $1.5 million since Bachmann channeled Joe McCarthy on MSNBC. The Washington Post reported today that Tinklenberg’s fundraising “in a single week, is more than what any other Democratic challenger has raised in a fundraising quarter in the entire two-year election cycle.”
Bachmann’s constituents seem to be rejecting her politics of division, distraction and demonization as well. According to a new Minnesota Public Radio/University of Minnesota Humphrey Institute poll, Tinklenberg – previously considered a long-shot – now leads Bachmann 45 to 43 percent. Approximately 40 percent of the district’s voters say that they have “re-evaluated [Bachmann] and are less likely to support her,” and two-thirds disagree with her comments.
The more Bachmann talks, the deeper she seems to dig the proverbial hole. One day after she claimed that she hadn’t questioned Barack Obama’s patriotism, Bachmann said on the Mike Gallagher radio show, “What are Barack Obama’s policies? Are they for America or will they be against traditional American ideals and values?.... The United States may be literally changed forever if Barack Obama becomes the next president.”
In a new ad Bachmann attempts a pseudo mea culpa, “I may not always get my words right, but I know that my heart is right. Because my heart is for you, for your children and for the blessings of liberty to remain for our great country.”
Really? And what are her notions of “the blessings of liberty” besides investigations and accusations regarding who is, and who is not, “pro-America”? In addition to Bachmann’s waxing philosophical on Hardball she let rip with this doozy a few years back: “Not all cultures are equal. Not all values are equal…. We are seeing that those who are coming into France – which had a beautiful culture – the French culture is actually diminished. It’s going away. And just with the population of France they are losing Western Europeans and it’s being taken over by muh…by a Muslim ethic. Not that Muslims are bad. But they are not assimilating.”
It’s possible that Bachmann’s politics have finally proven too toxic even for Republicans. As I reported last week, the National Republican Congressional Committee has pulled its resources from the district, and former Republican Governor Arne Carlson said Bachmann’s comments were the deciding factor in his endorsement of Obama. Carlson also compared Bachmann to Joe McCarthy and said, “I don’t want Minnesota to continue to be seen in the national picture as some sort of a land that has these rather strange views – we don’t.”
Hopefully, on November 4, the voters in Minnesota’s 6th District will render their verdict that they have had enough of Bachmann’s gutter politics in America, and they will send Elwyn Tinklenberg to Washington to replace her in the People’s House.
Today in an interview with CNBC, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) blasted unions:
But this is — we’ve been talking about it for a long time — this is a threat to the fundamental of labor-management relations. It’s fundamental to democracy, the right to have a secret ballot.
The way that Senator Obama envisions — and the unions, and this is their big push, they’ve gotten commitments from Senator Obama and Senator Biden — union organizer goes to your house and says, Hey, Joe, can I sign you up for the union?
That is — we all know what that opens the door to. It’s dangerous for America, it’s dangerous to small business. And I think it’s a threat to one of the fundamentals of democracy.
McCain added that he would veto the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) in a “New York minute.” Watch it:
Despite McCain’s claim, the EFCA preserves workers’ rights to secret balloting. However, it also gives workers the option to form a union through a “card-check” system, in which a union would be recognized if a majority of workers signed a petition testifying to their desire to organize.
Right now, there isn’t a true balance in “labor-management relations”; management has all the power. Workers can only use a card-check system if their employers approve it. CAPAF’s David Madland writes on other problems with the current process:
Employers legally can force workers to attend anti-union meetings, including “one-on-one conversations” with supervisors, which happens in over 90 percent of organizing campaigns, according to a Cornell University study. And according to research by University of Oregon professor Gordon Lafer, workers often are pressured by employers to reveal their private preferences for the union. This takes the “secret” out of the “secret ballot” — the most common conservative mischaracterization of current union organizing rules.
Not only do unions improve the quality of life for American workers, but workplaces with a card-check system experience less hostility and polarization between management and employees. ThinkProgress received a reaction to McCain’s comments from Tom Woodruff, International Executive Vice President of SEIU and Director of the Strategic Organizing Center at Change to Win:
Workers who unite in unions have fairer pay and benefits—and when working families have more in their paychecks to spend, it stimulates economic growth. … Workers need a simple, easy way to join unions without management interference. The Employee Free Choice Act provides for workers to have a union when a majority sign up — majority rule, that is the American Way.
McCain’s indignation that organizers may go to people’s homes to persuade them to vote a certain way also seems odd. Perhaps he will be pulling his door-to-door canvassing operation as well?
ES&S Touch-Screen Votes Now Flipping in TX Too! Obama/DNC Attorneys Still AWOL!
State After State, ES&S iVotronics Are Flipping Democratic Votes to Republican!
What You Can Do About It, And Where the Hell Are Those ‘Thousands’ of Obama/DNC Attorneys?…
Posted By Brad Friedman On 24th October 2008
This is just getting worse and worse. Now it’s happening in Texas. (And in MO, if you read to the end of the article). And the vaunted “thousands of attorneys” from the Obama campaign and the DNC are still nowhere to be found.
With every incident so far reported of touch-screen vote-flipping during early voting in this year’s general election --- from county [1] to county [2] in WV and in Nashville, [3] TN) --- it’s been the ES&S iVotronic touch-screen machine that has failed, flipping votes from one candidate to another not chosen by the voter. In most every instances [see update below], it’s been an attempted Democratic vote, flipped to a Republican, or another party.
These are the same machines that lost 18,000 votes in Democratic-leaning Sarasota County in the 2006 U.S. House Race for Katherine Harris’ old seat. The Democrat, Christine Jennings, was declared the loser to Republican Vern Buchanan (whose own wife had trouble voting for him that day), by just 369 votes. Several academic studies, and even the GAO, have been unable to rule out either tampering or hardware/software error for the disappeared 18,000 votes.
As we wrote earlier this week [4], after there was finally one report of a vote flipping from Democratic to Republican in TN (a very rare instance, btw), these machines need to be taken out of service now, impounded and quarantined immediately, and every voter needs to be given a paper ballot where these machines are currently being used. Voters who have such problems need to inform other voters waiting in line which machine should not be used (and we offer other tips below, as well).
[Update: The rare vote-flip from Republican to Democratic now seems to have been a hoax carried out by local Republicans, according to a TN election integrity activist who did some digging and reporting. Details here… [5]]
The latest reports today of ES&S vote-flipping [6] come from Palo Pinto County, TX, where two voters --- one of them an alternate election judge and office manager of the Palo Pinto County Democratic Headquarters --- saw straight-ticket Democratic votes flipped to straight-ticket Republican votes. Two times for the first person, and three times for the alternate election judge!
The report is a doozy…
At least two Palo Pinto County residents say they experienced early voting problems when the touch-screen voting machines they used kept switching their straight-party vote from Democratic to Republican.
“When I cast an early vote [Wednesday] at Palo Pinto County Courthouse, my vote was switched from Democrat to Republican right in front of my face - twice!” reported Lona Jones, a Precinct 1 county resident.
Intending to vote straight party on the Democratic ticket, Jones said she was surprised Wednesday when the electronic voting machine “on the left as you face the machines” in the courthouse basement asked her if she wanted to cast her vote for a straight Republican ticket.
Thinking she had pushed the wrong button the first time the machine “came up Republican,” Jones said she repeated her intended straight-party vote.
“The second time I was sure to just touch the Democratic button,” she said, further reporting that the machine responded to her selection, “‘Do you want to change your Republican straight ticket vote to a Democratic vote?’ I pressed, ‘Yes,’ then it came back up and it was a total Republican ticket again.”
We’ve cautioned many times here at The BRAD BLOG [7], of the dangers of voting straight-party tickets, particularly in TX, where election officials have “>reportedly been giving disinformation to voters [8], but everywhere else that they allow it as well. Vote for each candidate, NOT straight-party!
But whether it’s a straight-party vote or not, no voter should ever cast a vote on a touch-screen machine unless they are forced to. There is absolutely no way that any vote ever cast on a touch-screen machine --- with or without a so-called paper trail --- can ever be shown as having been recorded accurately.
None. Zero. Scientifically impossible. Or if it isn’t a scientific impossibility, our many months of asking for evidence, from anyone, of such a vote having been accurately recorded by a touch-screen/DRE has yielded precisely no such evidence. And we’ve asked voting machine companies, election officials, and so-called “election experts” time and again, and none have been able to offer anysuch evidence. Ever.
So what do you do about it when your vote flips? Other than demanding a paper ballot, and demanding these machines be confiscated and quarantined immediately?
The article goes on to notes a very good point…
“One of the ladies told me, ‘These machines don’t work well’ and, ‘These machines give us problems.’ I told her I not only didn’t want to use that machine, [indicating the problematic first machine], I didn’t want anyone using that machine.”
Yesterday, election integrity experts Emily Levy from VelvetRevolution.us’ [9] and Kevin Zeese from TrueVote.us [10] suggested that when this problem occurs, voters should first tell officials, and ask them to remove the machine from service.
Then...Alert everyone else in line waiting to vote which machine caused the problem, and warn everyone else not to use it!
These are among the steps recommended, with which I strongly concur:
Call poll supervisors to observe the problem
Fill out a problem report
Refuse to vote on that machine
Request that the machine be taken out of service
Get a serial number of the machine if possible (may be unlikely in many cases)
Tell other voters not to vote on that machine
Call county/town election office
Call local reporters
Call voter problem hotlines (eg. 866-MYVOTE1 and 866-OUR-VOTE)
Contact bloggers and Election Integrity websites.
Raise holy hell.
VR has more details here [11] on what to do if you see your vote flip. [Disclosure: The BRAD BLOG [12] is a co-founder of VelvetRevolution.us [13].]
Also, before you go to vote, bring a video camera (a cell phone video camera will do), to document the vote-flipping when you vote, and then upload it to VideoTheVote.org [14] and YouTube [15], etc.!
Unfortunately, Lona Jones --- who did contact our associates at VotersUnite.org [16] with the problem earlier this morning (they instructed her to contact the media, which she did, leading to the report we’re quoting here) --- was not the only one to have the same problem, with the same failed ES&S iVotronic touch-screens, in Palo Pinto:
Teresa Crosier, an alternate election judge and office manager of the Palo Pinto County Democratic Headquarters, called Jones to remind her to vote early.
“She told me she had already voted and had problems,” said Crosier. “She told me her story and I told her I had the same problem Wednesday morning.”
Like Jones, Crosier tried to cast a straight party Democratic vote at the courthouse annex, “and it came up straight party, Republican party.”
Crosier recognized her election trainer, who was helping to monitor the polls, and called him over. “We went back through the process and it did it again,” she said of the third time the touch-screen machine suggested she vote Republican.
This has got to stop. Paging Barack Obama, the DNC and the “thousands of attorneys” we’ve been told for months that they “have on the ground, ready to move in as soon as any problems are reported.”
Are your pagers not on yet?! What are you waiting for? Concession Day on November 5th?
Oh...and this just in from an Election Integrity advocate in swing state MO:
Hi Brad,
Just wanted to let you know that Missourians for Honest Elections [17] is in the process of confirming five separate reports of vote flipping --- from Democrat to Republican --- on the iVotronic machines that are the only means the Board of Elections is providing for in-person absentee voting at its headquarters in Maplewood [St. Louis County, MO].
--Cynthia Richards
We’ll try to offer more details on the problems in MO when we get them. No doubt, thousands of Obama/DNC attorneys are on their way…
The BRAD BLOG [7] covers your electoral system, fiercely and independently, like no other media outlet in the nation. Please support our work with a donation [19] to help us keep going. If you like, we’ll send you some great election integrity documentary films in return. Details on that right here… [20]
VOTE EARLY!!!! Do you want to vote EARLY? You can vote at the Sacramento County Registrar of Voters:
Voter Registration and Elections
7000 65th Street, STE A
Sacramento, CA 95823
916-875-6451
SATURDAY VOTING - Now open on Saturdays for voting
Saturdays, October 18, 25 and November 1 - 9:00 am to 2:00 pm
VOTE BY MAIL DROP OFF SITES:
Additional sites where you may drop off your Vote by Mail ballot:
Dates: October 27 through October 31
Time: 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.
Locations:
County of Sacramento
700 H Street, Room 2450
Sacramento, CA 95814
City of Sacramento
915 “I” Street – 1st Floor
Sacramento, CA 95814
City of Citrus Heights
6237 Fountain Square Drive
Citrus Heights, CA 95621
City of Elk Grove
8380 Laguna Palms Way – 200
Elk Grove, CA 95758
City of Folsom
50 Natoma Street
Folsom, CA 95630
City of Galt
380 Civic Drive
Galt, CA 95632
City of Isleton
101 2nd Street
Isleton, CA 95641
City of Rancho Cordova
2729 Prospect Park Drive
Rancho Cordova, CA 95670
PROVISIONAL BALLOT
If, for any reason, your name does not appear on the list of voters at a polling place, you have the right to cast a “provisional” ballot. This is a ballot just like a regular ballot, but it will be placed in a
special envelope and will be counted after the elections official confirms that you are eligible to vote. The official at the polling place will give you information about how to find out if your ballot was counted, and, if it was not counted, the reason why.
Provisional Voting
A voter is asked to vote a provisional ballot at the polls due to one of the following reasons:
The voter’s name is not on the official roster of voters and the election officer cannot verify the voter’s voting eligibility on Election Day. The Elections Official’s Office will check the registration records. If further research determines that the voter is eligible to vote in the election, the provisional ballot will be counted.
A voter has moved within the county, but did not re-register to vote. The Elections Official will verify the voter’s prior registration before the provisional ballot will be counted. The voter’s registration will then be updated with the voter’s current address.
Records indicate that the voter requested a vote-by-mail ballot and the voter fails to turn in the vote-by-mail ballot at the polls on Election Day. The Elections Official’s Office will check the records, and if the voter did not vote a vote-by-mail ballot, the voter’s provisional ballot will be counted.
The voter is a first-time Federal Election voter in the county and was unable to provide the required proof of identification. The Elections Official’s Office will verify the voter’s eligibility to vote by comparing the signature on the voter’s registration with the signature on the provisional ballot envelope.
Provisional ballots are counted when:
Prior to the completion of the official canvass, the elections official determines that the voter is indeed a registered voter who was entitled to cast a ballot; or
A court directs the elections official to count the voter’s ballot.
For more information, visit online at http://www.ss.ca.gov, or call 800.345.VOTE [8683]
Free Access System
The Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) requires each state or local elections official to establish a “Free Access System,” such as a toll-free telephone number for voters to call or an Internet website that voters can access free of charge, to ascertain if they voted a provisional ballot at the polls, whether or not their vote was counted, and, if it was not counted, the reason why it was not counted.
Each county elections office has established a free access system for voters to determine if their provisional ballot was counted and, if it was not counted, the reason why it was not counted. Information on each county elections official’s free access system can be found at Provisional Voting Free Access System.
THE PROCESS OF VOTING BY MAIL
Any registered voter may vote using a vote by mail ballot instead of going to the polls to cast a ballot on Election Day.
All valid vote-by-mail ballots are counted in every election in California, regardless of the outcome or closeness of any race. For additional canvass of the vote information please visit our web site at http://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/elections_oc.htm.
Once your application is processed by your county elections official, the proper ballot will be sent to you. After you have voted, insert your ballot in the envelope provided for this purpose, making sure you complete all required information on the envelope. You may return your voted vote-by-mail ballot by 1) mailing it to your county elections official; 2) returning it in person to a polling place or elections office within your county on Election Day; or 3) authorizing a legally-allowable third party (relative or person residing in the same household as you) to return the ballot on your behalf. Regardless of how the ballot is returned, it MUST be received by the county elections office by the time polls close at 8:00 p.m. on Election Day. Late-arriving vote-by-mail ballots are not counted.
Once your vote by mail ballot is received by your county elections official, your signature on the return envelope will be compared to the signature on your voter registration card to determine whether you are the authorized voter. To preserve the secrecy of your ballot, the ballot will then be separated from the envelope and the ballot becomes as anonymous and secret as any other ballot.
“No on Prop 8: Received a Message Under Cover of Darkness”
10/23/08, Sacramento Bee
Last night, as I curled up in bed with thoughts of sleep around 10 p.m., the dog began charging the front windows in the living room and barking with an urgency that clearly signaled something was very wrong. As I hurried to the front room and peered through the blinds, I saw my two “No on Prop 8” yard signs and one “Obama” sign pulled out and hastily dropped in the yard. Knowing this had happened moments before, I rushed into the night, unarmed, barefoot and in my nightgown to see who might be running for cover. Upon inspection, I noted the “No on Prop 8” signs, one on each side of the yard had been slashed through the center sending a clear warning. I stood on the sidewalk for a moment staring into the night to quell the fear that would keep me from replacing the signs. Then, I replaced the tattered and slashed signs, hoping to the thoughtful observer it would send an even clearer message why writing into law a constitutional amendment that encourages this type of hatred,animosity, and discrimination against any of our citizens is a dangerous concept; Vote No on Prop 8.
![[PDA - Progressive Democrats of America - Stand Up. Take Action. Vote.]](http://pdamerica.org/images/ads/pdalink-150x200.gif)
