One of the many dubious claims about Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) is that it will produce a consensus winner.  Not always true, as has been found in studies of both Aspen, CO and Burlington, VT.  The candidate with the most first and second place support does not always win.  This is because it is possible to hurt your preferred candidate by turning out too many supporters in his behalf.  How is this possible?  Just take a look at this explanatory video to see how this could happen (and has indeed happened in real elections in various places across the U.S.)

Why is this more democratic?  Why would voters prefer the kind of result described in this video to a straightforward up-or-down vote?

In Humboldt County California, Registrar of Voters Carolyn Crnich has not had good luck relying on her computer system(s) to give her accurate information. This has created problems.

In November 2008 she found out that the Diebold optical scan system she was using was capable of making an entire batch of counted ballots disappear into thin air without a trace … poof! No warning message … no tellltale evidence in the computer log … just poof, the batch was gone.

It turned out to be a known bug in the Diebold software that might only be avoided with special “workaround” procedures – or at least, that is what representatives of Diebold told her when she contacted them about the vanishing votes. Crnich found out about the problem because of a post-election audit conducted by local activists – not because of any notification from Diebold.

So Crnich did what a conscientious election official might do – she decided to switch to a new vendor and spent recent months getting her brand new system from Hart InterCivic ready for this November’s election.

Again, she hit a speedbump of bad information in her computer system. This time it was the local Eureka school board race that was the problem. Her new system was coded for an election in only Ward 1 rather than at-large. During the process of importing election information into the new system, Crnich said, something happened and the Eureka school board race was inadvertently and incorrectly changed from an at-large race to a ward election. There hadn’t been a contested Eureka school board race in 6 years and no one at the elections office had the institutional memory about how it was supposed to be set up.

As a result of this computer error the two candidates for the at-large seat on the Eureka school board were given incorrect information and planned their campaigns accordingly. http://www.times-standard.com/localnews/ci_13549788

Eureka City Schools school board candidate Gaye Gerdts had a plan to win the hearts and votes of the roughly 7,000 people living in her 1st Ward.

The only problem was, unbeknownst to Gerdts — and apparently to the Humboldt County Elections Office, which Gerdts had relied on for her campaign information — the school board seat is elected at large, by voters throughout the school district, not just from Gerdts’ ward.

”As a first-time candidate, I was given wrong information,” Gerdts said in a statement sent to the Times-Standard. “When the Elections Office can’t be trusted to provide accurate guidance, the democratic process is jeopardized. This mistake has thrown my whole campaign into turmoil. Overnight, my voter pool went from 7,000 to 27,000.”

Incumbent John Fullerton was impacted differently.

Having served on the board since 2001, Fullerton said he knew the race would be decided district-wide, but said he had planned an advertising blitz for last week, right when he thought absentee ballots would start showing up. But the Elections Office had printed absentee ballots in error, only including the Eureka City School Board race on ballots from the 1st Ward rather than on ballots in the entire school district. Elections officials then had to correct the ballots, delaying their being sent by about a week.

”It did cause me a little bit of inconvenience in that I had started my advertising this week, assuming that everyone would be getting their absentee ballots,” Fullerton said. “I kind of feel like I’ve wasted some money on advertising by advertising too early.”

Other candidates may have been similarly inconvenienced since corrected absentee ballots were sent out and arrived later than originally scheduled.

Carolyn Crnich is unhappy about the situation. She and her staff had worked diligently all summer trying to make sure that the transition to a new computer system was smooth. Despite her best intentions, she had had a bumpy ride in the run-up to the November 3 election.

”We literally spent all summer doing this, and it’s really disappointing to me that something as big as this whole school district would have happened this way,” Crnich said, adding that she knows the error, and the delay in getting absentee ballots out, has inconvenienced candidates in other races, too.

”We tried so hard to make sure everything was right, and we just missed it,” she said.

Perhaps the lesson here is to not trust mission-critical election information without paper backup. It is not enough to tell everyone: “But it’s in the computer!” as if that means it is the gospel-truth. Sometimes computers are just plain wrong. Both times when Crnich relied on computers for information she got bad information.

Crnich is to be commended for ditching the Diebold system that made votes disappear from the count in 2008. However, continuing to trust what the computer says has proved to be a bad strategy.  Let’s hope Crnich has learned her lesson about trusting computers.

Yup, you read that right.  Diebold scanners are picky about which color ink is used to mark a ballot — sometimes just can not read blue ink.  Also, sometimes just can not read  marks made with number two pencil.  Everyone who has ever filled out a scantron sheet for an  SAT or GRE or any other standardized test must be scratching your head by now.

Yes, I know, I know …  the official instructions  from Diebold say to use a number two pencil or a pen with blue or black ink (just like those standardized test directions).  But you can’t believe the official stuff because it doesn’t always work.

If you feed your carefully marked ballot through a scanner from Diebold sometimes it just “sees” a blank piece of paper.  And you’ll never know when a Diebold scanner will fail to do its basic job of scanning for filled-in ovals on a sheet of paper.  Sometimes it works just fine and sometimes it doesn’t.  Sometimes your vote will count — and sometimes it just won’t.

How did we learn about this “feature” of certain Diebold scanners?  Well, it was during a routine Logic and Accuracy Test in Sarasota, Florida, that election director Cathy Dent noticed that some marked ballots being fed through the brand new scanners from Diebold were being seen as blank sheets paper by the machines.

Ms. Dent experimented a bit and discovered that the problem was “intermittent” but that it seemed to happen more often with blue ink or number two pencil marks.

What did Ms. Dent do next?  Did she call Diebold and demand they take their defective machines back?  Or, did she perhaps call Diebold and demand they fix them?  Nope, not a chance that she would take the kind of action as the average American consumer whose new toaster failed to turn both sides of the bread an appropriate shade of .. er .. toast.

What Ms. Dent plans to do is photocopy any ballots that are submitted with blue ink.  Plus, polling places in Sarasota will be stocked with an ample supply of black felt tip pens for voters to use.

That’s a temporary fix.  But the long term solution is to fix the machines so they function properly and “read” popular types of inks and number two pencils.  That’s in the hands of the Diebold elections unit (aka Premier) that was recently purchased by rival ES&S. They make these junk machines that can not perform even the most basic function of scanning with consistency.

The next question is whether these machines can actually count.  There have long been suspicions about the accuracy of vote counts on Diebold machines.  A public failure like the one in Sarasota does nothing to instill confidence in these machines — or any software or equipment with the Diebold/Premier label.

Another issue that needs to be addressed:  These machines are used in jurisdictions across the country.  It is not enough to have paper ballots if the machines cannot “read” the marks made by voters who use a pen with the “wrong” (=blue) ink color.    The machine in question is the Diebold/Premier AccuVote OSX Digital Scan Tabulator (Hardware Model A) with Firmware 1.0.2.

If your jurisdiction uses this model Diebold/Premier scanner be sure to use black ink to mark your ballot. And make sure your local election officials know about this documented problem with these machines.

For more information:

http://www.sunnewspapers.net/articles /pnnews.aspx?NewsID=70156&a=newsarchive3/101709/vn1.htm&pnpg=0

http://votingnews.blogspot.com/2009/10/sarasotas-diebold-scanners-flunk-test.html

Voting is a risky business in Afghanistan. During the period when Afghanis cast their ballots more than two months ago the Taliban launched grenade attacks at polling places. They also punished voters who sported the ink-stained finger that is proof of voting in Afghanistan by amputating that finger.

This Taliban campaign was so effective that turnout was a below 40 percent nationally and as low as five percent in Helmand and Kandahar provinces.

So it is no wonder that some Afghanis may be having second thoughts about further participation in the electoral process.          http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5ijs1fXELKgCTxaMD8Ix_DNyrNiWQ

“If there is a second round we will not participate,” Sadruddin Khan, a tribal elder in Kandahar told AFP.

“It is not worth it to us to once again face the possibility of having our fingers and heads chopped off, and our police and soldiers die. Neither Karzai nor Abdullah are worth the lives of our children.”

Especially now when the results still have not been certified amid accusations that massive fraud was committed by Hamid Karzai’s supporters.  Nasrat Shoaib summarizes the situation on the ground in Kandahar.    http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5ijs1fXELKgCTxaMD8Ix_DNyrNiWQ

Fraud, the time taken to declare a winner and the government’s inability to provide security have demoralised Pashtun tribal leaders in the southern provinces of Kandahar and Helmand who form the backbone of Karzai’s support.

Afghans voted nearly two months ago but no result has yet been declared.

Now the latest development in this unfolding chaos is the decision by the U.N. Electoral Complaint Commission to toss hundreds of thousands of ballots from the official count.  This means that Karzai’s percentage has dropped from 55% to below the 50% threshhold needed to avoid a runoff.

A runoff election or a negotiated power-sharing agreement between Karzai and his closest rival, former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah, are two possible ways of resolving the electoral crisis.

Either choice will be met with a shrug of indifference by many Afghanis who have lost all desire to participate any further in the travesty.

Khonchazai, an elder in Helmand, said: “Afghan people will not take the same risks again, especially in light of the fraud which proves that their genuine votes were not respected or given any value.”

Another Helmand elder, Assadullah, said that in Nad Ali district, 1,800 people voted but the official figures showed many thousands more had turned out.

“This is a clear proof of fraud,” he said.

“A second round will serve neither the country nor the people, will not make the people any more confident in the election process and will further weaken the Afghan government.”

Abdul Satar, 55, an elder in Zabul province, said: “If I have to vote a second time, what does that say about the value of my vote the first time?”

If this indeed reflects the consensus among the Afghan people, then there will be no legitimacy to whatever government is patched together with chewing gum and bailing wire.  Any runoff will have even lower turnout than the original election — and any claim that Karzai had to be the elected leader of Afghanistan will now be seen to be a sham.

With widespread question marks over the next administration’s legitimacy, Hafizullah Khan, 60, an elder from Kandahar, said “any curiosity we had before about who our new president will be is now dead in our hearts.

“No matter who they announce now it makes no difference to us. All we have learned from this election is that there will always be fraud in elections, and whoever is in power will commit fraud.”

The next Afghan election (if there is one) might well fit the nightmare scenario of  “Suppose they had an election and nobody came.”  At a basic level that is the greatest risk of all.

Note: An interesting analysis of the possible policy implications on the Obama administration resulting from the electoral turmoil in Afghanistant can be found at:   http://news.firedoglake.com/2009/10/19/un-invalidates-hundreds-of-thousands-of-votes-in-afghanistan-strips-karzai-of-victory/

Oh, the anguish of electronic voting… did that vote actually count? Did the dancing electrons inside that voting machine actually record that vote? Or did that vote disappear into the maw of the voting machine never to be seen again? Only Diebold and ES&S know for sure — and they’re not telling.

In honor of the planned union of the number one and number two voting machine companies (ES&S and Diebold), I give you the Voting Machine Song … a lyrical message from the Diebold-Halliburton Fund for the Promotion of Democracy, sung by Marilyn Bennett, Doug Smith, Nkemjika Ofodile and James Garland.

Amidst all the eulogies for the “liberal lion” of the Senate — Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts — one important part of his legacy is often mentioned in passing, if it gets mentioned at all.  That legacy is Senator Kennedy’s role in expanding and protecting voting rights for all Americans.

Because of Ted Kennedy’s work, millions of American voters are able to participate in the most basic function of a citizen in a democracy:  they are able to make their voices heard at the ballot box and vote  for the candidate of their choosing.

Let’s take a walk down Memory Lane and see how Senator Kennedy’s work has led to major steps forward in increasing voting rights.  First, we must recognize that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 laid the groundwork for the landmark Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965.  The VRA has been renewed  and strengthened several times since then (1970, 1975, and 1982), the latest being in 2006.

How important was the VRA, one might ask?  What did it accomplish?

This “act to enforce the fifteenth amendment to the Constitution” was signed into law 95 years after the amendment was ratified. In those years, African Americans in the South faced tremendous obstacles to voting, including poll taxes, literacy tests, and other bureaucratic restrictions to deny them the right to vote. They also risked harassment, intimidation, economic reprisals, and physical violence when they tried to register or vote. As a result, very few African Americans were registered voters, and they had very little, if any, political power, either locally or nationally….

The legislation, which President Johnson signed into law August 6, 1965, outlawed literacy tests and provided for the appointment of Federal examiners (with the power to register qualified citizens to vote) in those jurisdictions that were “covered” according to a formula provided in the statute. In addition, Section 5 of the act required covered jurisdictions to obtain “preclearance” from either the District Court for the District of Columbia or the U.S. Attorney General for any new voting practices and procedures. Section 2, which closely followed the language of the 15th amendment, applied a nationwide prohibition of the denial or abridgment of the right to vote on account of race or color. The use of poll taxes in national elections had been abolished by the 24th amendment (1964) to the Constitution; the Voting Rights Act directed the Attorney General to challenge the use of poll taxes in state and local elections.

Some might point to the election of an African American President as a direct result of the Voting Rights Act.  I would argue that the main focus of the VRA was NOT the candidate but the voter.  Greater participation by African Americans and other people of color has indeed led to the election of officials who are members of those communities of color.  But that is simply a by-product of giving more Americans access to the ballot box.  A candidate does not have to be a member of a particular racial or ethnic or economic group to advocate for their needs — as Ted Kennedy demonstrated throughout his career.

Moving on from the Voting Rights Act, Ted Kennedy helped to pass the 26th Amendment to the Constitution in 1971, giving 18-year-olds the right to vote.  In the midst of the Vietnam War it did not seem fair to send young Americans to fight in the jungles of Southeast Asia without also giving them a voice at the ballot box.

Then he took on campaign finance reform, and authored the Federal Election Campaign Act of  1974 (FECA), which created the Federal Election Commission and established rules concerning disclosure, public financing and contribution limits.  Although several key provisions have been struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court, FECA remains an important statute regulating the financing of U.S. elections.  Senator Kennedy knew that the corrupting power of money could tip the balance of power in government against the ordinary voter and fought to level the playing field with FECA.

Any other legislator might have been content to rest on his laurels, since having their name on just one of these monumental laws would have been the crowning achievement of a lawmaker’s career.  But Ted Kennedy wasn’t done yet.

In 1990 Ted Kennedy pushed the Americans with Disabilities Act  (ADA) through Congress.  While the ADA did not directly impact voting rights, it laid the groundwork for key provisions of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002 which required that disabled Americans be able to vote in privacy and independence.

Then in a final contribution to voting rights Ted Kennedy passed the National Voter Rights Act (NVRA) in 1993, which is often referred to as the “Motor Voter” act.  http://www.usdoj.gov/crt/voting/nvra/activ_nvra.php

The Act requires states to provide the opportunity to apply to register to vote for federal elections by three means:

Section 5 of the Act requires states to provide individuals with the opportunity to register to vote at the same time that they apply for a driver’s license or seek to renew a driver’s license, and requires the State to forward the completed application to the appropriate state of local election official.

Section 7 of the Act requires states to offer voter registration opportunities at all offices that provide public assistance and all offices that provide state-funded programs primarily engaged in providing services to persons with disabilities. Each applicant for any of these services, renewal of services, or address changes must be provided with a voter registration form of a declination form as well as assistance in completing the form and forwarding the completed application to the appropriate state or local election official.

Section 6 of the Act provides that citizens can register to vote by mail using mail-in-forms developed by each state and the Election Assistance Commission.

As America pauses to honor one of the greatest Senators ever to serve, we should all take a moment to contemplate Ted Kennedy’s achievements in the area of  voting rights and campaign finance reform.  We are a better, more inclusive and democratic nation because of the contributions of Edward Moore Kennedy.

Let us pay tribute to his work  expanding the franchise.    It is hard to imagine the 2008 election unfolding the way it did without the foundation laid by Ted Kennedy — the youth vote powered by the 26th Amendment, the massive African American vote thanks to the Voting Rights Act and the major surge in voter registration encouraged by the Motor Voter law.l

Recently, Hawaii held a first-in-nation all-digital election for local district races using telephone and internet technologies.  The company providing the technological solutions hailed the election as a great success.  In reality, voter participation plummeted to a fraction of the previous levels.  If this was supposed to encourage more voters to cast a ballot by making it more convenient, it was an epic fail.  The drop in voter participation was a dramatic  83 percent — let me say this again — epic fail . http://www.kitv.com/politics/19573770/detail.html

Nevertheless, Aaron Contorer, Chief of Products and Partnerships for Everyone Counts E1C), the vendor providing the digital solutions for Honolulu local elections, wrote a puff piece on Huffington Post, pronouncing in a great success that was  “advancing the art of government.”

Contorer makes it sound positively unpatriotic to question the use of the internet and telephone in voting.   http://www.huffingtonpost.com/aaron-contorer/americas-newest-state-hol_b_203639.html

What better use of technology? Who would see democracy stuck in the past, a relic of the age before secure encryption, before cash machines, indeed before telephones?

Any time someone wraps an idea in the flag and suggests that that is sufficient reason to support it, it is appropriate to wonder whether that is all they’ve got.  And in this case, I would argue that appeals to patriotism are the foundation of Contorer’s arguments and should be weighed with a large dose of scepticism since the real technological concerns about the security of such a voting system are never really addressed.

Contorer makes the comparison between internet banking and internet voting and never admits that there are significant differences between the two that military grade  encryption alone will not address.

At this point a savvy tech person  in the person of  Barbara Simons stepped up to counter Contorer’s flag-waving marketing piece in behalf of his company’s products.  Simons’ credentials are impressive. In addition to being the former president of the Association for Computing Machinery, Simons is an expert in electronic voting and serves on the Board of Advisors of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.  She was a member of the National Workshop on Internet Voting that was convened at the request of President Clinton and produced a report on Internet Voting in 2001. She also participated on the Security Peer Review Group for the US Department of Defense’s Internet voting project (SERVE) and co-authored the report that led to the cancellation of SERVE because of security concerns.

When Barbara Simons speaks on the subject of internet voting she cannot be ignored or dismissed as someone frightened of  computer technology or lacking sufficient knowledge.  First she provides some much-needed facts about the scope of the Hawaii election and the state’s election law.  She says Contorer’s article on Huffington Post:    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/barbara-simons/the-internet-and-voting-w_b_210554.html

…exaggerates the scope of the election, overlooks or insults other election methods, and glosses over the formidable technical challenges and dangers posed by the electronic submission of voted ballots.

The election in Honolulu was for neighborhood board members, and thus was not covered by Hawaii’s public election laws. That matters because Hawaii’s election laws, fortunately, require a voter-verified paper ballot and a post-election hand audit of a percentage of these ballots. Since such verification and audits are impossible with a purely Internet-based voting system, there is no legal way to use the E1C system under current Hawaii state law.

Nevertheless, because this small election is being used to promote Internet voting generally, and because Internet voting schemes are being proposed across the United States, the issue demands thorough discussion.

Simons points out that numerous computer scientists have signed a letter warning about the dangers of internet voting.  Then she proceeds to  make the case against internet voting.

The article asserts that since we are able to conduct banking and commerce over the Internet, we should also be able to vote over the Internet. This is a common misconception (or misrepresentation) that is often made when attempting to support Internet-based voting. Banks spend considerable time and money to ensure the security of our assets, yet there are still risks. Identity theft and fraud affect millions of Americans and cost billions of dollars each year. When we can detect such fraud it is because we are able to track our money through each transaction from start to finish, including the people associated with those transactions.

However, elections by their very definition disallow this type of explicit end-to-end auditing. Voters must cast their ballot in secret and not be able to prove to others how they voted. Election officials must not be able to tie votes to citizens except in very narrow circumstances as carved out by law. The lack of these basic protections make Internet-based voting a dangerous idea and place it so far from the realm of Internet banking or commerce as to make the author’s point moot.

There are significant security issues that any vendor must address before declaring such a system fit for public elections. Yet the author glosses over these security issues raised by Internet voting, referring several times to “military-grade encryption.” It is a well-known marketing technique of voting system vendors to tout the strength of their encryption because it sounds impressive. But the fact is that encryption is only a secondary part of any electronic security. It does nothing at all to protect against insider attacks, denial of service attacks, various forms of spoofing, viruses, or many kinds of ordinary software bugs. Even the most secure military computer networks have been compromised, including a recent serious breach of the Pentagon’s $300 billion Joint Strike Fighter project.

Even in the absence of malicious adversaries, software, especially a networked system such as the one E1C sells, is fundamentally difficult to get right. Aviation and military software, written to standards requiring development efforts tens or hundreds of times as costly as voting software, is undergoing constant review and upgrades.

With something so precious as the vote it is appropriate to stick to mature, tested technologies instead of rushing to adopt the Next New Thing.

I notice that Contorer points with pride to his previous work on Microsoft Windows and MSN.  As a longtime Windows user who has experienced several generations of  Microsoft’s buggy, crash-prone operating system, I would not see that association as a strong positive recommendation.   How do we know that the software he is currently touting is not equally flawed?

Simons concludes by suggesting that America deserves the best election system possible.  She notes that there are certain election functions where the internet might be appropriate such as maintenance of voter registration databases, or distribution of blank absentee ballots.  She ends with the following plea:

But we should not subject our democracy to the costs or risks of current Internet-based voting schemes. Rather than rushing to implement Internet voting systems because we don’t want to be “stuck in the past,” we should instead focus on improving our elections using innovations that build upon mature and well-understood technologies. Let’s leave the bluster and insults behind, and build a reliable, accurate, and secure electoral system of which we can all be proud.

NOTE: A more technical article on possible secure uses of the internet for voting can be found on Ed Felten’s blog.  Felten is  a Princeton computer science professor who has demonstrated how easy it is to hack electronic voting machines and has written extensively on e-voting security. Here’s the link to the article:     http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/felten/internet-voting-how-far-can-we-go-safely

Instead of hiring the fox to guard the chicken coop, why not hire him to give advice on chicken coop security?   That seems to be the attitude behind the appointment of voter suppression guru Hans Von Spakovsky to an advisory position in Virginia.      http://www.virginiafreepress.org/2009/07/11/vote-suppression-expert-spakovsky-about-to-be-confirmed-in-volunteer-civil-rights-post/

The U.S. Civil Rights Commission apparently couldn’t find another way to keep Von Spakovsky involved in his favorite pastime — finding ingenious new ways to keep minority voters (especially Democratic-leaning ones) from exercising their rights at the ballot box.

For those who are not familiar with Von Spakovsky’s track record here is a brief synopsis:

Von Spakovsky got his start in Georgia, where he worked to institute stringent voter ID requirements and disenfranchise felons.  He had a hand in the notorious voter purges in Florida before the 2000 Presidential election that kept thousands of legitimate registered voters from being able to vote and helped tip the election to George W. Bush.  Then he moved on to the Bush Justice Department where he was involved in approving Tom Delay’s midterm redistricting scheme.  He also had a hand in giving a stamp of approval to several other voting rights suppression ploys. For instance,   Von Spakovsky was instrumental in the DOJ’s decision not to investigate a decision by Minnesota’s Republican Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer to not accept tribal ID cards for voter identification by American Indians living outside reservations.   The net effect of these actions on Von Spakovsky’s part was to deny voting rights to tens of thousands of Americans — and tip elections in favor of the GOP.

With a track record like this, it is no wonder that Senators Diane Feinstein and Barack Obama placed a hold on his nomination by the Bush administration to fill a vacancy on the Federal Elections Commission.  This 2007 letter to  the Senate Judiciary Committee by Joseph J. Rich, former Chief of the DOJ Voting Rights Section (1999-2005) is a devastating indictment of  Von Spakovsky’s tenure at the DOJ.    http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/docs/letter-rules-vonspakovsky/?resultpage=1&

It says in part:

… he consistently used this position to promote partisan political interest through narrow interpretations of HAVA, refocusing the Department’s National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) activities, refusing to allow investigations under the Voting Rights Act based on discrimination in African-American and Native American communities and redirecting limited resources to a partisan search for unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud.

It’s no wonder that the Senate refused to confirm him to the FEC.  Instead he got a short-term recess appointment to the Commission and finally withdrew his name from consideration when it was apparent that he had no chance of confirmation.

Since then he has gotten his current  advisory gig as well as  a consulting position with the the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, courtesy of his buddy from the DOJ and Heritage Foundation Todd Gaziano.     http://www.mainjustice.com/2009/07/10/spakovsky-hopes-to-return-to-voting-rights-agency/

Spakovsky was actually hired by the commission last August [2008] as a consultant and temporary full-time employee at the behest of Commissioner Todd Gaziano.  Gaziano told TPMMuckraker that he was also one of the people who recommended Spakovsky for the volunteer position with the advisory committee.  Gaziano is the Director of the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Legal and Judicial Studies and has served in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.

Von Spakovsky should be barred from having any role in voting rights policy or enforcement.   Instead of  wearing white sheets, Von Spakovsky and his buddies  keep finding new, sophisticated and insidious techniques  of voter suppression — computers for massive purges of the voter rolls and restrictive voter ID requirements.  When all else fails, they just find ways to NOT enforce existing laws, like, for instance, HAVA, VRA and NVRA.

Tell me once again why we need his “diversity of views” included on the Civil Rights Advisory Panel?  Von Spakovsky is an Orwellian choice to give advice on voting rights enforcement.

Can’t we find a way to ban this guy from any position involving voting rights?  After all embezzlers are barred from working for financial institutions.

Better yet, what about a fox hunt — let’s set the hounds on him and chase him away from the chicken coop.

I get frustrated by those who see CIA conspiracies lurking under every rock and hiding in the shrubbery every time there is an international incident.  The recent situations in Iran and Honduras are both prime examples of this kind of thinking.

Some tin-foil hatters are absolutely convinced that the CIA is the prime mover behind the demonstrations in Iran ( and the military coup in Honduras).

On the other hand, some would make the argument that the actors in both situations are simply homegrown groups responding to their country’s situation.

It is rarely as simple as either side on this argument would have one believe.

Both assertions could be equally and simultaneously true.

In other words, the CIA may be plotting and trying to influence events  while local groups are trying to do the same.  Sometimes the CIA and these other  forces interact in both positive and negative ways.   Sometimes alliances are formed and sometimes these same alliances are discarded.

Why is it so impossible to admit that there are forces/movements/aspirations within Iran that may be opposing Ahmadinejad for their own reasons not having any thing to do with the CIA?  There seems to be real opposition to the Iranian regime from many levels of society within the country.

Let’s not try to pin everything happening in Iran in response to the recent elections on the CIA.  They’re probably not smart enough to initiate something like this. They would be smart enough to climb on the bandwagon, however.