Tag: robert bridge

Strategic Culture Foundation: When Does a ‘Glitch’ Become a Coup? It’s Time to Regulate America’s Fly-by-Night Voting Machine Monopoly

This article comes from Robert Bridge at the Strategic Culture Foundation – When Does a ‘Glitch’ Become a Coup? It’s Time to Regulate America’s Fly-by-Night Voting Machine Monopoly

It’s a frightening thing to consider, but the ultimate success of democracy in the United States largely hinges on the integrity of just three voting machine companies, which conduct their affairs with almost no government oversight and regulation. Unless that changes, the greatest democracy will start looking like a banana republic in the eyes of the world.

In January 2020, the CEOs of the three companies that produce over 80 percent of voting machines in the U.S. – Election Systems & Software (ES&S), Dominion Voting Systems and Hart InterCivic – were grilled by members of Congress over the question of security at the ballot box. Perhaps it would surprise exactly nobody that the 90-minute discussion focused almost entirely on the possibility of foreign actors, specifically China and Russia, interfering in the U.S. election system. Within such a predictably narrow frame of reference – Russia! Russia! Russia! – it becomes much easier to eliminate the possibility that domestic actors may also be tempted to tamper with the vote. At the same time, Russia provides the perfect smokescreen in the event someone gets caught with their hand in the election cookie jar. But already I digress.

Currently, Dominion Voting Systems, the supplier of voting machines in 28 states, is coming under fierce scrutiny after it was reported that thousands of votes in one Michigan country intended for Donald Trump went to his challenger, Joe Biden. Officials were quick to point out that the ‘glitch’ was due to silly “human error,” as opposed to any mechanical flaws with the voting machines.

According to Michigan state government website, “[T]he erroneous reporting of unofficial results … was a result of accidental error on the part of the Antrim County Clerk (who) accidentally did not update the software used to collect voting machine data and report unofficial results.”

While I am no computer specialist, it is hard to imagine how a software update would have done anything to prevent one candidate from receiving the votes intended for another unless it was originally programmed to behave that way. But again, I am no expert.

Another state that relies heavily on Dominion Voting Systems is Georgia, which received 30,000 new voting machines last year – “the largest rollout of elections equipment in U.S. history,” according to the Government Technology newsletter. Following the announcement of the $107 million contract, the same newsletter foretold of problems down the road, saying the “new voting system is expected to be quickly challenged in court by voters who say it remains vulnerable to hacking and tampering, despite the addition of paper ballots.”

Those fears were quickly realized on the morning of Nov. 3, Election Day, when a technological glitch wreaked havoc on voting in two Georgia counties (a side note to this story is that Georgia officials blamed the abrupt pause in vote counting on a burst pipe at Atlanta’s State Farm Arena. Thus far, however, officials have not been able to produce any evidence that such an incident took place).

While the source of the ‘glitch’ is still under investigation, one state ballot supervisor, Marcia Ridley, initially told POLITICO on Nov. 3 that Dominion, which prepares the poll books for counties before elections, “uploaded something last night, which is not normal, and it caused a glitch.” That reported incident prevented staff from programming the voter smart cards for the voting machines. Ridley continued, “That is something that they don’t ever do. I’ve never seen them update anything the day before the election.”

However, Dominion officials, while admitting there was a problem with the poll books, deny there was any last-minute update made to the poll books after Oct. 31 (a press release by Dominion countered this and other allegations, including that the Pelosi family, the Feinstein family, or the Clinton Global Initiative has any relationship with the company).

And here is where things get interesting.

Ridley went on to say that Dominion assured her that “no system can be updated remotely without the knowledge of [the company],” indicating that an update could not have been made without detection. In other words, there appears to be a backdoor channel for Dominion Voting Systems to connect to the internet, and, as everybody knows, whatever appears on the internet is fair game for hackers.

In fact, it was exactly that concern that helped dissuade the state of Texas from also purchasing the dodgy Dominion system.

In a letter from Brandon Hurley, a voting systems examiner, addressed to Keith Ingram, Director of Elections in Texas, it was determined that “some of the hardware in the Democracy 5.5-A System can be connected to the internet through Ethernet ports.”

Later in the letter, it was emphasized again that “[W]ithout question, one or more of the components of the 5.5-A System can be connected to an external communication network and this can only be avoided if the end-user takes the proper precautions to prevent such a connection.”

On Wednesday, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger announced the state would perform a hand-recount of presidential ballots before certifying the results of its election. According to the New York Times, Biden leads the incumbent Trump by 14,000 votes.

Whatever the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, which also had to wrangle with the influx of millions of mail-in ballots amid a pandemic, it will certainly go down in the history books as one of the most chaotic, controversial and fraud-prone contests in U.S. history. The tragedy is that this fiasco, which is making America look ridiculous on the global stage, could have been avoided. There have been numerous attempts to sound the alarm on the vulnerability of voting machines to accurately tabulate the results of an election, and not least of all the ongoing Trump-Biden showdown, which will determine the political, cultural and economic trajectory of the United States long into the future.

It is the opinion here that, judging by everything we know and don’t know about how the 2020 presidential election was organized, the only realistic option is to hold a nationwide recount. It is simply impossible to expect millions of American voters from either side of the political aisle to hold any doubts over an election of such tremendous consequence. Yes, a recount would be a massive undertaking, but the future peace and tranquility of the nation, already partisan to the breaking point, depends upon it. Once the recount is accomplished, the next task should be a congressional task force to examine ways of securing U.S. elections in the future, while holding the voting machine companies to severe government control and regulation. The days of monkey-wrenching U.S. elections must end.

 

US Civil War 2.0 Update

Young boy sleeps between his parents

There have been several articles in the past week or so on the topic of the possibility that there will be or there already is a second civil war occurring in the United States. Several of them reference each other.

The Washington Post started with In America, Talk Turns to Something Not Spoken of for 150 Years: Civil War in which it blames Trump and conservatives for the current state of affairs.

From Richard Fernandez’s article at PJ Media, What Would a Hybrid Civil War Look Like? wonders if we are already in a civil hybrid war where victory is achieved by silencing opponents, punitive prosecution and deplatforming.

…Howard Schultz tweeted that “the failed political class of Washington, D.C., has broken America’s political system. And out of that are rising political extremes on both sides.” Yet to some, extremes are not a bug but a feature. Bernie Sanders declared without a hint of irony that “Donald Trump wants to divide us up based on the color of our skin, based on where we were born, based on our gender, our religion and our sexual orientation,” even though that is the perfect definition of intersectional identity politics.

While one explanation for the fractiousness is a reversion to our primitive natural tendency to mistrust outsiders, the other possibility is that it is now the way modern warfare is waged. The Russians have ascribed events unfolding in Venezuela to an American Trojan Horse strategy. It “would rely on ‘protest potential of the fifth column’ to destabilize the situation in the countries with unwanted governments … using the technologies of color revolutions.”

The Russians, whose Soviet empire was overthrown by the color revolutions, have been experimenting with similar strategies known as hybrid warfare. As the NYT reported

General Gerasimov laid out in an article published in 2013 … which many now see as a foreshadowing of the country’s embrace of “hybrid war”… analysts see a progression from the blend of subversion and propaganda used in Ukraine to the tactics later directed against Western nations, including the United States, where Russia’s military intelligence agency hacked into Democratic Party computers during the 2016 election.

With conventional war rendered suicidal by the advent of nuclear weapons, a cocktail of lawfare, info war, deliberate population movement, and targeted physical intimidation is now the toolset of choice and the Russians, Chinese, jihadis, EU, and USA each have their versions.

“The idea that the Russians have discovered some new art of war is wrong,” Mark Galeotti, a Russia expert at the Royal United Services Institute and the author of “Russian Political War,” said of the general’s latest speech. “This is basically the Russians trying to grapple with the modern world.” Hybrid war has long been a Western military term of art, analysts say, especially in the context of counterterrorism.

But since the resulting battlefields are waged inside the country, there is little reason why domestic political conflict should not resemble the international ones. Because victory is now attained by jailing opponents, silencing or financially sanctioning them, punitive prosecution, deplatforming, and universal surveillance are used alike in both cases and it is increasingly hard to tell them apart. The thesis that America is already in a “civil war” or on the brink occurred to Greg Jaffe, national security reporter, and Jenna Johnson, national political correspondent for The Washington Post...

Robert Bridge writes at RT American Civil War 2: US media will have only itself to blame if all hell breaks loose that the media’s self-righteous bias stokes the divisions.

…Michael Cohen, for example, Trump’s turncoat personal lawyer who committed perjury by lying to Congress, was quoted high in the article as saying, “Given my experience working for Mr. Trump, I fear that if he loses the election in 2020 that there will never be a peaceful transition of power.”

Now that is certainly rich. Ever since Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 presidential election, Washington has been consumed by the Mueller investigation, and amid mindless chatter that Trump is an illegitimate president slated for impeachment. In other words, the last thing that can be said about the Democrats is that they facilitated a “peaceful transition of power.” In fact, they have hobbled Trump and his administration ever since he entered the Oval Office.

Another pro-Liberal voice dragged into the Civil War story was Robert Reich, who served on Barack Obama’s economic transition advisory board. The Post linked to an article Reich wrote last year where he posited the fictional scenario where an impeachment resolution against the president is enacted, thus kicking off mass civil strife on the direct command of dear leader…

Now that is some world-class chutzpah. In fact, it is the same self-righteous, ingratiating tone that weaves itself throughout the Post article. In keeping with the mainstream media’s non-stop narrative, Trump and the Republicans are blamed for everything that has gone wrong in the country, while the Democrats come off as little angels trying to piece the fractured country back together.

As already mentioned, Donald Trump is certainly not above criticism. Far from it. But for the mainstream media to place all of the blame for the current political malaise at the Republican’s door is about as responsible as lighting up a cigarette inside of a Chinese fireworks factory…

Finally Malcolm Pollack’s On Civil War discusses how it is the Left that has pulled crazily away from the rest of the country and the resulting desperation of normal people to return to civilized order that is causing the chasm.

…That’s it exactly: we are desperate. We know how close we are to the edge, to the dissolution of civilized order into chaos and tyranny. We can feel in our bones the implacable hatred of our would-be commissars for everything we believe is good and right and true — along with a growing understanding that their hatred doesn’t stop at our traditions and beliefs. As long as we live and breathe, we are a threat. If the blood-soaked history of the twentieth century can teach us anything at all, it should teach us that it will not be enough to see us displaced and destroyed. They will want us dead and gone.

One of the milestones along the road to civil war is the normalization of violence as a rational response to a dehumanized enemy, followed soon after by an eagerness for general conflict. This eagerness arises first in the breasts of those seeking radical change, who see violence as justified by the righteousness of their cause, and who are usually young and excitable people who have a much better sense of how to destroy what exists than to build and preserve a system that, however flawed, actually works. (This also reflects that the Right, almost by definition, moves toward order, while the Left is always entropic.) But the Right is eminently capable of reactive, or even proactive, violence when confronted by an existential threat to order, and is every bit as liable to the “othering” and dehumanization of its enemies in preparation for war.

There is, then, a spiral of mutual threat and provocation in the run-up to war, along the course of which a people can go from general comity and commonality, to political or cultural division, to rancorous debate, to increasingly bitter struggle for political power, to “othering” and dehumanization, to normalized violence, to bloodthirsty eagerness for war, to general armed conflict. We are already well into the latter stages, and even on the Right I see martial enthusiasm increasing: the hatred of the enemy, the idea that we are now so far beyond reconciliation that there is going to be a fight, and that we might as well get on with it (especially as we are the ones who will most likely win)…

RT: America Stumbling Towards Civil War One Terrible Tweet at a Time