It Ain't Over 'Til It's Over

Yes, Election Day was yesterday and we still don't know who is going to be president for the next four years. Trump, of course, has claimed victory, based on the voices in his head, but they're still counting votes -- millions of mail-in ballots. For some reason, only a few states allow absentee/mail-in ballots to be counted before election day. The thinking behind that eludes me.

This is going to wind up in the courts. It's already been there, and that's going to be a big problem, now that the GOP has stacked the Supreme Court with Republican hacks. Digby has a post quoting extensively from an article by Ian Millhiser examining the legal landscape -- or at least, part of it:

Two significant legal events occurred last week that could determine whether the winner of the 2020 election actually becomes president. They could also shape American elections for years to come if the Supreme Court’s 6-3 Republican majority remains in place. The first was the confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett, which not only gave Republicans a supermajority on the Supreme Court, it also most likely made Justice Brett Kavanaugh the swing vote in election cases. While Kavanaugh’s approach to election law is extremely conservative, he’s staked out a position that is slightly more moderate than the views of his most conservative colleagues Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch.

The second event is that, last Monday, just minutes before Barrett was confirmed, the Supreme Court handed down a decision that prevents ballots that arrive after Election Day in the state of Wisconsin from being counted. Kavanaugh joined that decision, and he also wrote a separate concurring opinion that endorsed a radical reading of the Constitution that would upend at least a century of established law.

Briefly, Kavanaugh signaled that he wants to give federal courts — and his Court in particular — an unprecedented new power to overrule state supreme courts and to potentially rewrite state election law. Some of the implications of this view are discussed below, but the upshot is it means that Kavanaugh appears ready to change longstanding rules that have governed elections for a very long time.

That's bad enough, but it gets worse:

There is, however, a crucial question that the Supreme Court has yet to resolve. If the courts change the rules governing an election after voters have already cast their ballots, are voters who did not comply with these new rules disenfranchised, even if they followed the rules that were in place when their ballot was cast?

Three justices, Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch, have all claimed that voters who followed the rules that were in place when their ballot was counted can have their ballots tossed out anyway if a court later changes the rules.

ANd how long, do you suppose, before we dispense with holding elections at all, and just let the courts decide who our elected officials are going to be? American democracy -- it was fun while it lasted.

Anybody Can Do It

So who needs the Russians?

After the debacle of the 2000 presidential election count, the US invested heavily in electronic voting systems – but not, it seems, the security to protect them.

This year at the DEF CON hacking conference in Las Vegas, 30 computer-powered ballot boxes used in American elections were set up in a simulated national White House race – and hackers got to work physically breaking the gear open to find out what was hidden inside.

In less than 90 minutes, the first cracks in the systems' defenses started appearing, revealing an embarrassing low level of security. Then one was hacked wirelessly.

Of course, it's the wireless hacks that are the most worrisome:

It's one thing to physically nobble a box in front of you, which isn't hard for election officials to spot and stop. It's another to do it over the air from a distance. Apparently, some of the boxes included poorly secured Wi-Fi connectivity. A WinVote system used in previous county elections was, it appears, hacked via Wi-Fi and the MS03-026 vulnerability in WinXP, allowing infosec academic Carsten Schurmann to access the machine from his laptop using RDP. Another system could be potentially cracked remotely via OpenSSL bug CVE-2011-4109, it is claimed.

Greetings from the Defcon voting village where it took 1:40 for Carsten Schurmann to get remote access to this WinVote machine. pic.twitter.com/1Xk3baWdxv

— Robert McMillan (@bobmcmillan) July 28, 2017

OK, so not all these machines are in current use, but I'd like to point out that we've known about their vulnerability to hacking just about forever, and it doesn't look like anyone in the voting machine manufacturing business is too concerned. And I'm sure The Hairpiece isn't concerned -- at least until someone hacks in and flips his votes.

Final quote: In the words of former FBI Director James Comey, ‘They're coming after America. They will be back.’

Via Towleroad.

Today's Must-Read: The Russia Thing

Trump's meeting with Putin looks to be, from the few reports available (the meeting was limited to six people -- Trump, Tillerson, Putin, Lavrov, and two interpreters -- at Trump's request) a big win for Putin and a big disaster for the U.S. The reaction (on Twitter, of course, the current medium of choice for political commentary) is -- well, "appalled" seems to fit. Anne Laurie has a rundown at Balloon Juice. A couple of highlights:

Tillerson: "There was a very clear positive chemistry between the two...There was not a lot of relitigating things from the past."

— Jeff Zeleny (@jeffzeleny) July 7, 2017

Both the fence and the burglar agreed there was no need to relitigate who the TV belonged to.

— David Frum (@davidfrum) July 7, 2017

It gets better. The final tweet hits a key point, I think:

Not a "victory" if they're on the same side. Not a cyber "attack" if it's welcomed. The WH is aligned with Russia. We have to accept that. https://t.co/qL4Hecv7kf

— Brandon Friedman (@BFriedmanDC) July 8, 2017

It's much more than the White House being aligned with Russia. It's the fact that the Republican party has spent the last decade or more trying to destroy the American system of elections -- voter suppression, gerrymandering, you name it. Putin's interference in the 2016 election is a Republican wet dream, and right in line with their attempts to destroy the federal judiciary and now the press: they don't like democracy.

Today's Must-Read: Useful Idiots

Paul Krugman (and why has this man never been appointed to a high-level government position? We need someone like him.) lays it out:

On Wednesday an editorial in The Times described Donald Trump as a “useful idiot” serving Russian interests. That may not be exactly right. After all, useful idiots are supposed to be unaware of how they’re being used, but Mr. Trump probably knows very well how much he owes to Vladimir Putin. Remember, he once openly appealed to the Russians to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails.

Still, the general picture of a president-elect who owes his position in part to intervention by a foreign power, and shows every sign of being prepared to use U.S. policy to reward that power, is accurate.

But let’s be honest: Mr. Trump is by no means the only useful idiot in this story. As recent reporting by The Times makes clear, bad guys couldn’t have hacked the U.S. election without a lot of help, both from U.S. politicians and from the news media.

Let me explain what I mean by saying that bad guys hacked the election. I’m not talking about some kind of wild conspiracy theory. I’m talking about the obvious effect of two factors on voting: the steady drumbeat of Russia-contrived leaks about Democrats, and only Democrats, and the dramatic, totally unjustified last-minute intervention by the F.B.I., which appears to have become a highly partisan institution, with distinct alt-right sympathies.

He goes on from there, and no one gets away unscathed. Read it.

Footnote: The President's final press conference makes a nice coda.

Well, I Hope You Weren't Counting on an Honest Election

Thanks to the Supreme Court gutting the key section of the Voting Rights Act of 1965:

Federal election observers can only be sent to five states in this year’s U.S. presidential election, among the smallest deployments since the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965 to end racial discrimination at the ballot box.

The plan, confirmed in a U.S. Department of Justice fact sheet seen by Reuters, reflects changes brought about by the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision to strike down parts of the Act, a signature legislative achievement of the 1960s civil rights movement.

Voting rights advocates told Reuters they were concerned that the scaling-back of observers would make it harder to detect and counter efforts to intimidate or hinder voters, especially in southern states with a history of racial discrimination at the ballot box.

The Supreme Court ruling undercut a key section of the Act that requires such states to obtain U.S. approval before changing election laws. The court struck down the formula used to determine which states were affected.

"President Trump" is starting to sound not so farfetched.

Politico Nails It

I'm sure you've heard about the Senate Democrats finally growing a pair and filibustering all activity in the Senate until gun control amendments were brought to a vote. Well, the Turtle caved, and they're getting their vote. For what it's worth. Here's the headline from Politico:

 

Via Box Turtle Bulletin, where Jim Burroway thinks it's worthy of The Onion.

Election Day Link Dump

And it's really depressing. One of the first stories that I ran across today had the Republicans with a 70% chance of taking a Senate majority, since the Democratic party seems determined to shoot itself in the foot, which means two years of nothing happening in Congress at all -- unless, of course, the Great Negotiator in the White House caves. Again.

Meanwhile, Anti-Gay, Inc., is pulling out all the stops -- the rhetoric is now completely over the top, and the "religious" members are once again flouting the law.

And I have to go out and find my new polling place -- apparently, I'm not the only one. Happily, in Chicago the powers that be actually want us to vote, so I got a mailer with not only the address of my polling place, but a URL for early and absentee voting information -- in English, Spanish, Hindi, and Vietnamese (I think -- could be Chinese, but I tend to think Vietnamese because the major Vietnamese community is on the North Side, where I am; Chinatown's on the South Side). It was much easier when the polls were half a block away on the corner. That's what I get for moving. I meant to vote early -- there was an early voting location right on my usual bus route -- and kept forgetting until Saturday, when the wait time was an hour and a half to two hours. I know how I'm going to vote -- except for the judges. There are always a million judges up for retention, and I have no idea who they are and I kept forgetting to check the CBA ratings.

For some reason, there are a lot of ambulances and fire trucks going by this morning.

And it's cloudy, although we're promised sun later.

And I just feel like sitting around chain-smoking, even though I'm doing pretty well on cutting down and eventually stopping.

Gah.