Dorkus Malorkus

Holy fücking batshit.  I can’t even begin to express how much this impresses me.

Obama Transition Team Adopts Ethics Rules – NYTimes.com:
By BRIAN KNOWLTON
Published: November 11, 2008

WASHINGTON — A top adviser to President-elect Barack Obama said Tuesday that the transition team would raise about $7 million to cover its costs, supplementing $5 million in government funds, but would reject donations from lobbyists or corporations and rely instead on the same pool of small donors who helped propel the Democrat to victory.

Seriously:  how amazing is this?

[Edit] P.S.  How’s THIS for change?  Look back three years to see how Bush’s team was handling fund raising.

Truthdig – Ear to the Ground – Not Exactly ‘AccuVote’: Diebold Machine Removed in Colo.:
So someone finally pulled their head out of their ass and did the only sensible thing:  they pulled the plug on a voting machine that wasn’t working right.

I can’t believe that it’s difficult to make an accurate voting machine.

How can these machines so consistently work in favor of Republican candidates?  In the years since these machines have been introduced, I’ve not seen ONE story that talks about a machine errantly voting in Democratic favor.  The ONLY story that didn’t blatantly vote Republican was the case of a Democratic vote going to Nader, instead.

Nader, I personally love that you’re trying to stick it to our broken two party system, but let’s face it:  your chances of winning are miniscule, and since you’re viewed to be similar to the Democratic party, your votes are essentially strengthening the Repulican party’s odds.

So, wtf?  How is it possible that these machines are all so broken?

• Diebold either used the absolute cheapest, unreliable touch screens known to man.  My iphone can sense my touches down to the size of about 1/4“ — the voting screen gives you a hugely generous two inch area to tap, and the Diebold machines can’t get that right?
• The software interpreting the sensors could be shit.  If that’s the case, it seems odd that they results always favor one party.
• Maybe the software responsible for registering the vote was written to cheat from it’s inception.
• Maybe there’s no tamper proof seals on the outside casing that’d tell poll operators that their machine’s been opened.
• Perhaps the OS is so insecure that it’s child’s play to modify the tabulation program.
• Or perhaps instead of lax security, we could have a perfectly secure OS/hardware solution that’s simply got a highly skilled attacker that’s done a lot of amazingly complex hacking on a large number of machines.  This doesn’t seem likely unless the attacker has ready access to a large number of pre-shipped machines; the hack could be in place upon arrival at the polling stations.

This all seems conspiracy worthy, but as this article points out, the Bush Administration is not above using tech companies that ”lose“ their emails for them.  Rather than use official government email accounts, they use the domains rnc.com and gwb43.com — two domains that have no public websites configured and are apparently used solely to avoid using the well backed up official government email domains.  That says nothing of the main point of the article, which alleges a 2004 Ohio vote hack.

First off, wtf is up w/ govt officials using non-standard email accounts?  The only reason they’d do this is to skirt the official (and archived) email systems.  Having worked for the Dept of Defense’s Defense Messaging System (DMS) Program Management Office (PMO), I know full well that there’s a system in place that allows them to encrypt their email so that only the recipient can decrypt it.  They’re either uncomfortable using DMS because it has a backdoor in it, or there’s no backdoor and they’re just ignorant that it can do this encryption, or they’re just doing some shady shit that they want to do completely outside the official domains.

So back to my point:  if the administration feels comfortable using a company that doesn’t have reliable backups of their email for their dubious unofficial domains, they’re either comfortable out of ignorance, or they never asked if there were backups, or they specifically chose a company that doesn’t DO backups.  Alternatively, they could have ordered that these backups be ”lost“ when the probes were applied, or the company just legitimately lost the email.  None of these situations is confidence inspiring.

Interestingly enough, the Republican party’s head IT guy is to appear in court on Monday, 24 hours before election day.  This is the guy responsible for the lost email and the alleged 2004 Ohio vote hack.  He’s being deposed to speak under oath about fixing an election.

Also, there’s some shady voter purging going on.  Colorado’s Republican Secretary of State, Mike Coffman, was court ordered to cease and desist his voting roll purge.  He apparently settled, but as part of the settlement, 20k voters will be allowed to vote, while the other 15k that he purged won’t.  All of this done within 90 days of an election, which violates the federal Voting Rights Act.

Ugh.  I feel dirty.