#unhackthevote

I’m praying for them, you know. All of them. Not between gritted teeth but with a grace I’ve learned from spiritual allies. I pause to grace, close my eyes and send healing thoughts into the universe, praying those perpetrating crimes against humanity are relieved of their spiritual maladies. The RNC was hacked and the files are holding pols hostage. At some point, they’ll have to do what’s right. I pray it’s soon.

In the meantime, I’ve been studying how a dictator comes to power, and I’ve mapped it out in Five Easy Steps so we can all recognize the signs:

1. “LYING IS THE MESSAGE”: While reading David Frum’s brilliant and prescient essay in The Atlantic from January 30, 2017, in which he predicts what America will look like in 2021 in stunning detail if we do not resist, he quotes a Russian journalist named Masha Gessen. Gessen notes that “lying is the message,” and by that she means when a dictator lies with the ease of breathing it’s to “assert power over truth.” The first lesson I learned in 2016 from a member of the Resistance who grew up in Romania: “It starts with the silencing of truth.” Today, as each Network gave “Trumputin” facetime, we witnessed the blather of nothing. As Gessen told Deutsche Welle regarding Putin, “the former spy has remained in the Kremlin despite a declining economy, diplomatic isolation and nearly continuous allegations of corruption and human rights abuses because of his ability to ‘have words mean nothing. He just keeps talking… it’s meant to create the impression that he knows what he’s talking about. But it’s also meant to drown you in meaningless stuff.’” Hmm.

Read the David Frum “Atlantic” article here:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/03/how-to-build-an-autocracy/513872/

2. DISINFORMATION HIGHWAY: Now that we’ve established those with authoritarian leanings have no trouble lying about everything, the next step is to ensure the lies are amplified by the Disinformation Highway. A dictator utilizes multiple fronts to amplify lies: botnets, State News agencies, paid flacks and political loyalists/opportunists/consultants. There’s a lot of money in lies: as cognitive thinkers spend hours researching and refuting the lies, those on the corruption payola keep up the “theatre craft,” the tornado that creates the fog and the fury so beautifully described by Mike Mariani in Vanity Fair. Lying is a soulless gig. The truth always prevails eventually, but havoc is wreaked in the meantime.

To learn how the Kremlin creates chaos and to see if you can spot some right here at home, check out Mike Mariani’s Vanity Fair essay:

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/03/is-trumps-chaos-a-move-from-the-kremlins-playbook

3. POWER GRAB: As the lies, subterfuge and the hacks on State News chip away at truth, bite by bite, and the Disinformation Highway piles up with bumper-car bots, riding roughshod over facts, what is really taking place is the consolidation of power. While cognitive thinkers cry foul, unqualified, but extremely loyal henchman are being installed into power at the highest levels. Dictators rush to replace talent and integrity with toadies and sycophants, who share in common a history of shade but offer their leaders the assurance they’ll do their bidding at any cost. When one’s moral compass is already blinky, what’s another three, four acts of corruption. Pockets will be lined, and thus, the corrupted are banking on a soft landing. That is until, the dictators turn on them and then it’s flee or plea.

4. MAFIA STATE: When a government is comprised of members of organized crime that’s what’s known as “a mafia state.” In America, we haven’t been immune to corruption, but it’s always been countered by the fact that, ultimately, we are a country of law and order. But when a leader is cultivated, financed and backed by the mob, it gets sticky. As we watch Special Counsel Mueller and his team of prosecutors navigate their way carefully, indictment by indictment, guilty plea by guilty plea, to take down a global crime syndicate, we see how naïve America has been in thinking it couldn’t happen here. We are watching our allies being alienated and dictators being praised. This is what a mafia state looks like. When a leader casts shade on our top intelligence agencies, that’s the markings of a dictator, shaping a mafia state.

For more on how it’s done, read this Deutsche Welle explainer: https://www.dw.com/en/vladimir-putin-how-a-spy-rose-to-power-and-held-on-to-it/a-43030900

5. VOTER TAMPERING: Dictators need to control all outcomes and this includes the voting systems. A dictator ensures victory at the ballot box in myriad ways: intimidation, stuffing the ballot box, voter suppression, hacking voter rolls, redistricting, hacking electronic voting databases, hacking the machines, and using bot networks to blast voters with so much false information that they will either stay home or vote for the dictator who paid hackers to advertise directly to a voter’s preconceived biases. Cognitive thinkers know about the data breaches, but we still are at the early stages of understanding just how much this digital arms race, to quote digital activist Professor David Carroll, is harming Democracy everywhere. Stay vigilant, read the latest indictment from Team Mueller and know that if we show up in gigantic numbers at the polls, we may yet have a chance to salvage Democracy. 

Ohm.

***

Heidi Siegmund Cuda is an investigative producer, mother and activist. Her short film, “Rigged,” debuted at the 2017 Orcas Island Film Festival: http://www.orcasfilmfest.com/rigged

https://wapo.st/2FpUVhE

Justice officials were briefed months ago on allegations against operative at the center of N.C. election fraud scandal

By Beth Reinhard | January 11 at 9:51 PM EST | Washington Post | Posted January 12, 2019 |

Nine months before allegations of absentee ballot fraud tainted a congressional race in North Carolina, the state elections board gave officials from the Justice Department’s main office evidence that the political operative at the center of the scandal had used similar tactics in 2016.

On Jan. 31, 2018, the chief of the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, which oversees prosecutions of election crimes, met in Raleigh with state officials and U.S. attorney Robert Higdon, according to an elections board spokesman.

The following day, the state officials sent a public integrity lawyer an eight-page memo describing interviews with two campaign workers who said they were paid during the 2016 election to hand-deliver mail-in ballots to political operative Leslie McCrae Dowless. Under North Carolina law, only voters or their close relatives or guardians may deliver or mail in ballots. The memo also summarized interviews with three Bladen County voters who filed complaints saying those campaign workers had sought their ballots.

The meeting and follow-up email, obtained by The Washington Post under a public records request, are the first public indications that officials with the Justice Department in Washington were made aware of the allegations against Dowless. Dowless has emerged in recent weeks as a key figure in the absentee ballot scandal in Republican Mark Harris’s 2018 congressional bid. State elections officials and some voters have expressed frustration that federal prosecutors with the U.S. attorney’s office in North Carolina did not act more aggressively to pursue earlier complaints against Dowless and potentially stop him from working on campaigns.

Dowless worked for one of Harris’s campaign vendors, and the state elections board has declined to certify his narrow win in the 9th Congressional District amid allegations that ballot tampering may have affected the results. Dowless did not respond to messages seeking comment and has previously declined interview requests.

“I really expected something would be done about this,” said Linda Johnson-Baldwin, a retired principal and one of the three voters who filed complaints about absentee ballot collection in 2016. Told her complaint was shared with the Justice Department, she added, “I didn’t even know it went that far. So was anything done about it?”

A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment. An FBI spokeswoman in Raleigh did not return phone calls. A spokesman for Higdon also declined to comment. 

The other two voters who filed complaints, Brenda Register and Heather Register, who are not related, also said they never heard from federal law enforcement after giving interviews to state elections investigators.

Josh Lawson, general counsel for the state elections board, said he saw little indication that federal prosecutors pursued the Dowless matter. “Meetings did not result in prosecutions or substantial work in the district before the election,” he said.

Other emails obtained by The Post shed additional light on state elections officials’ entreaties to federal prosecutors and the FBI.

After the primary in May of last year, elections officials provided the FBI with records that they said suggested “new efforts by ‘MD,’ ” an apparent reference to Dowless. That communication was referenced in a reminder email Joan Fleming, a state elections investigator, sent to an FBI agent on Oct. 3, a month before the midterm election.

“For this election, Bladen County’s ABS requests are off the charts,” Fleming wrote to FBI agent Julia Hanish, using shorthand for absentee ballots.

The email address misspelled Hanish’s name, using two N’s, and it was unclear whether the email was received. An email sent to that address seeking comment bounced back.

After the November election, reports that unusually high numbers of mail-in ballots were requested in the county but not returned fueled questions about the integrity of the congressional election. State elections investigators have spoken with witnesses who link Dowless to the irregularities, people familiar with the probe have said.

Harris has denied knowledge of any wrongdoing by Dowless during the campaign.

The Jan. 31 meeting in Raleigh included a broad discussion of campaign practices in North Carolina, including the 2016 allegations in Bladen County, state elections board spokesman Pat Gannon said. The elections board had initially referred those allegations to the U.S. attorney’s office a year earlier, warning that those activities “if not addressed will likely continue for future elections.”

The email sent the following day included a transcript of Dowless’s testimony at an elections board hearing in December 2016. Dowless acknowledged that his campaign workers collected absentee ballots in violation of state law but said that he had not told them to do so and that he later ordered them to return the ballots.

On Feb. 28, 2018, state elections officials met again with federal law enforcement authorities to discuss suspicious campaign activities in Bladen County, Gannon confirmed. Hanish and two prosecutors from Higdon’s office attended the meeting.

Marshall Tutor, a state elections board investigator who worked with Fleming on probing election irregularities, said he thought the case referred to prosecutors was strong.

5% error rate shows Machine Count to matching hand count. This is how what little you do have is taken from you by those who defame and insult you and steal from your communities.