We Are Getting There...

I think it is a watershed moment when liberals go from reacting to news about Repuglican crap with "Oh my God..." (gasp) to "Oh my God, that again?" (eye-roll). We have reached that point (only 23 million Americans watched the president's speech, down from 34+ million when he spoke about Social Security).

Next phase will be "Oh my God!" (hysterical laughter).

Why Are You Fighting Your War on Terror, Here in Iraq?

I never, ever, supported the military overthrow of Saddam Hussein. And I have always believed that Bush entered Iraq for oil and revenge but not necessarily in that order. That he uses the overthrow of a dictator for invading one country while employing dictators in others (like Uzbekistan) illustrates his hippocritical political positioning. But let's say we take the BushCon argument at face value and look at what we've got; a dictator from an oil-rich nation deposed from a country in which America can fight a war against "Terror" with a somewhat supportive population. That's a pretty sweet deal from the BushCon perspective and it's why many American's terrified into stupidity of a terrorist attack in their own neighborhood can still support Bush.

Continue to connect 9/11 to Iraq (see this and this) and the one-two punch that delivered America to Bush (and corporate pay to play politics) will come through every time.

To break the punch's success we'll have to divide the punch in two; disconnect Iraq from the Holy War on Terror and 9/11. Not only by doggedly reiterating the obvious facts and evidence there were no WMD's, that Bush lied to start the war and how the strategy is failing in Iraq, but by using Iraqi supporters own sentiments to demand a withdrawal. Use Rove's own tactical strategy of setting up a conditional that once challenged creates a caveat the challenger must defend and by doing so must lose.

To this end I present Iraqis give mixed response to Bush vow to stay on:

"Grateful, in the main, for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, many are dismayed by what they see as heavy-handed tactics and a failure by the U.S. occupiers to prevent Iraq becoming a new haven for foreign Islamists in the chaos that followed Saddam.

'Why don't they find another place to fight terrorism?' asked Abdul Ridha al-Hafadhi, 58, head of a humanitarian aid group. 'I don't feel comforted by Bush's remarks; there must be a timetable for their departure.'"

Hmmm...that is a good question, isn't it...

Karl and Joe, Sittin' in a Tree, L - i - e -- i - n - g

I like to think I pick my blog posts like I pick my battles; gut shots. The kind that rip, shred and bloody; kill shots.

Karl Rove is one of my targets. My past posts about him drip with vitriol. He is my personal anti-christ. The Main Event. Without him, the whole Republican Neocon movement shrivels to the size of his dried black heart. So of course though I find this rather late-to-the-McCarthy-comparing-game column by E. J. Dionne low in timeliness, it is still gratifying.

Near the column's middle he makes some salient points that it takes nothing more than a scan of the last few years of Republican tactics to see are quite accurate. First, there is the Republican willingness to divide the country and destroy democracy to get power and keep it:

"The McCarthyites' real enemies were not communists but the New Deal liberals who had dominated U.S. politics for 20 years. The McCarthy crowd was willing to divide the nation at a time of grave international peril if that's what it took to beat the liberals."

Big -snip-

Then, after Rove derisively compares liberals to therapists Dionne writes:

...Rove knows how to play this game. The only evidence he adduces for his therapy charge is a petition in which the current executive director of MoveOn.org called for "moderation and restraint" in the wake of Sept. 11. Rove then slides smoothly from the attack on MoveOn to attacks on Michael Moore and Howard Dean. Finally, Rove tosses in an assault on Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) for his statement that an FBI report on the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, might remind Americans of the practices of Nazi and communist dictatorships.

In the ensuing controversy, Rove's defenders cleverly sought to pretend that there was nothing partisan about Rove's speech. "Karl didn't say 'the Democratic Party,' " insisted Ken Mehlman, the Republican national chairman. "He said 'liberals.' " It must have been purely accidental that one of the "liberals" mentioned was the Democratic national chairman and another was the Senate Democratic whip. It must also have been accidental that both of them, like most other liberals, supported the war in Afghanistan, not therapy. At the time, Durbin called the war "essential."

-snip-
And,

That's how guilt by association works. Make a charge and then -- once your attack is out there -- pretend that your words have been misinterpreted. Split your opponents. Put them on the defensive. Force them to say things like: "No, we're not soft on terrorism," or, "I'm not that kind of liberal." Once this happens, the attacker has already won.

And the most important evidence of Rove's malevolence, which was the above Big snip out of the middle:

Here are the key passages: "Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers. In the wake of 9/11, conservatives believed it was time to unleash the might and power of the United States military against the Taliban; in the wake of 9/11, liberals believed it was time to submit a petition. . . . Conservatives saw what happened to us on 9/11 and said: 'We will defeat our enemies.' Liberals saw what happened to us and said: 'We must understand our enemies.'"

That reiteration of 9/11--how many times?--at least four in only three sentences?--is a tactic that comes directly from the Frank Luntz Republican 2006 election strategy playbook.

In his foreward alone Luntz writes: "George W. Bush won because 9/11 had truly changed Anerica and because he accurately reflected America's resolve that the War on Terror has to be won. Not waged. Won. Voters concluded that while John Kerry could adequately manage a terroroist attack, it was President Bush who was more likely to prevent one," and "The events and aftermath of 9/11 may not have changed everything, but it certainly changed the outcome of the 2004 presidential race."

Karl must have decided that given the Iraq quagmire and Republican inability to beat back the truth about Iraq overall, if he wanted the job of keeping Bush's approval rating afloat done right, he would have to do it himself. After all Bush's rating affects House and Senate ability to control government and get elections in 2006. So he used 9/11, the ONLY event with enough broad-based emotional charge (i.e. fear) to cut through increasingly accurate and relentless liberal fire. And he linked it to liberals through distortions while linking Republican actions (equally distorted to the positive) to the party and by association, Bush.

Look at this and learn two things: the only correct response to the charges in his speech completely sidestep his liberal namecalling. Instead ask why, in the months preceeding 9/11, the Bush Vulcans were ignoring the briefings that practically begged their attention to this matter. And in every case when Republicans attack liberals go to the matter they are avoiding and drive their lack of accountability on it home.

And read the Luntz 2006 playbook! I know it's lengthy and not the whole gameplan but once you've absorbed it you can clearly understand the overall strategy they are using and so more easily answer Republican attacks on any subject.

The Repugs are in trouble and Rove's appearance is a sure sign. And remember this little tidbit from a Google searched piece about Joe McCarthy:

Once he was known from coast to coast as an enemy to Communism, money started pouring in. Some people sent him ones and fives, and some sent as much as $7,000 or even $10,000. To every donor, he sent a letter thanking the person for the donation and asking for more money to keep up "the hard and costly struggle against Communism." As it turns out, the fight against Communism was quite inexpensive, and most of the money went into his bank account and then into soybean futures or horse race bets. If anyone had dared to investigate this fishy situation, Joe's national prominence might have been ended. However, at that time, you were as good as Red if you attacked his reputation.

Today, most of us look at McCarthyism in a negative way, but in a nationwide poll, a full fifty percent approved of McCarthy and his methods, with twenty-one percent undecided. It is quite scary that half the American population approved of his tactics, when it was obvious that there were serious flaws in his methods. This poll shows that either a large portion of people in the 50's were quite gullible, or that Joe was an excellent demagogue. Both are probably true.

[UPDATE 6-29-05]

Don't lose sight of Rove's explicit liberal+"therapy" attack choice. Much of today's therapy successes have arisen from liberal and humanistic roots. Therapy--a course of action people take to overcome pathological self-destructive belief systems one can otherwise not overcome--is the chosen course for many to rational free thinking. By linking liberals to therapy he is attacking rationality, intentionality and free-thinking. He is suggesting liberals are weak and that therapy is a choice of the weak-willed.

Those with mental disease and therapy both fight terrible bias even in today's modern culture.

Attacks on therapy by control-addicts who think their pathology is rugged individualism (of the type that brings you corporal punishment of children, spousal abuse and invitational rape i.e. 'she asked for it', as well as religious extremism) comprise the winger portion of the Bush base.

You Knew They Were Lying About WMD's, What About 9/11?

Knight-Ridder has produced an illustrative overview of how the Downing Street Memo's verify what many of us saw as weird goings-on here in America. As you may remember, it always appeared as though Bush was speaking out of both sides of his mouth regarding peace (he wanted it) or invasion (it was all Saddam's fault) in Iraq. If he was willing to lie, twist, distort and cover-up this much about Iraq...what is he hiding about 9/11?

By mid-March 2002, a year before the invasion of Iraq, top British officials were already so resigned to a war that they seemed preoccupied mostly with building international support and finding a legal justification.

-snip-

Richard Haass, the State Department's director of policy planning, told an interviewer that in an early July 2002 chat with then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, he questioned putting Iraq at the center of the U.S. war against terrorism. He said Rice advised him "essentially, that that decision's been made, don't waste your breath."

-snip-

Moreover, they echo other accounts of Bush's determination to unseat Saddam, who once tried to assassinate his father.

Bush came into office with aides, including Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, who believed that the United States erred gravely by allowing Saddam to remain in power after the 1991 Gulf War.

Four days after the Sept. 11 attacks, during a crisis meeting at Camp David, Wolfowitz argued for attacking Iraq in response, as first recounted in journalist Bob Woodward's book "Plan of Attack."

Later that month, Wolfowitz helped arrange a trip by former CIA Director James Woolsey to the United Kingdom to look for evidence of an Iraqi role in Sept. 11.

Richard Clarke, at the time a veteran White House counterterrorism official, has written that Bush ordered him to look for the same evidence the day after the attacks.

-snip-

"Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy," Sir Richard Dearlove, head of Britain's MI-6 spy service, told Blair and his top advisers after talks in Washington, according to the first memo to be leaked. It was dated July 23, 2002.

US scrambling to establish a link between Iraq and al (Qaida) is so far frankly unconvincing," Ricketts reported earlier in his March 2002 letter to Straw.

In his own letter to Blair three days later, Straw also seemed to question the scale of the threat. "In the documents so far presented, it has been hard to glean whether the threat from Iraq is so significantly different from that of Iran and North Korea as to justify military action," he wrote.

-snip-

In yet another memo, Christopher Meyer, then Blair's ambassador to Washington, said he met with Wolfowitz on March 17, 2002, and discussed how to build support for military action. "I then went through the need to wrongfoot Saddam on the inspectors," Meyer reported to London.

The two governments discussed ways to craft an ultimatum to Saddam on U.N. weapons inspectors that he would be sure to reject, providing an excuse for war and a path to building international support.

Said Mann: "Going to the U.N. was always a box to be checked and a necessity for winning the support of the British government."

And Clinton was impeached for lying about a blow-job that came up during the trumped-up Whitewater scandal? Are you fucking kidding me?

Onward, Moderate Christian Soldiers

I know a definition of moderate Christianity and how it looks in political practice may have been written before and will be again, but kos found this link to an explanation by ex-senator John Danforth (a Republican and Episcopal minister). Although I have quoted less of it than kos I present a snippet. For my money Danforth's brief, elegant piece is the one I'll print and carry in my pocket to whip out at those handy moments when I'll need something with which to hit (or avoid hitting) the next Chrisitan wingnut that gets in my face...

"Moderate Christians are less certain about when and how our beliefs can be translated into statutory form, not because of a lack of faith in God but because of a healthy acknowledgement of the limitations of human beings. Like conservative Christians, we attend church, read the Bible and say our prayers.

But for us, the only absolute standard of behavior is the commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves. Repeatedly in the Gospels, we find that the Love Commandment takes precedence when it conflicts with laws. We struggle to follow that commandment as we face the realities of everyday living, and we do not agree that our responsibility to live as Christians can be codified by legislators."

Terri Schiavo Was NOT Aware or Murdered -- No Shit!

Daily Kos :: Schiavo autopsy press conference 11am est

INCOMING: Bush Run for Third Term?!

If this isn't a joke then we've entered the Tenth Ring of Hell, the one where Repugs rule forever because they own the election equipment AND Sensenbrenner, Hoyer sponsor repeal of 22nd amendment:

"The 22nd Amendment, Section 1. No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once."

[UPDATE 6-16-05] I'm taking some heat for posting this as it seems efforts to repeal the 22nd come up fairly often. Okay. I didn't know that. But I stand by my alarm because in case you haven't noticed shit happens now that in 2000 was unthinkable--do I need to make a list? No?

Just saying...it could happen.

Uncle Sam Wants Your Kids and 'No Child Left Behind' is Giving Them Up!

In an excellent article regarding military recruitment on area high school campuses, this week's Phoenix, AZ New Times writer John Dougherty gives insight on how this is happening and what you can do about it:

"Passed three months after September 11, 2001, the No Child Left Behind Act requires secondary schools receiving federal funds (which is just about every high school in the country) to provide military recruiters, upon request, the names, addresses and phone numbers of students."

--snip--

"The No Child Left Behind Act states:

'A secondary school student or the parent of the student may request that the student's name, address and telephone listing . . . not be released without prior written parental consent, and the local educational agency or private school shall notify parents of the option to make a request and shall comply with any request.'

My advice to parents is to forget about the forms provided by school districts. If you want a form to present to your child's district that blocks his information from getting handed over to the military but allows it to be given to the likes of colleges and scholarship funds, go to http://www.militaryfreezone.org/opt_out.

The time to act is now."

Here's the Military Free Zone opt-out link.

My Memory of Her Nips is a Blur...

As a proud owner of a pair myself I gotta tell ya, nipples rock (oh, and in case the nipple police hadn't noticed guys have them too, but the only ones that really offend people--of course--are the female kind).

Those hard (or soft), perky (or puffy), pink (or brown), long (or stubby) protuberances at the apex of a (gasp) breast (oh, my God) are natural, pretty damn tiny (given the entire mass of most women's bodies) and the last time I looked, incapable of murder, rape, bludgeoning, or even verbal abuse of others (or their owners). Somehow though, they are d-a-n-g-e-r-o-u-s. So dangerous that, unlike spectacularly colored entrails, exploding head wounds and gushing dismemberments, those little round flesh-colored nubs can NOT be seen on TeeVee by human eyes, even if those eyes are those of adults (even really old adults who probably could care less about pink anythings anymore).

I mean there is now (finally--phew) an electronic gizmo that can take the worry out of everybody's prurient little minds, that erases (well, blurs) those weapons pf mass destruction right off women's bodies. Damn, now women can be viewed as anatomically correct as Barbie dolls. Now that's scientific progress.

"'What we have are media executives coming around trying to suggest they should protect us from this, because they're trying to protect themselves,' says Mr. Jarvis. 'Is there really going to be an outcry? In fact, shouldn't the person who causes that outcry be embarrassed?'

Mr. Jarvis adds: 'At some point, I think this becomes a case for the National Organization for Women. Going back to Janet Jackson, when did people's lives get ruined by seeing a breast?'"

From The 'Lips' of Diebold Hackers: "Are We Having Fun Yet?"

From Black Box Voting we have this:

Tallahassee, FL: "Are we having fun yet?"

This is the message that appeared in the window of a county optical scan machine, startling Leon County Information Systems Officer Thomas James. Visibly shaken, he immediately turned the machine off.

Diebold's opti-scan (paper ballot) voting system uses a curious memory card design, offering penetration by a lone programmer such that standard canvassing procedures cannot detect election manipulation.

The Diebold optical scan system was used in about 800 jurisdictions in 2004. Among them were several hotbeds of controversy: Volusia County (FL); King County (WA); and the New Hampshire primary election, where machine results differed markedly from hand-counted localities.

New regs: Counting paper ballots forbidden

Most states prohibit elections officials from checking on optical scan tallies by examining the paper ballots. In Washington, Secretary of State Sam Reed declared such spontaneous checkups to be "unauthorized recounts" and prohibited them altogether. New Florida regulations will forbid counting paper ballots, even in recounts, except in highly unusual circumstances. Without paper ballot hand-counts, the hacks demonstrated below show that optical-scan elections can be destroyed in seconds.

A little man living in every ballot box

The Diebold optical scan system uses a dangerous programming methodology, with an executable program living inside the electronic ballot box. This method is the equivalent of having a little man living in the ballot box, holding an eraser and a pencil. With an executable program in the memory card, no Diebold opti-scan ballot box can be considered "empty" at the start of the election.

The Black Box Voting team proved that the Diebold optical scan program, housed on a chip inside the voting machine, places a call to a program living in the removable memory card during the election. The demonstration also showed that the executable program on the memory card (ballot box) can easily be changed, and that checks and balances, required by FEC standards to catch unauthorized changes, were not implemented by Diebold -- yet the system was certified anyway.

The Diebold system in Leon County, Florida succumbed to multiple attacks.

Ion Sancho: Truth and Excellence in Elections

Leon County Elections Supervisor Ion Sancho and Information Systems Officer Thomas James had already implemented security procedures in Leon County far exceeding the norm in elections management. This testing, done by a team of researchers including Black Box Voting, independent filmmakers, security expert Dr. Herbert Thompson, and special consultant Harri Hursti, was authorized by Mr. Sancho, in an unusual act of openness and courage, to identify any remaining holes in Leon County's election security.

The results of the memory card hack demonstration will assist elections supervisors throughout the U.S., by emphasizing the critical importance of accounting for each and every memory card and protecting access.

Findings:

Computer expert Harri Hursti gained control over Leon County memory cards, which handle the vote-reporting from the precincts. Dr. Herbert Thompson, a security expert, took control of the Leon County central tabulator by implanting a trojan horse-like script.

Two programmers can become a lone programmer, says Hursti, who has figured out a way to control the entire central tabulator by way of a single memory card swap, and also how to make tampered polling place tapes match tampered central tabulator results. This more complex approach is untested, but based on testing performed May 26, Hursti says he has absolutely no reason to believe it wouldn't work.

Three memory card tests demonstrated successful manipulation of election results, and showed that 1990 and 2002 FEC-required safeguards are being violated in the Diebold version 1.94 opti-scan system.

Three memory card hacks

1. An altered memory card (electronic ballot box) was substituted for a real one. The optical scan machine performed seamlessly, issuing a report that looked like the real thing. No checksum captured the change in the executable program Diebold designed into the memory card.

2. A second altered memory card was demonstrated, using a program that was shorter than the original. It still worked, showing that there is also no check for the number of bytes in the program.

3. A third altered memory card was demonstrated with the votes themselves changed, showing that the data block (votes) can be altered without triggering any error message.

How to "Roll over the odometer" in Diebold optical scan machines

Integer overflow checks do not seem to exist in this system, making it possible to stuff the ballot box without triggering any error message. This would be like pre-loading minus 100 votes for Tom and plus 100 votes for Rick (-100+100=ZERO) -- changing the candidate totals without changing the overall number of votes.

A more precise comparison would be this: The odometer on a car rolls over to zero after 999,999. In the Diebold system tested, the rollover to zero happens at 65,536 votes. By pre-loading 65,511 votes for a candidate, after 25 real votes appear (65,511 plus 25 = 65,536) the report "rolls over" so that the candidate's total is ZERO.

This manipulation can be balanced out by preloading votes for candidate "A" at 65,511 and candidate "B" at 25 votes -- producing an articifial 50-vote spread between the candidates, which will not be obvious after the first 25 votes for candidate "A" roll over to zero. The "negative 25" votes from the odometer rollover counterbalance the "plus 25" votes for the other candidates, making the total number of votes cast at the end of the day exactly equal to the number of voters.

While testing the hack on the Leon County optical scan machine, Hursti was stunned to find that pre-stuffing the ballot box to "roll over the odometer" produced no error message whatsoever.*

*We did not have the opportunity to scan ballots after stuffing the ballot box. Therefore, the rollover to zero was not tested in Leon County. This integer overflow capability is discernable in the program itself. We did have the opportunity to test a pre-stuffed ballot box, which showed that pre-loaded ballot boxes do not trigger any error message.

Simple tweaks to pass L&A test and survive zero tape

Though the additional tweaks were not demonstrated at the Leon County elections office, Hursti believes that the integer overflow hack can be covered up on the "zero tape" produced at the beginning of the election. The programming to cover up manipulations during the "logic & accuracy test" is even simpler, since the program allows you to specify on which reports (and, if you like, date and time of day) the manipulation will affect.

The testing demonstrated, using the actual voting system used in a real elections office, that Diebold programmers developed a system that sacrifices security in favor of dangerously flexible programming, violating FEC standards and calling the actions of ITA testing labs and certifiers into question.

In the case of Leon County, inside access was used to achieve the hacks, but there are numerous ways to introduce the hacks without inside access. Outside access methods will be described in the technical report to be released in mid-June.

Security concerns

Putting an executable program into removable memory card "ballot boxes" -- and then programming the opti-scan chip to call and invoke whatever program is in the live ballot box during the middle of an election -- is a mind-boggling design from a security standpoint. Combining this idiotic design with a program that doesn't even check to see whether someone has tampered with it constitutes negligence and should result in a product recall.

Counties that purchased the Diebold 1.94 optical scan machines should not pay for any upgraded program; instead, Diebold should be required to recall the faulty program and correct the problem at its own expense.

None of the attacks left any telltale marks, rendering all audits and logs useless, except for hand-counting all the paper ballots.

Is it real? Or is it Memorex?

For example, Election Supervisor Ion Sancho was unable to tell, at first, whether the poll tape printed with manipulated results was the real thing. Only the message at the end of the tape, which read "Is this real? Or is it Memorex?" identified the tape as a tampered version of results.

In another test, Congresswoman Corrine Brown (FL-Dem) was shocked to see the impact of a trojan implanted by Dr. Herbert Thompson. She asked if the program could be manipulated in such a way as to flip every fifth vote.

"No problem," Dr. Thompson replied.

"It IS a problem. It's a PROBLEM!" exclaimed Brown, whose district includes the troubled Volusia County, along with Duval County -- both currently using the Diebold opti-scan system.

This system is also used in Congressman John Conyers' home district, in contentious King County, Washington, and in Lucas County, Ohio (where six election officials resigned or were suspended after many irregularities were found.)

Diebold optical scans were used in San Diego for its ill-fated mayoral election in Nov. 2004.

- - - - - - - - - - -

Optical scan systems have paper ballots, but election officials are crippled in their ability to hand count these ballots due to restrictive state regulations and budget limitations.

The canvassing (audit) procedure used to certify results from optical scan systems involves comparing the "poll tapes" (cash register-like results receipts) with the printout from the central tabulator. These tests demonstrate that both results can be manipulated easily and quickly.

Minimum requirements to perform this hack:

1. A single specimen memory card from any county using the Diebold 1.94 optical scan series. (These cards were seen scattered on tables in King County, piled in baskets accessible to the public in Georgia, and jumbled on desktops in Volusia county.)

2. A copy of the compiler for the AccuBasic program. (These compilers have been fairly widely distributed by Diebold and its predecessor company, and there are workarounds if no compiler is available.)

3. Modest working language of any one of the higher level computer languages (Pascal, C, Cobol, Basic, Fortran...) along with introductory-level knowledge of assembler or machine language. (Machine language knowledge needed is less than an advanced refrigerator or TV repairmen needs. The optical scan system is much simpler than modern appliances).

The existence of the executable program in the memory card was discernable from a review of the Diebold memos. The test hacks took just a few hours for Black Box Voting consultants to develop.

Nearly 800 jurisdictions conducted a presidential election on this system. This system is so profoundly hackable that an advanced-level TV repairman can manipulate votes on it.

Black Box Voting asked Dr. Thompson and Hursti to examine the central tabulator and the optical scan system after becoming concerned that not enough attention had been paid to optical scans, tabulators and remote access.

Thompson and Hursti each found the vulnerabilities for their respective hacks in less than 24 hours.

"Open for Business"

When it comes to this optical-scan system, as Hursti says, "It's not that they left the door open. There is no door. This system is 'open for business.'"

The question now is: How brisk has business been? Based on this new evidence, it is time to sequester and examine the memory cards used with Diebold optical scans in Nov. 2004.

The popularity of tamper-friendly machines that are "open for business" in heavily Democratic areas may explain the lethargy with which Democratic leaders have been approaching voting machine security concerns.

The enthusiasm with which Republicans have endorsed machines with no paper ballots at all indicates that neither party really wants to have intact auditing of elections.

The ease with which a system -- which clearly violates dozens of FEC standards going back to 1990 -- was certified calls into question the honesty, competence, and personal financial transactions of both testing labs and NASED certifiers.

Revamp and update hand-counted paper ballot technology?

Perhaps it is time to revisit the idea of hand-counted paper ballots, printed by machines for legibility, with color-coded choices for quick, easy, accurate sorting and counting. We should also take another look at bringing counting teams in when the polls close, to relieve tired poll workers.