More and better hacking
The Republicans are going full steam ahead on the voter suppression front, Ari Berman reports.
n a little-noticed 6-3 vote today, the House Administration Committee voted along party lines to eliminate the Election Assistance Commission, which helps states run elections and is the only federal agency charged with making sure voting machines can’t be hacked. The EAC was created after the disastrous 2000 election in Florida as part of the Help America Vote Act to rectify problems like butterfly ballots and hanging chads. (Republicans have tried to kill the agency for years.) The Committee also voted to eliminate the public-financing system for presidential elections dating back to the 1970s.
Thirty-eight pro-democracy groups, including the NAACP and Common Cause, denounced the vote. “The EAC is the only federal agency which has as its central mission the improvement of election administration, and it undertakes essential activities that no other institution is equipped to address,” says the Brennan Center for Justice.
Oh well, it’s only elections.
They’re not even pretending are they? Why aren’t the Democrats giving the GOP an absolute shit canning for all this? Why are they so damned restrained? At least, I presume they’re being restrained, we don’t see any media reporting to suggest otherwise.
It’s the Gish Gallup for politics: the Trump Administration and GOP legislature are throwing so much crap out so fast that some of it, no matter how indefensible, will escape a proper thrashing, just because the proper thrashing for any given item requires considerably more time, energy, expense, attention, and/or capital with the media than it takes the perpetrators to fling out.
We hear a lot about X or Y being a distraction from Z, but it misses the point that X, Y and Z are all of them both distractions and the things from which we are meant to be distracted. Our defenses against injustice and untruth are deliberately, intentionally, tactically overwhelmed by saturation bombardment.
To paraphrase Jeff, it’s a Blitz. “We” have given them the power to carpet bomb us, and they are using it to their complete advantage.
Despite election integrity being an issue I’ve put more effort into than any other over the past five years, I shed no tears at the passing of this agency. They weren’t doing the job. They couldn’t. It was just a facade presiding a corrupt system without integrity. This way there is no pretense that we have accountable elections with accurate results reported to the voters. We don’t live in a democracy when we don’t have honest elections and, at least in Kansas, we don’t have honest elections. You can see my website for more details and evidence about why I make that statement.