Continent of Europe on Strike

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/14/us-spain-portugal-strike-idUSBRE8AD00020121114

Many of you probably have heard by now that the whole continent of Europe is on strike. This includes services such as transportation as well. Many Americans have been mocking the Europeans, saying things such as "that's what you socialists and/or communists get for following that way of life."

Personally, I believe that is unfair to the Europeans for Americans (and those from other countries) to say that. Why? Well, it is because we have gone through a similar thing here in America not too long ago. The only difference is, Europeans are not willing to allow those in their governments to take advantage of them and take it lying down. They decided to do something about it.

This all started when banksters in Europe had done the same thing as American banksters had, which is to gamble with the people's money and lose it all, only to be bailed out with those same people's taxpayer money. This caused interest rates to go up, which in turn caused European's comfortable lifestyle to fall apart. Add to that the mortgage rates rising, and you have people being evicted from their homes from foreclosures, much like in America. I believe the death of the lady in Spain had put a fire under the Spainiard's behinds and made them rally together to say that enough is enough. The reason the Spanish woman had died? She was being evicted from her home, and she jumped to her death. If something like this had happened in America, would Americans take to the streets? Who knows?

Another reason the Europeans have gone on strike was because the unions feel they are in danger of being broken up. Well paid Europeans now have to compete with low paid workers in foreign contries as their jobs are being outsourced. Another mirror image of America, yet many Americans do nothing about this, be it protests or running for local government. It is easy to see why nobody has time to do these things, though. Many people struggle as they try to work two, sometimes even three jobs just to pay the bills. I do hope America doesn't see the collapse of its country as Europeans seem to be experiencing right now. The problems have been mounting for some time, so if there is a day where there is total economic collapse, I hope Americans will be brave enough, and passionate enough to make our voices heard.

Puerto Rico, the 51 state?

After the November elections, the American territory of Puerto Rico could become the 51 state in the country. Residents will be able to vote on whether they would like to remain a territory, become its own country, or merge into the United States to become the 51 state. Some believe that it will shift the balance of power in Congress, as Puerto Rico would gain two senators and one representative in the House. Citizens are pretty divided as far as their options are concerned.

Voting Rights Watch 2012

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/voting-rights-watch-2012#

US email voting scheme dubbed 'risky'

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20217810

Plans to let US citizens displaced by storm Sandy vote by email have been dubbed "risky" by security experts.

New Jersey officials have decided to let people displaced from their homes by Sandy vote via email as if they were living overseas.
The hasty decision has drawn criticism and forced election officials to put in place a postal backup plan.
Other problems are emerging as some voters report that email inboxes set up to gather votes are already full.
Horror show Tweets from some US voters reveal that email votes sent to inboxes in the Essex and Morris counties in New Jersey are being bounced back. Essex Country is the third largest county in New Jersey.
"It's really maddening," Jason Tanz, an editor at tech news magazine Wired, who lives in Essex County, told Buzzfeed, adding that the state's officials had a duty to make sure the email voting plan worked.
Flood waters meant many had to abandon their homes, and others left because they had no electrical power. In addition public transport in New Jersey has been disrupted and roads are hard to navigate because of the storm.
New Jersey residents can take advantage of e-voting by emailing or faxing a request for an absentee ballot. These are more usually used by US military and diplomatic staff based overseas, expatriates and travellers who are out of the country on election day.
Massively expanding email voting and squeezing it into a tight timetable was a "risky" measure, said security expert Matt Blaze in a blogpost.
"The security implications of voting by email are, under normal conditions, more than sufficient to make any computer security specialist recoil in horror," he wrote. Email was not, by its very nature, "authenticated, reliable, or confidential", he said,
The big problem that was likely to catch out New Jersey officials was the sheer number of people that wanted to take up the option, he said.
"Systems that work on a small scale almost never work without significant change at a large scale," he said, adding that he had doubts about whether email votes would be secured against "tampering and loss" either by corrupt officials or hackers.

Problems at polling stations have meant a long wait for some US voters

Motivated attackers could also target email inboxes with attacks that bombarded them with data and made it impossible to send in a vote.
Mr Blaze's comments were echoed by Princeton computer scientist Prof Andrew Appel, who said net voting was "inherently insecure" and that email was the "most insecure form of internet voting". Prof Appel also said using email voting meant citizens had to surrender their right to make a choice anonymously.
Fears about the security of email voting led New York to abandon plans to use it.
In a bid to allay some fears about email voting, New Jersey officials said anyone who votes electronically must also send in a paper ballot recording their preference.
Pam Smith, of the Verified Voting Foundation, which opposes any use of e-voting that does not involve a follow-up paper vote, said there was a better option for those that could not get to their designated polling station.
"You can vote at any polling place in New Jersey and you won't lose privacy," she said.

In Tight Race, 11th-Hour Voter ID Laws, Suppression Could Decide Ohio and Other Swing States

http://www.democracynow.org/2012/11/5/in_tight_race_11th_hour_voter

With the presidential election just one day away, 11th-hour Republican voter suppression could swing the critical battleground state of Ohio for GOP nominee Mitt Romney. On Friday, Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted issued a last-minute directive which could invalidate a large number of legal provisional ballots by placing the burden on the voter to correctly record the form of identification provided to election officials. Over the weekend, long lines were reported across the state as voters braved cold weather to line up for hours at the polls. Even longer lines were reported in Florida, where early voters waited for up to six hours to cast their ballot. We’re joined from Cleveland by Ari Berman, contributing writer for The Nation magazine and author of "Herding Donkeys: The Fight to Rebuild the Democratic Party and Reshape American Politics."

*Includes transcript and video*

After Sandy, Occupy Movement Re-Emerges as Relief Hub for Residents in Need

 http://www.democracynow.org/2012/11/5/after_sandy_occupy_movement_re_emerges

In addition to the National Guard and FEMA, one of the more active relief efforts in New York City has been a volunteer effort organized by alumni of Occupy Wall Street called Occupy Sandy Relief. Along with groups like 350.org and Recovers.org, Occupy activists quickly mobilized hundreds, and then thousands, of people to help affected areas of New York City. Democracy Now! senior producer Mike Burke speaks with Occupy organizer Catherine Yeager in the Rockaways about Occupy Wall Street’s transformation into Occupy Sandy Relief.

Pro-Romney Firm's Purchase Of Voting Machine Company Raises Alarms

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/23/pro-romney-firm-voting-machines_n_2006697.html
by: Dan Froomkin

A private equity company run by fervent supporters of Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney bought the third-largest voting machine company in the country last July, raising concerns about the appearance of impropriety, if not the possibility of impropriety itself.
Apprehension that Romney supporters could be literally buying votes has been burbling on left-wing blogs since Freepress.org, an alternative website based in Columbus, Ohio, reported late last month about H.I.G Capital's purchase of Hart Intercivic.
H.I.G. Capital is a Miami-based private equity fund that manages $8.5 billion in capital. Hart Intercivic is a company exclusively in the business of manufacturing and programming voting systems.
Charles Sipkins, a crisis communications consultant serving as spokesman for H.I.G., told The Huffington Post on Monday that "Hart InterCivic has a long track record of supporting a fair and open democratic process." He added: "Any suggestions that the company might try to influence the outcome of election results are unfounded.”
But there are elements to the story that nonetheless alarm election experts.
H.I.G. Capital's co-founder, Anthony Tamer, previously worked at Bain & Company, the global consulting giant where Romney was once CEO. Eight of the company's managing directors came from Bain as well. Tamer and his wife are major Romney donors, having each contributed $50,000 to the pro-Romney super PAC Restore Our Future. Tamer has also donated $75,000 to the Romney Victory Fund.
And Tamer has plenty of company at H.I.G. Although it isn't a particularly big firm, H.I.G.'s directors have collectively given so much money to Romney that their company is the sixth biggest contributor to all Romney committees, as calculated by opensecrets.org.

Almost all of their 2012 contributions, in fact, went either to Romney or to the Republican National Committee.
Hart Intercivic, meanwhile, provides voting machines for 370 jurisdictions around the nation, with about 17.7 million registered voters.
One of the jurisdictions with Hart Intercivic equipment is Hamilton County -- which includes Cincinnati, the third-largest city in the hotly contested swing state of Ohio.
Election experts say that because Hamilton County -- like many but not all jurisdictions using Hart Intercivic machines -- requires paper trails and random post-election audits, it is exceedingly unlikely that a voting machine company could get away with manipulating results, even if it were to take the extraordinary step of trying to do so.
But several critics of the country's privatized and lightly regulated vote-counting system criticized the purchase nonetheless.
"This is just not passing the smell test at all," said Bev Harris, founder of the nonprofit election watchdog, BlackBoxVoting.org. "They're Romney guys."
She said Hart Intercivic machines are considered among the more hackable -- but that's not really the point here. "There is no way to secure a system from its administrator," she said.
"There are thousands of venture capital and private equity firms," Harris said. Why then, she asked, would one of the very few major voting companies in the country fall into the hands of a firm that happens to be associated with a presidential candidate?

"I think it looks bad," said Larry Norden, an election expert with the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. Actually trying to steal the election "would be pretty risky," he said. "That's not to say it couldn't be done."
More critically, he said, "it points to some of the problems with having private companies essentially running our elections."
Companies that are actively partisan would ideally not own voting machine companies, he said. "But if you're going to have private companies owning these machines and programming them and essentially counting the votes, it's really hard to start drawing these lines."
Pam Smith, president of the election watchdog VerifiedVoting.org, questioned the timing. "If a company's going to do that, that's the kind of thing you do after an election, not before," she said. "You don't just want to avoid impropriety. You want to avoid the whiff of impropriety. So why would you want to give rise that something that could generate doubt in the outcome?"
Smith said she's still not particularly concerned about Hart Intercivic. Her concern is over any equipment from any company that doesn't leave an auditable trail. "We need systems and rules in place that makes it irrelevant who owns the voting machines," she said. "Some of them are recountable and some of them are not. And that's the situation that's really unacceptable."
According to Verified Voting, there are 118 jurisdictions with as many as 7.8 million registered voters whose votes are counted by Hart Intercivic machines that produce no paper records whatsoever -- in other words, no way to make sure they've been counted properly. That includes jurisdictions in Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia.
One aspect of the story, as it has evolved online, ties H.I.G. to Solamere Capital -- a private equity fund founded by Romney's eldest son Tagg that serves as a de facto subsidiary of the Romney campaign.
But Sipkins told HuffPost that there is no connection at all between Solamere and Hart Intercivic. "Solamere has invested in a certain H.I.G. Capital fund," he said. "Solamere has no interest in the specific H.I.G. fund that invested in Hart Intercivic." He added that Solamere's total investment in H.I.G. represents 0.05 percent of H.I.G.'s total assets.
Sipkins wouldn't say what prompted H.I.G. to acquire the voting machine company. A contemporary press release quotes Neil Tuch, a managing director of H.I.G. who is now on Hart's board, as saying: “Hart InterCivic is a well-positioned, high-growth company with a great future."
The story is somewhat reminiscent of the time in August 2003 when Walden W. O'Dell, the chief executive of the then-voting machine giant Diebold, Inc., sent an email to would-be donors to President George W. Bush's reelection campaign, saying he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.''