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mojowork_n

(2,354 posts)
5. Thanks, the part about the Bradley Foundation/UW-Madison/Milw. Journal-Sentinel.....
Thu Jun 7, 2012, 01:46 PM
Jun 2012

...was certainly interesting. From your first link:

About a year ago, we discovered that the far-right Bradley Foundation front, the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute (WPRI), made a deal to "partner" with the political science department at UW Madison. The Poli Sci department agreed to conduct WPRI polls with questions provided by WPRI. WPRI and Political Science agreed that the agreement and all polling would be outside the reach of open records laws. Incredible. Reporters who routinely use Open Records to get information wouldn't think of asking Marquette Law School about their brand new polling operation. Keeping all the relevant data outside the reach of the public is not pants on fire it is "building burning down!" And they agreed that a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter would have first crack at revealing the poll's results. A scoop so to speak.






....But I wasn't really thinking about the exit polling or the accuracy or possible bias of the poll takers; I was more
focused on how -- with more than 3 hours to go, while the polls were still open -- FAUX News could have come to
the conclusion that the race was over, and our side had lost.

...I was listening to Stephanie Miller on Chicago Progressive Radio (online),
earlier this morning, and got led back to a story that was posted here. From our friends
and neighbors over at the D.U. Minnesota Group:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1059686

I couldn't help noticing that the name, Kathy Nickolaus, popped up again in quite a prominent
role:

Forty-six Wisconsin counties and 3,000 voting machines are being controlled by a two-person company operating out of a strip mall in Minnesota

_snip_

Uh…down the hall from Michelle Bachman's campaign office


That's a whole lot of Wisconsin counties, 46. More than half the total, I'm pretty sure.
(How many do we have, 75?)

From that link in the Minn. Group:

In June 2011, the Wisconsin County Clerks Association held their annual summer conference in Ladysmith. Seventy-five county clerks from across the state came together to, among other things, “assist the legislators in developing sound legislation that affects county clerks and county government by providing accurate and useful information.” WCCA Legislation Committee chair at the time was Kathy Nickolaus.

....By law, voting machines must be publicly tested prior to every election. A Programmable Read Only Memory (P.R.O.M.) pack or cartridge is used to reprogram the machines with the details of the current election. Clerks receive two PROM packs from Command Central: A PRE-LAT, which is used a week or so before the election for the public test, and an “Official” pack used on Election Day. Whoever programs the PROM packs has the ability to inject all the machines with a virus that will flip votes only on Election Day. With two different PROM packs in play, it’s easy to see how public tests could be flawless and the machines could still flip votes Election Day.

In his report of his experience with the November 2010 gubernatorial election for Scott Walker, John Washburn, an election integrity investigator and professional software tester for almost 20 years, states, “I have been to dozens of voting system test sessions and have never seen any of this faux ‘testing’ actually test the voting system software correctly. This is the professional opinion of a software tester testing software since 1994.”


Which is a roundabout way of going back to my original question -- when it came to the signatures on all the recall petitions, it became open season for Tea Party volunteers to pore over the lists of names, to file away and do with whatever they chose, in order to "verify" the recall.

But it doesn't seem likely that anything similar will ever happen with the actual vote totals in the election. Touchscreen voting machines don't leave a paper trail and in the middle of last summer -- when the first round of recall voting had just started -- Kathy Nickolaus helped to push through a "new lamps for old" agreement through which that two-person company operating out of the strip mall near Michelle Bachman's campaign office supplied TWO touchscreen voting machines, for free, in exchange for ONE optical-scanner voting machine (1,500 of them, all together?), to 46 different Wisconsin counties.

.....Nah, nothing to see there. Let's just move along, shall we? (And move "forward" with our new/old political leaders. It's not as if any of them have been indicted for any fraudulent activity, yet, or been the focus of any actual criminal investigations. ...Oh, wait -- oops -- never mind.)


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