As Paul notes, the good folks up at the Albany Project, Lipris and Brian Keeler, are soliciting input for their new Wiki project dedicated to the state government. So I thought I'd contribute, and what do I know better than republicans in all their beady-eyed foolishness? Just in case I missed something, here's the manuscript.

Republican Party

The state-level offshoot of the well-known national criminal enterprise, headquartered at this writing in a picturesque opium den in Schenectady.

History

Founded in 1879 by a then-newly discovered tribe of cannibals living in the sewers of Manhattan, the republican party is also known by the acronym GOP. It is little known that this stands not for 'Grand Old Party', or 'Gross Ogling Perverts' as has more recently been argued with regard to the Foley scandal, but is rather based on a guttural cry first heard upon the discovery of the original cannibalistic tribe; in their secret speech, to this day only taught to initiates beginning at the State Assembly level, 'gwagwa ogog Pffzzt' translates as 'Let's redistrict them and spend their money'.

Bouldin has already linked to it, but I want to put in a special word for the TAPopedia. The folks over at the Albany Project have come up with such a good idea here, but the whole point is that it needs input from all of us.

Let's face it: there's woefully little out there in the way of systematic explanation of how Albany works and who its players are. TAPopedia gives us the opportunity to use open-source knowledge to explore every nut and bolt in the sausage factory, and to track every single legislator down to the most obscure freshman Assemblymember. Since so much of Albany's dysfunction results from its opacity, a tool like TAPopedia holds a lot of promise in the struggle to achieve transparency.

But it needs you! What do you know? Go and build!

It's an article of faith among many Progressive activists that electronic voting machines are a thing of evil, that these machines are somehow programmed to steal votes from Democrats, and that any and all Democratic election losses are directly attributable to this electronic menace. And who knows, this contention may very well be accurate.

The problem with this perception is the same as that afflicting the arguments of so-called "Intelligent Design" advocates, namely that faith-based assumptions rest on thin evidentiary reeds. Despite what is alleged to be a massive, nationwide and ongoing fraud that would constitute a federal crime, no successful court case has yet been brought, let alone litigated successfully, that would support the assertions of the Dieboldistas. Now, this may be because everyone is in on the conspiracy; but the more natural conclusion, and one more in line with Occam's Razor, is that this vast conspiracy does not exist. The test may very well be the litigation underway over the contested results in Fl-13. But as things stand today, the verified-voting crowd is setting up an argument which is essentially not falsifiable – "votes are being stolen in ways we can't see or verify", and that should, in my mind, offend the reality-based community.

My personal argument with the Dieboldistas is this: there is, as noted, a bit of a disparity between the fervor with which they advance their claims, and the underlying evidentiary record; and more importantly, by engaging in a small-bore faith-based conspiracy theory, they're discrediting and hindering a realization that should be manifest to everyone, namely that our system of elections is deeply and perhaps irredeemably flawed. I'd go further and say that the Diebold crowd, by positing fraud as the proximate cause of every problem with the electoral process, weakens the case that must be made for fixing the system itself. Ironically, they argue for fraud in exactly the same way that, as noted, advocates of "Intelligent Design" argue for their designer, as the root default cause that explains everything. Tin foil hats are fashionable across the political spectrum, it seems.

Hacking Democracy on Google Video

Ok, so our own Michael is going to kill me, for publishing this. I do want to say that verified voting is not going to be an issue in New York this election. It's the 10% of the nation who is using these machines that may get screwed, like in the battleground states of Florida and Ohio.

To me it's clear : Better to go armed with a heavy dose of skepticism and information than to go blinding trusting the current system to protect your right to vote.

If there are lawyers on the fence about whether to do pro-bono voting verification work in places like New Mexico, this should be enough reason for you to make the right decision : pack your bags and just go. A lot of elections across the country will need lawyers to contest the vote.

What do you think?

This post is for Marjorie Gersten, a local activist who has been sounding the drum here in New York City about the wretched misuse of the new HAVA laws. Laws that are supposed to extend the Voting Rights Act to protect the votes of the hadicapped are being used by Republicans to impose closed-source technology suitable for stealing elections.

Obviate some (not all) of the tin-hat foolery interspersed by the people of Pluri Media Group (no relationship, by the way, with ePubluribus Media), and what you get is a solid Lou Dobbs special report on how to steal elections this coming Tuesday.

The kicker? "Unfortunately for democracy, there is no paper trail with the new electronic voting machines, so a recount is impossible".