Free Press Election Reporting

Let’s imagine that we’re buying a house for $100,000 with all pennies. That’s 10 million pennies. We begin saving them one at a time, picking up every penny we can. At the same time, another person wants the home and is taking action to stop our dream from coming true. They spend millions of pennies and every $10 they spend could prevent us from collecting one more penny. They enact new laws and another 2.5 million of our pennies no longer qualify. New lines on the map drawn by our opponent disqualify 10% of more of our pennies. Another 250 thousand cannot be used because they made poor spending choices previously. A quarter million pennies are ‘accidentally’ not counted. Our competitor uses media ads to boost their appeal and to falsely undermine ours. Finally, a foreign supporter of our opponent sways another 10% of our pennies away from us. 

The infamous gestapo-style assault on an Ohio anti-nuclear referendum is now headed to the Ohio Supreme Court. 

The pro-nuke campaign has featured widespread physical attacks against peaceful canvassers, as well as phone threats, pibery, signature-buying, a fake pro-nuke petition, a massive lie-filled PR campaign invoking the Chinese Communists, and more. 

The bitter battle has been sent by a federal judge to Ohio’s highest court, which is dominated by Republicans. 

Here are the key points ( a full-hour discussion can be heard at : https://greenpowerwellnessshow.podbean.com/e/solartopia-green-power-and-wellness-hour-outright-nuclear-fascism-in-ohio…be-very-afraid/)

X In July, the gerrymandered Ohio Legislature passed HB6, a massive bailout to keep two dying nukes operating on Lake Erie.

X Akron-based FirstEnergy is bankrupt, and says it will shut both reactors without the $1 billion promised by the bailout;

There is an existential threat to all democracies worldwide, a dark corruption, and sinister plot to rip the fundamental rights and duties of a developed civilization from the hands of the most vulnerable. The vicious beast of American exceptionalism (or exclusionism) has been caught in the hen-house of our governance. Evidence of it's racist, elitist, and over-entitled claw-mark's are all over our metaphorical "collective consensus;" our county-level ballot boxes.

The odds are now very strong that Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders will be the Democratic presidential nominee. New polling averages say they account for almost 70 percent of support nationwide, while no other candidate is anywhere near. For progressives who want to affect the news instead of just consume it, active engagement will be essential.

Had Friday’s 7.1 earthquake and other ongoing seismic shocks hit less than 200 miles northwest of Ridgecrest/China Lake, ten million people in Los Angeles would now be under an apocalyptic cloud, their lives and those of the state and nation in radioactive ruin.    

The likely human death toll would be in the millions. The likely property loss would be in the trillions. The forever damage to our species’ food supply, ecological support systems, and longterm economy would be very far beyond any meaningful calculation. The threat to the ability of the human race to survive on this planet would be extremely significant.     

The two cracked, embrittled, under-maintained, unregulated, uninsured, and un-inspected atomic reactors at Diablo Canyon, near San Luis Obispo, would be a seething radioactive ruin.

“The long dormant seeds of ‘bottom-up’ culture, evolutionally baked deeply into our DNA and our neurophysiological systems, are vibrantly reawakening.”

“When I asked Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, ‘What’s the next big thing on the web?’ He

replied that it was trust.”

“This tsunami of bottom-up thinking and behavior is causing a bigger paradigm shift than the inventions of writing or Gutenberg’s printing press because we’re already genetically primed for this by our millions of years of human evolution.”

So many trends today look toward the end of life as we know it—climate change, the huge gluttony of the super-rich who work together to transcend national boundaries in their pursuit of more money, more power, ultimately a global feudal system.

Joshua Douglas’ new book, Vote for Us: How to Take Back Our Elections and Change the Future of Voting, does not explain when it was that we had our elections or what we can vote for other than “us,” but it does provide a great survey of election reform efforts, who’s working on them, and what’s working, with a list of organizations at the back that you can engage with.

While voter ID laws have spread, the racist stripping of names from polls goes unmentioned, threats and intimidation by fascist presidential candidates would have been hard to address in a book that aims at fairness and balance between the two noble political parties, verifiability of counting is apparently not a major concern, and the unthinkable but widely understood reality that often each of the two approved choices is simply indecent must not be named, nonetheless useful and significant reforms are being made here and there in the United States.

Broward had technology in place to do better, but state law blocked its use.

Byline

Political grandstanding aside, the chaotic scenes and missteps from southern Florida’s recounts pose one question above all: Can its vote counting be more trustable?

The answer is yes. And the remedy is closer than almost everyone paying attention might realize, from reporters covering Broward County’s bungles; to bone-tired county officials in Palm Beach County where old ballot scanners overheated and had to be turned off; to rooms of political party observers watching round two of an already imprecise process—the numbing eye-balling of empty or ambiguous ballots; to voters across the state and county seeing slices of these spectacles on their TVs and digital devices.

A week ago, I received a call from Stacey Abrams’ lead attorneys. Our investigative team had “gold,” as they put it, for litigating the election: Expert analysis proving 340,134 voters were wrongly purged by her opponent when he was Secretary of State. Plus, we had, on camera, victims of the purge, including the 92-year-old cousin of Martin Luther King.

But I’m a journalist, not a campaign operative. I could only offer my reports and my affidavit filed in federal court in Common Cause v. Brian Kemp.

With Abrams no longer in the race for Governor, we are now free to open our files to her new voting rights group, Fair Fight Georgia.

As sure as death & taxes, the Trump Party means to steal today’s election.

From Florida 2000 to Ohio 2004 to Wisconsin/Michigan/Pennsylvania/North Carolina/Florida 2016, we’ve seen it all before.  Here are some sure signals: