Republicans Muzzling the People’s Will by Suppressing Ballot Initiatives

by Brian T. Lynch, MSW

A ballot initiative process gives direct power to the voters to enact new, or change existing laws. It allows ordinary citizens to bypass their legislators by placing their proposed legislation directly on the public election ballot. These proposed initiatives first have to meet states’ qualifications regarding the number of petition signatures required and other criteria required by state laws.

This century-old fixture of American democracy allows voters to defy the wishes of their state’s representatives. In states now dominated by Republican-led legislatures, Democrats and independents have had recent success in passing broadly popular laws that are opposed by Republican legislators and governors.

The New York Times is running a story (5/22/21) about how state Republican legislators have begun passing new laws to limit or dismantle the ballot initiative in their state. This is part of a broader Republican agenda to suppress majority rule and cease permanent government control. Here is an excerpt from the article:

“But this year, Republican-led legislatures in Florida, Idaho, South Dakota, and other states have passed laws limiting the use of the practice, one piece of a broader G.O.P. attempt to lock in political control for years to come… So far in 2021, Republicans have introduced 144 bills to restrict the ballot initiative processes in 32 states… Of those bills, 19 have been signed into law by nine Republican governors. In three states, Republican lawmakers have asked voters to approve ballot initiatives that in fact limit their own right to bring and pass future ballot initiatives.”

Republicans lost the Presidency and control of the Senate in a massive voter turnout election. The people of America have spoken loudly, and they don’t like it. They pulled out all the stops and didn’t expect to lose. The manner in which they have conducted themselves before and since the election has tipped their hand to reveal their real intent. Their only goal is to suppress majority rule so they can take permanent control over the federal government. They have accomplished this in many states. These states served as models of how a federal takeover can be done. A critical piece of the plan was put in place when Mitch McConnell succeeded in packing the federal bench and the Supreme Court with sympathetic ideologues.

This was supposed to be the election to take over our republic. It was their only agenda. They literally didn’t have any party platform to run on. They offered no policy initiatives, no vision statements for how they would govern, no critical issues that might distract Trump’s carefully curated base from their cult-like trance. Now their decades-long plans for totalitarian control are out in the open, even as they try to cover their tracks. It won’t work. Everyone sees clearly what they are up to and how they are doing it.

This assault on state ballot initiatives described in the NY Times article details their attacks on the majority will of the people in their state. The “Anti-Republican” movement has opened yet another front in their battle to dismantle our democratic rule. We cannot let them win. We must not allow the United States of America to become a totalitarian country.

Securing Elections in the State of New Jersey is a Small Price for Democracy

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LET'S DEMAND SECURE VOTING MACHINES NOW! 

Picture credit: Philadelphia Inquirer 

New Jersey has the 5th least secure voting system in the country. Given the massive loss of confidence in US elections following the last election, the $60 to $80 million it would take to replace our e-machines with voting machines that produce a paper trail is essential. Let's not give conspiracy theorists or election hackers a foothold in questioning or tampering with our elections in New Jersey. 

HISTORY

N.J. was going to have paper-based voting machines more than a decade ago. Will it happen by 2020? - from The Philadelphia Inquirer from March 10, 2019. 

"New Jersey was once at the vanguard of voting security. In the mid-2000s, it became an issue thanks to a major lawsuit from voters. The state Legislature in 2005 passed a law requiring that machines allow voters to verify paper ballots by 2008, then required audits of those paper trails. It even set aside $20 million in funding to retrofit machines to print records."

"Instead, the governor took back the money as the recession struck; lawmakers suspended the requirement to buy new machines; no funding has materialized since."
"Now, as the 2020 elections draw ever nearer, a handful of counties are replacing their machines, some of them two decades old. Others will continue to rely on current systems, waiting for federal or state funding before undertaking the costly, time-consuming upgrade to protect citizens’ votes."

PRESENT-DAY 
N.J. among nation’s worst in making sure elections are secure. Why haven’t we fixed that?
Updated May 15, 2021; Posted May 15, 2021 - by Jonathan D. Salant | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

"After President Donald Trump and his Republican allies singled out Georgia and Arizona in falsely claiming that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, both states recounted their votes and found no significant problems."

"That’s not so easy to do in New Jersey after each election. It’s one of just six states that do not require a paper trail that allows election officials to check that voting machines were not hacked and the results not tampered with." <snip>

"While New Jersey could do an audit last year because so many ballots were cast by mail, that was a one-shot deal due to the coronavirus pandemic. Going forward, the Garden State will remain an outlier unless the state comes up with the estimated $60 million to $80 million needed to replace county voting machines."

“That’s totally the problem,” said Eileen Kean, a Monmouth County elections commissioner. It’s really a very, very expensive undertaking. Voting experts said that a paper trail will do more for election security than all of the voting restrictions being enacted by Republican state legislatures, including both Georgia and Arizona."

FUNDING DEMOCRACY IN NJ

How can we fund $80 million for secure voting in NJ? The NJ annual budget is about $60 billion dollars. Funding a safe and verifiable voting process would cost 0.0013% of the annual budget. It isn't a question of not having enough money, it is a question of priorities. There are lots of no-sweat choices we can make. For example, we can pay for safe elections through a one-time dip into property tax rebate revenue.
According to the 2021/22 NJ budget, the appropriations for general revenues and property tax relief are up 9.6%, or $2.873 billion. About $1.2 billion is budgeted for property tax relief. Just 6.7% of that money could be used to buy verifiable voting machines. That would still leave $1.12 billion for property tax relief next year. 

And while we are at it, the distribution of the one-time $80 million debit could be progressively shared to make this tax rebate fairer. 

There is a "... divergence in spending on programs offering targeted help to those who need it most and on tax breaks for homeowners no matter their income is largely a function of separate policies that have been put in place over the years for each relief program. But the current trend for divvying up the more than $1.2 billion in annual funding for the relief programs comes as Murphy, a first-term Democrat, regularly talks about enacting fiscal policies that will make New Jersey “stronger and fairer.”  - New Jersey Spotlight - Sept 6, 2020 

If you believe that securing our elections during this national threat to American democracy should be a much higher priority, then: 

1. Share this FB post widely among your friends and with the FB groups to which you belong.

2. Write or call your state representatives and ask them to support Vincent Mazzeo's bill, A291) that would require counties to replace their voting machines and buy machines that produce a paper trail. 

3. CONTACT Gov. Murphy's office and demand that he makes it a priority to secure the vote in New Jersey https://www.nj.gov/governor/contact/all/

OR CALL or write the Governor's office directly: 

Governor Phil Murphy's Office
225 W State St, Trenton, NJ 08625

(609) 292-6000

Thanks.

Vote-by-mail is NOT Safe From Executive Power

by Brian T. Lynch, MSW

I have a different view on mail-in ballots than most. Yes, it has been safe and very beneficial in the past. The question is how safe is an election against a determined attack by a ruthless potentate? That is the question we must answer. The potential vulnerabilities of vote-by-mail against threats by the Executive Branch to undermine or discredit an election are very significant. Elections are state functions.

Each state has full constitutional authority and autonomy to conduct its own elections. There are no national elections in the United States. That is perhaps the most fundamental separation of power in the Constitution that most of us don't think of when we think of checks and balances.

To the extent that a state relies on the US Postal Service to handle state election ballots, it surrenders some of that autonomy to the federal government. It is a massive vulnerability because the U.S. Postal Service is under the direct control of the Chief Executive, Donald Trump.

We have already seen moves by the President to exploit this vulnerability when he installed an acting Master General, Louis DeJoy, on June 15, 2020. DeJoy was a top fundraiser for Donald Trump and the Republican National Party and a stalwart ally of the President. DeJoy is the first Postmaster General in 20 years with no prior experience at the U.S. Postal Service. He was president of LDJ Global Strategies, a Greensboro, North Carolina-based, boutique firm with interests in real estate, private equity, consulting, and project management.

When DeJoy began his tenure as 75 Postmaster General, he immediately began implementing sweeping changes to USPS operations in the face of backlash from unions, employees, and lawmakers. USPS announced a reorganization and corresponding executive shakeups that have already degraded the reliability of the USPS. Congress has expressed concern that new Postmaster DeJoy was consolidating power within the organization. The net effect has been slower mail delivery and a growing fear that the USPS will not be able to handle the great volume of mail that is expected due to huge numbers of mail-in-ballots.

When President Trump says that mail-in-voting will create a mess in this election, that isn't a prediction... it is a direct threat by a man who is already acting to deliver on it.

And that isn’t the only vulnerability of mail-in voting. But focusing on the US Postal Service, there are a number of things that could help mitigate the threat of missing or late ballot deliveries. Proper handling of mail-in voting by mail might alleviate the vulnerability.

Maintaining the chain of custody
All mail-in ballots could be sent by certified mail with a return receipt request. Currently, the normal chain of custody in a state election is maintained in most states. Pickups by postal workers break that chain of custody. There is no proof that your ballot was picked up, and not stolen out of your mailbox, or from a mail drop. There is no way to track your envelope or ensure it has been delivered.

If your ballot is misplaced before it is date stamped at the Post Office, there is no way to prove you sent it before election day. If the USPS is going to play a vital part in a state election, vote-by-mail ballots should all be handled as certified mail, at no cost to the voter. Congress should allocate money to the US Postal Service to defray the cost to certify every mail-in ballot.

Additionally, every state board of election office collecting and processing the ballots should receive an electronic list of who has mailed every ballot being sent by certified mail. When the ballots are received at the Boards of the election, the return receipts and mail-in ballot should be timestamped as having been received in the office and the verified delivery cards returned to the voter. This would go a long way in securing vote-by-mail ballots.


Postscript from 8/13/2020. Trump says it out loud:

Why Democrats (and Everyone) Should Care About People Who Don't Vote

by Brian T. Lynch

Both political parties in America, along with virtually all television pundits and political opinion polling companies focus entirely on 60% of likely voters. We all ignore 40% of potential voters who don't vote. Polling surveys commissioned by both the Democratic and Republican Parties are always predicated on some variation of likely voters. The results are then grise for the mill of television and newspaper commentators and political party prognosticators. And so it is settled wisdom that all of our elections boil down to 7% of likely voters who are also the swing voters among us. Rightly or not, these much fawned over swing voters are considered most independent voters with centrist political ideology. These swing voters have a disproportionate influence over electoral strategies and policy positioning. As a result, we never hear much about the 40% of all Americans who are disillusioned with politics.

The conventional wisdom is that these non-voters don't care about politics, but it is equally true that the body politic doesn't care about these non-voters. We have come to the point where non-voters are the largest block of eligible voters in America. But are they really unreachable? Or are they justifiably disengaged because they are neglected by both the Democratic and Republican Parties? What is the potential for re-engaging this huge block of the electorate, and which political party has the most to gain? Which of our current Presidential candidates have the best shot at reaching out to these non-voters? And who are they anyway?

Why Democrats should care more about non-voters than swing voters

·      Among likely voters, there are about 10 million swing voters or 7% of all likely voters according to Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight

·      There were 91.7 million non-voters in the 2016 presidential election or 40% of all eligible voters. Non-voters are the largest group of eligible voters

·      54% of non-voters (49.5 million votes) are Democrats or left-leaning non-voters

·      Another 10% of non-voters (14.7 million votes) have no political leaning

·      52% of all non-voters (47.7 million votes) want more government services, not less

·      The 64.2 million non-voting Democrats, left-leaning or neutral eligible voters represent over 6.4 times the number of swing voters in the 2016 election

·      This compares with 65.9 million Democratic votes for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election

Who are the eligible voters that are not engaged in voting?

·      66   million non-voters (72%) are under age 50. They are mostly younger voters

·      59.6 million non-voters (65%) are dissatisfied with the way things are in the country

·      54.1 million non-voters (59%) are White (non-Latino) citizens

·      19.3 million non-voters (21%) are Latino citizens

·      11   million non-voters (12%) are Black citizens

·      55  million non-voters (60%) either graduated or dropped out of high school

·      54.1 million non-voters (59%) are single

·      46.8 million non-voters (51%) experienced unemployment in their household in the prior 12 months

     39.4 million non-voters (43%) have household incomes of $30,000 or less per year

      By far, the largest number of eligible non-voters are people who once made up the base of the Democratic Party. They are citizens for whom the rightward and upward shift of both political parties over the year has left them without a voice in government. It is not only the right thing to do to reconnect with these less-fortunate Americans, but it is also in the best interest of the Democratic Party and the Nation. These disillusioned, often angry citizens are most vulnerable to the nationalistic authoritarian appeals to which they are being targeted every day. 

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Micro-targeting: How Personal Data Stolen From Facebook Helped Elect Donald Trump

by Brian T. Lynch, MSW

In the spirit of "past as prologue", I offer this brief review of how the newest high-tech cyberwarfare techniques were successfully used by the Trump campaign in 2016 to win the electoral contest despite nearly three million fewer popular votes.

Imagine a world in which corporations, political organizations, billionaires, and hostile governments had the computing power, data storage capacity, personal information about you (think Facebook), and sophisticated computer algorithms to accurately predict your behavior. What if they could predict the behavior of every adult in the United States? Then imagine they could find you on social media by filtering the entire US adult population according to the specific personality characteristics they compiled on everyone. And after identifying you by your personality, imagine that they could flood your personal media accounts with specific messages and images designed to trigger your emotions, alter your opinions, or fundamentally change your social outlook without you catching on that this is happening to you.

This science-fiction horror scenario, reminiscent of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers movie years ago, isn’t science fiction. It is the real world in which we live today.

What the above scenario describes is “micro-targeting.” It is just one of the latest high-tech propaganda weapons manipulating our personal information against us. It was first unleashed in this country by Cambridge Analytica during the 2016 Presidential election campaign, but it was previously used by them in Great Britain during the Brexit campaign. It has also been used in numerous other foreign countries during their elections. It is a certainty that micro-targeting will play a much bigger role in the 2020 election cycle.

Cambridge Analytica was a British political consulting firm that combined data mining, data brokerage, and data analysis with strategic communication during the electoral processes here and abroad. Public scrutiny that followed them after their schemes were later uncovered force the company out of business, but their successful application of micro-targeting and other sophisticated propaganda tools triggered an arms race among big businesses and powerful interest groups to master these new technologies and apply them for both competitive advantages and political control.

There is a 2019 documentary currently available on Netflix that chronicles the story of Cambridge Analytica and how our personal data is being stolen from us and used against us. It’s called “The Great Hack,” and everyone should see it after reading this. There are also many other articles now about micro-targeting and other propaganda technologies being adopted by corporations and political consulting companies. My limited purpose here is to give a concrete example of how micro-targeting was used in the 2016 Presidential campaign.

In 2016 Cambridge Analytica stole the personal data of 50 million US Facebook users to create their giant database. They fed this data into very sophisticated AI-enhanced algorithms (mathematical computer programs) to create very accurate “biopsychosocial” personality profiles on every person from whom personal data was stolen. From these profiles, they were able to accurately identify adults in the United States who either didn’t have strong political opinions or were otherwise susceptible to having their minds changed. They called these people the “persuadables,” and there were many of them all across the country. In fact, there were too many to directly target each of them, but this isn’t necessary. We don’t elect presidents by the popular vote, but by electoral votes from individual states.

To understand how micro-targeting works, it is helpful to review how state election systems works. Every state divides its electorate into scores of smaller voting precincts or polling districts, each with a long public record of how precincts voted in the past. Presidential campaigns conduct extensive polling in every state district where their candidate has a historical possibility of winning. After analyzing the polling data in conjunction with historical voting trends, they are able to identify the voting precincts that they need to win in order to win the state’s electoral votes. Campaigns use this information to determine where to campaign, where to spend money on ads and where to build strong get-out-the-vote efforts.

Cambridge Analytica went further. They identified and targeted all the persuadables in every swing precinct in four swing states, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Florida. Then they used social media networks and their knowledge of the personality profiles of each targeted person to bombard them with images and content designed specifically to get them to either vote for Donald Trump (and other Republican candidates down-ballot) or to feel so dispirited that they didn’t vote at all.

For the sake of argument, let’s assume there was a total of 24 swing precincts targeted in these four swing states. The number was probably more. Each precinct contained around 20,000 persuadable voters, according to the documentary report. That means at least 480,000 individuals were targeted by a personal media blitz to either vote for Donald Trump or be dissuaded from voting for Hillary Clinton. That’s just 480,000 voters out of 130 million.

An analysis of the 2016 election found that the results came down to the winners of the six swing states. Hillary Clinton won two of those states. Donald Trump won four of them, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Florida, the same states targeted by Cambridge Analytica.

According to an analysis by the Washington Post:

 “Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania account for 46 electoral votes. If Clinton had won these states, she could have sealed the presidency with 274 total electoral votes… This election was effectively decided by 107,000 people in these three states. Trump won the popular vote there by that combined amount. That amounts to 0.09 percent of all votes cast in this election.”

Donald Trump unexpectedly won Michigan by a narrow margin of 0.23%. This stands as the narrowest margin of victory in Michigan's presidential election history. He unexpectedly won Wisconsin by a narrow margin of just 0.77 percent, becoming the first Republican candidate to win in Wisconsin since Ronald Reagan in 1984. Trump won Pennsylvania by 44,292 votes out of more than six million votes cast, a difference of 0.72 percent and the narrowest margin in a presidential election for that state in 176 years. Trump did better in Florida where he won a plurality with 1.2 percent of the vote.

So, did Cambridge Analytica play a key role in Donald Trump’s electoral victory? It seems conceivable, but they weren’t alone. Russian cyberattacks on our election also played a significant role in helping to defeat Hillary Clinton.

Did the Robert Mueller investigation cover micro-targeting of voters during the 2016 campaign? No. This election activity was not directly linked to Russian interference and so it was outside the scope of his investigation, although there is some evidence of a nexus between Russia and Cambridge Analytica involving the Brexit campaign. Also, Robert Mueller was not charged with investigating the actual impact of Russian interference in our election results. No one is investigating that issue. It is possible that the stealing of personal Facebook data was referred out elsewhere for criminal investigation, but we don’t know.

What we do know is that the American public is compromised by the massive collection and misuse of our personal data. We are vulnerable to psychosocial based manipulations that alter our behavior without our being aware that it is happening to us. We know that micro-targeting is now a major tool in corporate marketing, which may explain why the personal data collection and analysis industry has surpassed the oil industry as the most profitable business sector on earth. And we know that little is being done to protect our privacy rights, or our elections from weaponized propaganda, or to educate the public about the threats to which we are exposed every day. And we can all be very sure micro-targeting will be a prominent factor in the next election and every future election to come.



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Image credit: https://thehumornation.com/know-facebook-addiction/

Data Analysis Shows a Dem Centrist Candidate Loses

by Brian T. Lynch, MSW

Here’s a quick summary of how U.S. politics has evolved over the last 50 years, according to a massive analysis of exit polling data conducted by economist, Thomas Picketty.

The ultra-wealthy elites were always conservatives on the political right in the 20th Century. They were traditionally represented by the Republican Party. The lower economic classes were always progressives on the political left represented by the Democrats.

Massive income growth by the wealthiest citizens and changing patterns of wealth accumulation at the top of the scale created a new, high education/high wealth class of elites on the political left. Their power and special interests realigned the priorities of the Democratic Party and shifted focus away from those on the lower end of the economic scale. For over 20 years Democratic candidates for election barely ever mentioned America’s poor. This is especially true for America’s rural poor. With neither party representing the interests of the working class or the poor, these citizens became disaffected and radicalized against elites in both parties, and also against the federal government in general. This gave rise to the Tea Party movement. A vast swath of the Democratic base switched allegiance and became the radical Republican base we have today.

To attract and hold on to these radicalized low wealth/low education voters the industrialist elites have funded and vastly expanded the alt-right media machines to appeal to their radical base. They also pushed radical policies to appease and manipulate their new base. The Republican party today would not have enough members to be a national party if this shift had not taken place.

So, this is how United States politics stands nearly 20 years into the 21st Century. On the Right, we have a radicalized Republican Party comprised of the same ultra-wealthy industrialists at its core. But today they have created this subversive coalition of traditional conservatives and a pantheon of disaffected, low education/low wealth former Democrats. These voters at the lower half of the economic scale include a disparate collection of alt-media radicalized single-issue voters, fringe groups, hate groups, and the disaffected rural poor. All of these groups have otherwise unpopular goals, which the traditional party elites exploit by pushing a radical Republican agenda that is harmful to a majority of Americans, but not to their own bottom line.

On the left, we have a modulated Democratic Party unwilling to challenge the influence and power of the ultra-wealthy, left-leaning elites whose economic interests are best served by maintaining the status quo. The Party is no longer the champion of the poor and marginalized citizens that it once was. The party fauns over the “middle-class” (the upper 40% on the economic scale) in order to hang on to them while strategically ignoring the poor and working-class that once formed its base. Instead, it panders to its former base voters without actually pushing an agenda that would improve their lives.

It is for these reasons that Picketty draws the conclusion that a centrist Democratic candidate for President may be a losing strategy. A centrist who tries to thread the needle between ultra-wealthy elites on the left, and the poor and working classes at the base, will neither energize progressives at the bottom of the income scale nor win over the disaffected voters who have turned to the Republican Party to make themselves heard. It is against these new political realities that Democratic progressives must come to terms before it is too late.

Obsessive Political Delirium Syndrome – Confessions of a Chronic Sufferer

by Brian T. Lynch, MSW

What follows is a post from the Humans of New York Facebook page that unfortunately resonated with both my daughter and me. I recognized this account as a satirical description of what I call “Obsessive Political Delirium” syndrome:

“I had three bottles of wine on election night. I got in bed after Pennsylvania and stayed there for a week. I’d only get up to use the bathroom and get more wine. I’d have left the country by now if it wasn’t for my elderly mother. I’ve weaned myself off Xanax, but I haven’t recovered.

I still watch MSNBC all the time. I’ll spend entire days on the couch. I’ll wake up with Morning Joe and go to sleep with Brian Williams. I’ll get on Twitter during the commercials and search for any hint that somebody’s going to be indicted. I know way too much. I know the name of every congressman. I know their district. I know what percentage of the vote they got.

Before 2016, I hadn’t purchased a book in twenty years. Now I buy all the political ones. The scarier the better. I even got the Omarosa book. Nobody else wanted to read it so I thought I’d take one for the team. I went to DC for four different protests.

And a few weeks ago I drove down to Mexico to see for myself what was happening on the border. I’m obsessed. It’s not healthy. Recently I was able to cut myself off from politics for about a week. But then here comes Brett Kavanaugh and I’m back on the couch for three days.”

The malady described above first gripped me when Richard Nixon won the Presidential election in 1964. His politics and creepiness consumed my attention right up until his impeachment. My political worrying was debilitating and depressing. It also triggered a secondary obsession over the prior assassinations of two Kennedys and a King. I have never been able to shake the feeling that those assassinations are the start of a long thread that has run through U.S. history ever since.

No sooner had I gotten my life back under control when WHAM! Ronald Reagan was elected. He surrounded himself with some of the same creeps and spooks that buzzed around Nixon. That bout of fibral political delirium peaked with the Iran-Contra scandal and dissipated slowly due to the very dissatisfying lack of another well-deserved impeachment.

Then I went into a deep political slumber for a while, and it was glorious. But one evening a CBS news special to explain this new White-Water scandal failed to reveal anything at all of substance. I remember thinking, "OH GOD! Not again!" Here was another rogue’s gallery of radical neo-cons and dirty tricksters flexing their new conservative media machines. They were out for a revenge impeachment of Bill Clinton, and they got it. Clinton wasn't convicted in the Senate, of course, because well... lying about a blow job to protect your reputation isn't exactly a high crime. Still, the dark forces behind the conservative façade got their pound of flesh.

After that I thought I would catch a break, but then Bush v. Gore happened.  I went nuts all over again about the stolen election and the discovery that electronic voting machines were craftily designed to be hacked. All the voting machine companies were owned by partisan Republicans at the time. That bout of the infliction culminated in my having to hire a First Amendment Lawyer to protect me from a threatened SLAPP suit by the company that ran our local elections, and a threatened criminal investigation of me by my county Prosecutor for bringing our local electronic voting machine vulnerabilities to the attention of our county government. I fended off the SLAPP suit (incurring legal fees) but it had its intended effect on me. I shut up about local politics.

I set out to cure myself of obsessive political delirium and was just starting to make good progress when Donald Trump started winning primaries. And OMG… here we are in the thick of the worst political disaster in our country’s history, with a President who is a “Clear and Present Danger” to the security of the United States.

I feel so bad for my children who have come down with this horrible affliction. I have suffered from recurring bouts of it my whole adult life. And the trauma now is greater than at any time in the past. Is this the final festering of an old injury that began with Kennedy’s assassination, or is it the end of America as we know it? I take some solace in the results of the 2016 Congressional election that has installed so many women and such great diversity into the House of Representatives. I also take comfort in the rising activism of a younger generation, including Parkland survivors, that sees things the same way I do. For my children’s sake, I hope that my hope for the future will be realized this time.

Campaign Finance Laws Discriminates Against Worker and Voters

By Brian T. Lynch, MSW

Two people work in a smoke shop on the South Side of Chicago. One of them is the owner. What principle of law says that the owner of the shop gets to donate three times as much to a political candidate than the employee? How can campaign finance law be allowed to discriminate against workers like that?

On April 21, 2018, the Chicago Tribune reported that Mayor Rahm Emanuel added $1.7 million to his campaign in a single day. The explanation that followed encapsulates what’s wrong with our campaign finance laws. As in other states, the Illinois campaign donation system is set up like a board game, specifically a corporate board game.

If you are an actual carbon based person in Illinois you cannot donate more than $5,600 to a political campaign, unless you own a business. If you own a business you can contribute twice that amount on behalf of your business. And if you register as a political action group you can donate nearly 10 times the individual contribution limit, up to $55,400. These campaign limits are entirely lifted if one candidate in a race decides to give their campaign $100,000 of their own money.

That’s what happened in Chicago. Emanuel’s Republican opponent, Willie Wilson, boosted his campaign with $100,000 of his own money. Twenty-four hours later the Mayor added a million dollars to his campaign from just three wealthy donors plus another $700,000 from other donors.

In the Citizen’s United decision the US Supreme Court said, in effect, that money is a form of free speech. This may be true in some intellectual perspective of the court, but if true in the real world, how can there be a $5,600 free speech limit on voters? How can there be any limits at all?

In our Republic we have this bedrock principle that says, “One person, One vote.” Everyone has an equal say in who represents their interests. Corporate governance operates on a different principle that says, “One share, One vote.” You get one vote with every share of the company you buy. The bigger your financial stake is, the greater your say is within the company. Wealthy shareholders like this system because their voting power is proportional to their financial power.

The concept of one person, one vote is an anathema to them in our democracy. They feel their greater financial stake in the economy should also entitle them to a greater political say in our government. This is why they have rigged the campaign finance system.

As a thought experiment, try imposing the “One person, One vote” principle to campaign financing. One person’s donation limit in Illinois is $5,600. That means one vote is equal to that amount or less, mostly less. Most voters don’t contribute to political campaigns. Even if they do, the individual donation limit may be well beyond their means. The median income for a family of four is close to $56,000 a year, so a maximum political donation would cost them 10% of their annual income. Even a 1% donation would be well beyond their means. One tenth of one percent of their income, or $56 dollars, might be feasible for most voters, and this amount is 100 times the current limit.

If you go with the “$5,600 limit equals one vote” rule, then being a business owner gives you three votes, one personal vote and two votes for your business. Join another business owner to form a political action committee you get eight votes, five votes for your half of the PAC, three for your business and one personal vote.

Then Willie Wilson upsets the apple cart in Chicago by donating $100k to his campaign. Now just three wealthy donors get a total of 180 votes or more for Mayor Emanuel’s campaign. The actual impact on how a candidate might responds to donors is enhanced by the fact that tens of thousands of voters contribute nothing. Additionally, because individual donor limits are 100 times what the average voter can afford, the impact of those three big donors in the mayor’s race is more like 180,000 votes. So, if you are Rahn Emanuel, who are you going to listen to?

Money is not free speech. Money is power.

If we agreed to pair the power of money to the power of the vote, then one voting share should have the same price tag for every eligible voter. It should not favor businesses or the wealthy as it does now in our corporate governance style of campaign finance. This also means only eligible voters should be able to donate; No PACs or businesses. If a businessman or organization wants to lobby for a special interest, they should lobby directly with the people to gain influence rather than lobbying our politicians. It would mean that fair share campaign finance limits would either be equal and affordable for everyone, or without donation limits but with maximum transparency so every voter can see exactly which candidates the big donors are buying.  

Oct. 7, 2016 - The Day We Learned and Forgot Russia Was Attacking Us

by Brian T. Lynch, MSW

James Clapper of the CIA and U.S. intelligence agencies announce that Russia is taking active measures to interfere with our Presidential elections.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/64-hours-october-one-weekend-blew-rules-american-politics-2-162827162.html

It was Friday, October 7, 2016. There was a rapid series of news dumps that day that changed the course of our Presidential Election, and our country.

If corporate (for profit) news outlets based reporting on the gravity of events rather than a story's public appeal, the top story that day would have been that US intelligence agencies announced that Russia was actively messing with our election. Media manipulations by powerful people behind the scenes took place in the hours that followed the announcement, burying the biggest news story in a decade. Who was behind the release of that shocking Access Hollywood tape that stole our attention?

The video was located by an Access Hollywood producer and turned over to NBC, who held onto it for a period of time. Somehow it was subsequently leaked to the Washington Post who published it. NBC published it minutes later. But how it got released isn't important, other to say that it wasn't released to NBC by the Hillary campaign. The public reaction to Donald Trumps debasing comments about woman was loud and immediate.*

Then, an hour after it was published, the first of the Podesta emails were released These emails that had been stolen by Russian based hackers and the content was used to strategically selected emails for release that maximize damage to the Hillary campaign. The Podesta email release blunted the impact of the Access Hollywood tapes. Both stories dominated the news for days. The two stories combined completely eclipsed the Russia story. And so the biggest story in a decade, That our democracy was currently under attack by Russia, got buried and erased from our collective conscious until after the election.

(Editors Note: Paragraph three above was re-written. It originally implied that no one knows who released the tape. The edited version above clarifies that the unidentified leak was to the Washington Post. Access Hollywood did give the information to  NBC prior to the Washington Post getting a confidential or anonymous copy. 1:35pm 10/10/17) 

Why Russia Hacked Voter Registration Databases - Micro-targeted Messaging

by Brian T. Lynch, MSW

What if Presidential candidates could identify the exact swing districts, to the precinct, that they need to win state elections? Imagine how concentrated their campaigns efforts and resources would be, including the ad buys and how those ads are tailored to the voters in those districts.

Welcome to the modern political campaign. The ability to do exactly this grows greatly every election cycle. Highly detailed voting information has not only allowed candidates to geographically concentrate their resources, it has given unscrupulous party operatives a map to devise voter suppression strategies, vote tampering schemes and gerrymandered districts that give their party structural advantages.

This much is well known by the savvy readers here, even if it remains under appreciated by the many voter. Less well understood are the new information technology weapons that were employed in the last election.

Into the" big data" world of our modern political campaigns came a whole set of newly developed propaganda technologies that can exploit a campaigns massive knowledge base. Explaining how just one of these new, information technology weapons work, one called micro-targeting, we can see how the dots are connected in the Russia election scandal now unfolding.

Here is a step by step plan to use modern information technologies to micro-target individual voters in swing districts to manipulate their vote.

Step 1. CREATE BIO-PSYCHO-SOCIAL PROFILES ON POTENTIAL VOTERS: All the publicly shared Facebook and Twitter information voluntarily provided by individual users has unwittingly created the most massive database ever imagined. Marketing companies can use this database to target ads to those most likely to buy certain products. But in politics, companies like Cambridge Analytica can use this data to creates highly accurate bio-psycho-social profiles (BPS profile) on millions of American adults, and use that information to manipulate voting behavior. The ability to create these very accurate, highly predictive individual profiles using a meta-analysis techniques is well established. Researchers have estimated that just 150 "likes" on Facebook, along with self-reported biographical information, can produce a BPS profile for individuals that better predicts their behavior than what their own spouse could predict. These profiles can even predict which words or phrases will elicit specific emotional reactions in a person. Of this profiling data, Paul-Olivier Dehaye, a Swiss mathematician, said, "People just don't understand the power of this data and how it can be used against them."

For those who don't know, Cambridge Analytica is a election data analysis company founded by Robert Mercer, an American billionaire with some very radical ideas. The company was lead by Breitbart's Steve Bannon until he joined the Trump administration. Cambridge Analytica was contracted by the Trump campaign to utilize the company's extensive voter profiles to help get Donald Trump elected in 2016.

Information that Facebook or Twitter does not uniformly obtain is the current voter registration status of users or their voting history. This type of information is only kept in state or county voter registration databases spread throughout the country. For a political campaign to get this type of information they would need to hack into many state and county databases, and do it in a way that doesn't easily trace back to the campaign.

Step 2. HACK SPECIFIC VOTER REGISTRATION FILES: Micro-targeting voters is a huge undertaking requiring a massive amount of computing. It also requires connecting an individual's BPS profile with their current voter registration status and voting history. Micro-targeting voters cannot happen without this information. There is currently no national source for voter registration information, but one has been proposed by Donald Trump's Presidential Advisory Commission of Election Integrity.

Not having a national voter registration system is probably a good thing. A hack of a single database would be far more damaging, and is less likely to be detected. Hacking dozens or hundreds of smaller databases increases the odds of getting caught. Hacks of voter registration files should therefore be limited in number, and the hacks must therefore be targeted at just the right swing districts where micro-targeting has the best odds of changing voting behaviors. The people with the best idea of which voting districts to hack are those within the campaign. The same internal polling numbers used to direct ad buys are the same numbers needed to direct voter registration hacks.

One way to assure that hacking activity can't easily be traced back to a candidate's campaign is to covertly employ third parties to conduct the hacks and supply the stolen information to the data analysis companies. If micro-targeting of voters took place during the 2016 elections, as a growing body of evidence suggests, then there has to be a connection between the micro-targeting and the Russian hacks of voter registration files that took place in 22 states. Some information sharing between the campaign and third party hackers would be required to assure that the information to be obtained is useful.

It is still highly speculative, but not unreasonable, to investigate the connections between the Trump campaign and Russian hacking of the voter registration databases. It is also reasonable to investigate whether any of the stolen information ended up in the databases of companies such as Cambridge Analytica.

Step 3. IDENTIFY INDIVIDUALS IN SWING DISTRICT WHOS VOTING BEHAVIOR CAN BE INFLUENCED BY MICRO-TARGETED MESSAGING: Once a voter's registration information and voting history is matched up with his or her BPS profile, it is a relatively straight forward step to distinguish implacable voters from casual or inconsistent voters. BPS profile characteristic can be used to identify a voters political leanings and the issues they might care about. Another characteristic that micro-targeting requires is that the target must be engaged in social media.

Step 4. BOMBARD TARGETED VOTERS ON THEIR SOCIAL MEDIA WITH SPECIALLY DESIGNED MESSAGES: In the final phase of the operation the object is to create an alternative social media landscape for the targeted voter by bombarding them with fake news stories, tweet storms and biased commentary designed to alter their perceptions of the political environment. These messages are tailored to elicit specific emotional reactions in the subjects. The messages are delivered by a virtual army of trolls (Russia has internet troll farms) and automated bots using fake Facebook or Twitter accounts. If the targeted voter ever shared any doubts about Hillary Clinton on social media, for example, the content of their micro-targeted messages might be designed to amplify those doubts and raise new ones. The purpose is to lessen the likelihood of that voter voting for Hillary. If a person ever "liked" a story about building the border wall, targeted messages might contain outrageous immigration stories to heighten fear and loathing toward immigrants, and to strengthen the voters motivation to vote for Donald Trump. By BPS profiling and micro-targeting people, it is the targeted voters who get manipulated, not the voting machines or the voting process itself.


RESULTS: The psychological and emotional impact of targeted propaganda messaging on individual voters will motivate some to go to the polls and vote for a candidate when they might have otherwise stayed home. Or the messaging may dispirit some voters and cause them to stay home when they would have otherwise cast their ballot. Researchers tell us that people manipulated by these technologies generally don't realize they are being manipulated. Because of the massive computing power available to these election data companies, and the unprecedented social media databases, identifying and targeting voters susceptible to targeted propaganda messaging is capable of directing these attacks on many thousands of voters just before an election. Flipping whole election through this process may be possible. Did micro-targeting flip the 2016 Presidential election to Donald Trump's win? No one knows yet, in part because it is so difficult to prove.

It is my belief that the state voter registration hacks were not done to disenfranchise voters at the polls, but to supplement data needed in order to identify and to micro-target low malleable voters with propaganda messaging. I also suspect targeting information was provided to the Russian hackers who broke into the state voter registration files. I don't know if these are crimes. I certainly hope they are, and I hope the Justice Department Probe is pursuing this line of investigation.

Propaganda in the Digital Age - Mind Control on a Massive Scale

by Brian T. Lynch, MSW

"World War III will be a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation." - Marshall McLahun

 I noticed it during the 2016 election. My Twitter and Facebook accounts were awash in anti-Hillary comments. Many comments seemed to piggy-back on my own reservations about her. Other comments were wildly inaccurate and mean-spirited.

I was a Bernie supporter and not happy with the way the DNC and Democratic leadership conducted the primaries. Still, Hillary Clinton seemed the better choice in my view.

When anti-Hillary tweets and messages mirrored my concerns I sometimes "liked" the comments or added my own to support of my views. But then there were many outrageously false anti-Hillary claims. I mostly ignored these, but sometimes took issue. This often lead to debate with some implacable troll on social media. I engaged them not to change their minds (impossible), but to make sure others would be exposed to a reasonable set of facts.

During these internet encounters I noticed a lot of respondents chiming in with "likes" or retweets  supporting the opposition side. The longer the debate, the greater the number of these silent opposition supporters. sometimes as many as 20 or 30 different accounts, Some mute retweeters even continued to piled on days after the conversation ended, and they latched on to randomly stupid or statements made by the original Hillary hater.

That's when I realized something unusual was happening. I assumed these respondents were part of a coordinated system of trolls. I didn't know I was experiencing a technically advanced propaganda attack.  I managed to resist the feeling that the consensus was against me, but did start to wonder if I was talking to myself.

After the election, all these feverish Twitter and Facebook respondents suddenly disappeared. Did anyone else notice that?

Only now am I beginning to learn the full horror of this new cyber based propaganda.

Many of us think of propaganda we think of what spies call "active measures" like dropping fliers from airplanes, broadcasting news on Radio Free Europe, writing op-ed pieces under pseudonyms or stealing and releasing classified documents to publically embarrass adversaries. The Russian connection to the DNC email hacks and subsequent Wikileaks publication appears to be of this sort. It seems a little high tech because the theft was by hacking, but at its root it old style propaganda.  And media attention to it only serves to distraction us to the whole new world of electronic propaganda unleashed during the election.  New, covertly developed, military grade propaganda techniques were used by private corporations, and perhaps foreign actors, to tip our election results on a scale never seen before. The internet was weaponized against us.

COGNITIVE WARFARE:  Cognitive warfare is a toolbox of cyber propaganda techniques that both models mass populations and profiles individuals to change their beliefs or attitudes. It has many aspects and methods that utilize super-computers, massive databases and sophisticated computer algorithms to weaponize information gathered from our digital footprints to use against us.  Some techniques model and manipulate whole societies to bring about social change while other techniques profile and manipulate individuals or groups to alter a person's attitudes and behavior.  These methods go by names such as  Bio-psycho-social profiling, Recoding (of mass consciousness), Strategic drowning (of mainstream media content, for example), micro-targeted propaganda, etc. These propaganda techniques can be highly effective and operate on an emotional level without our specific awareness.

So where to begin? The amount of information needed to fully explain the new propaganda is way beyond the scope of this blog post. It is honestly beyond the scope of my own understanding at this point as well. This article can only serve as an introduction to the topic. At the conclusion I will point you to several lengthy articles that go into more detail.

ALGORITHMS: To understand the basics of cognitive warfare methods we must start with computer algorithms. These are sets of computer code instructions that allow a computer to analyze huge amounts of data and automatically make complex decisions for further action based on their continuous analysis. Algorithms can be simple or mind-bendingly complex, as their use in modern day financial trading illustrates. In the area of financial investments algorithms monitor the markets and social media sites (like Twitter, to see what's trending) and then make split-second decisions on buying and selling stocks. It is estimated that over 70% of all stock trades are computer generated transactions.

But algorithms are ubiquitous in social media as well. From Google's search engine to Twitter's suggestions as to who to follow, algorithms have become our window on the world. As such they have an enormous impact on our outlook. Each of us who searches a term on Google may receive different information in a different order, depending on our digital footprint on the internet. This impacts our thinking. Robert Epstein, of the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology says,".. these personalized results impact our opinions and behavioral patterns without our awareness." Of Google he writes, "We are talking about the most powerful mind-control machine ever invented in the history of the human race. And people don't even notice it."

There is much more we need to know about these algorithms running in the background of the cyber world, but for our purposes here it is sufficient to know that a knowledge of them and how to manipulate and exploit them is the basis on which cognitive warfare operates.

BIO-PSYCHO-SOCIAL PROFILING:  When I type "Daily Record" into my iPhone search, my local newspaper site come up. Years ago this wasn't the case. I would get a newspaper with that name in Scotland. We don't think much about the convenience built into our media systems that allows computers to make assumptions about us. These assumptions are based on our digital profile, where we live, where we are presently located, what we have looked up in the past and other such personal information kept in a database about us somewhere. This is the friendly face of social profiling.

Advances in data storage and retrieval systems, sophisticated algorithms, and methods to analyze and manage massive amounts of data allow media platforms to develop comprehensive profiles on us. This allows them to deliver the content we most want to see. Formerly, the level of detail was based on some grouping we fit into, but increasingly it is based on who we are as individuals. This has been  a boon to commercial marketing but it has a very powerful dark side as well.

In the case of Facebook profiles, for example, scientists found that profiles can be correlated across millions of people to produce remarkably accurate individual profiles. When results are combined with data generated by the "like" button people click on approve certain content, the individual profile gets ever more perfect. With just 150 "likes"  our profile can predict personality better than our own spouses can, and with 300 likes it knows a person better they know themselves.

Of this profiling data, Paul-Olivier Dehaye, a Swiss mathematician, said, "People just don't understand the power of this data and how it can be used against them." This level of understand our personality allows those in control of our profiles to send micro-targeted messages to us that subtlety manipulate our feelings and the association with which our emotions are evoked.  For example, if a person is on the fence over how to vote in an election, the people behind the propaganda machines know this about you and can custom tailor messages to that will influence you to vote one way or the other. This technique is called micro-targeted propaganda. There is evidence that this type of propaganda was used in the 2016 election to help elect Donald Trump.

STRATEGIC DROWNING:  This is another tool in the Cognitive Warfare arsenal used to influence public discourse and alter our mass consciousness. While bio-psycho-social profiling targets individuals, this technique targets certain segments of the population or even the whole population at once. The idea behind this technique it to flood the cyber-media network with specific alternative messages that drown out conventional news and information. It exploits the algorithms used by media platforms that bring desired content to us. So, for example, if you type "Jews are" into Google search, it will return answers like, "Why do people hate Jews" I just did the experiment as I write this and the picture below shows the top results.

[EDITORS NOTE 7/15/2017: Following the election the example below no longer holds true if you try it today. The alternative medial narrative emphasis has shifted to other areas of focus, such as Islamic jihadists and sharia law as an alternative to Russia's election tampering and Trump Administration investigations. For a more contemporary example google: "Sarsour is" and then "Linda Sarsour" to see how strategic drowning has altered the search results.]

  Clearly these are unexpected results for most people who might enter the search terms. (Try it yourself, and don't be surprised if your results differ from mine based on your profile.) The result over-represent hate groups and the proliferation of these results are the work of nefarious operators who flood the "media ecosystem." 

Cyber media would normally be dominated by conventional information sources such as The New York Times, Fox News, MSNBC etc., but these sources are swamped with hundreds of thousands of links from much smaller alternative information sites. These links to alternative information are intended to exploit the structure of Google secret algorithms to bring these articles to the top of the search results. This has a psychological impact on us personally and gives a false impression about public consensus in America. It blurs the question as to what is really true.

The operational structure for strategic drowning includes a coordinated network of alternative information websites, referred to as micro-propaganda machines, or MPM's. Each MPM controls a vast warehouse of "bots" which are bogus Facebook and Twitter accounts, etc. These fake accounts exist by the hundreds of thousands. Some are always active to drive public dialogue while some are "sleeper bots." These are held in reserve and triggered en mass by propagandists to overwhelm news cycles or cover up information unfavorable to their goals. It is also used to create trends and alter public discourse, or change public attitudes.  

A picture is worth a thousand words. Jonathan Albright is an assistant professor of communications at Elon University in North Carolina. He analyzed the activity of these MPM's during the 2016 election and was able to create "spatial map" of that activity. The picture created shows the relative dominance of traditional information sources in the media ecosystem, as he calls it, and the impact on that system by MPM's during the election.  The red nodes are alternative information (propaganda) websites and the red lines radiating from them are links or activity of these sites.  

In effect, what you see here is the cognitive warfare battlefield during the last election. This new propaganda arms race is between pro-democracy advocates and their adversaries. It is a war still being waged here and in other Western democracies. It is being waged by both foreign attackers and billionaire Western oligarchs who share converging interests. It is being waged by Russia, who just announced the creation of a new branch of their military calling them "information warfare troops".

 "... Russians have moved into an offensive posture that threatens the very international order." said Ben Rhodes of the Obama Administration last year.

The propaganda war is also being waged by billionaire controlled corporations specializing in this field, companies like Cambridge Analytica. This is essentially a propaganda company featuring Steve Bannon on its board of directors.

This outline of Cognitive Warfare attacks we were subjected to, and are still experiencing as an attack on our journalism institutions, helps make sense of my social media experiences during the election. I see now how I was being stroked, on one hand (micro-targeted), to fan my discontent with Hillary while being made to feel my views were in the minority (strategic drowning) on the other hand. I know now that many of the trolls I encountered were really computer generated cyberbots. All this has caused be to completely rethink my own on-line presence.

I have presented a great deal of information here and a number of quotes and facts without specific attribution. That is because virtually all of the quotes and many of the fact are from the remarkable work of Carole Cadwalladr, published by The Guardian in London. I have vetted her information by going to her original source and found them to be accurate. If you have stayed with me to this point, I urge you to read Ms. Cadwalladr's two article for even more background information. She also outlines the connections between the companies providing propaganda services for the wealthy ideologues funding them and the Trump administration. 

Bibliography

Robert Mercer: the big data billionaire waging war on mainstream

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/robert-mercer-breitbart-war-on-media-steve-bannon-donald-trump-nigel-farage

Carole Cadwalladr, 26 February, 2017

Google, democracy and the truth about internet search

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/04/google-democracy-truth-internet-search-facebook

Carole Cadwalladr, 4 December, 2016

The #Election2016 Micro-Propaganda Machine

https://medium.com/@d1gi/the-election2016-micro-propaganda-machine-383449cc1fba#.gl16j8e9c

Jonathan Albright, 18 November, 2016

And for further reading from my blog on algorithms,

Algorithms Hidden Impact on How We Think 

http://aseyeseesit.blogspot.com/2017/02/algorithms-hidden-impact-on-how-we-think.html?spref=tw …

Brian T. Lynch, 9 February, 2016


UPDATE: For the sake of fairness, I returned to Jonathan Albright's website and found an updated analysis of the propaganda machine analysis including left-leaning websites as well, and the full picture of the activity is seen in the following picture. Obviously, there were left-leaning websites competing for a share of the media attention as well. I don't know the nature of the information from these left-leaning sites, or if they were part of a propaganda campaign. I'll share more when I know more.