BC POLITICS
Saved by @ThomassRichards

ES&S downplays problems w/ its voting machines. To know what occurred, we need public records requests. @RGarella did one in 2019 & found that, “‘poll workers & technicians reported issues with the new machines at more than 40 % of polling locations,’...1/

 ...[in Philadelphia], yet the voting machine vendor ES&S said that ‘it was ‘simply inaccurate’ for anyone to imply there were widespread issues.’” 2/
Although the GOP wants everyone focused on Dominion, it is ES&S that for years has arguably caused the most concern among election-integrity advocates and experts. I wrote about these concerns in detail here. 3/ https://t.co/uzCEQgwOFJ
Stacey Abrams’s group, Fair Fight Action, created this document detailing concerns with voting machine vendor ES&S, which had the Georgia contract before Georgia switched to Dominion. 4/ https://t.co/DtYMfV6fQC
Look what happened on ES&S’s watch in Georgia in 2018. The situation w/ ES&S & these vanishing black votes was under congressional investigation when a court ordered Georgia to replace its old touchscreens in time for the 2020 election. 5/ https://t.co/25on1yEMHx
ES&S also had the servicing and maintenance contract in Memphis in 2015 when black votes vanished, as discovered by @benniejsmith and reported in Bloomberg. 6/ https://t.co/XL13Zc0T2k
I wrote about ES&S & vanishing black votes for @whowhatwhy here. Rs in Memphis, TN are determined to buy more ES&S touchscreens. Democrats & election-integrity advocates have pushed back hard for the past year. It is a situation to keep a close eye on. 7/ https://t.co/ApYH2nMYAM
Democracy requires vigilance. IMO, we have a duty to call out these concerns. Trump supporters chose instead to mix real concerns w/ a firehose of lies, including the big lie that they had proof Trump won. Then they stormed the Capitol & tried 2 execute MOCs like wild animals. 8/
That is on THEM and on TRUMP and the GOP, which actually blocked legislation, the #SAFEAct, which would have banned internet connectivity to voting systems & required robust manual audits for all federal races. 9/ https://t.co/LDXnPl3Kkx
The result of their treasonous misconduct cannot be that the rest of us are cowed into silence about legitimate concerns re: election integrity & transparency. If we don’t address those legitimate concerns, the GOP i& other bad actors cld exploit them in the next election. 10/
If u think you’re sure the GOP has never stolen an election electronically, then you haven’t watched Atticus v the Architect which is free to Amazon Prime members. It details Democrat @DonSiegelman’s “loss” to Republican Rob Riley in 02 in Alabama. https://t.co/rOITAOfgII 11/
Notice how Don did NOT incite violence, while acknowledging concerns w/ the unexplained subtraction of 6k votes from his total behind closed doors (after he was declared to have won AL) & how Rs had blocked a recount in that one precinct. https://t.co/o65Omykj7g 12/
13/ Note: Although not mentioned in his concession speech, Karl Rove had already radicalized the Alabama Supreme Court with right-wing judges, so a court recount would have had to get past that red wall.
14/ I interviewed @DonSiegelman about the 2002 race and its aftermath here. He was the last Democratic Governor Alabama ever had. https://t.co/sEVyk5pP1d
15/ The vendor? ES&S. Here’s a photo of its office in Birmingham, Alabama.
16/ Bill Pryor is the Religious Right (anti-choice & anti-LGBTQ rights) zealot who was Rove’s former client & who, as AG, blocked the recount in the one problematic precinct in AL in 02. In 03, when Congress was in recess, Bush rewarded him w/ a spot on the 11th Circuit.
17/ Under Trump, there were concerns he would kiss up to the Religious Right by nominating Bill Pryor to SCOTUS. https://t.co/DHSnoMOptA
18/ This is Bob Riley, who supposedly beat Don in 02 in AL. He claimed to be anti-casino, but his campaign was secretly funded in substantial part w/ laundered money from an Indian casino in Mississippi. https://t.co/yBF7heGZtA
19/ The casino that funded Riley’s 02 campaign was the client of Jack Ambramoff, a GOP lobbyist who later went to prison for corruption & fraud. Abramoff was Karl Rove’s secret weapon. They wld meet outside the White House so that they wouldn’t have to record it on visitor logs.
20/ This is a great and detailed account of what went down on election night in 02 in Alabama. The vote totals were changed twice, the final time was after everyone was told to go home from the courthouse where the central tabulator was kept. https://t.co/eG497AtXK2
21/ “In law-enforcement interviews, Abramoff is said to have confirmed that he frequently met with Karl Rove outside of the White House so as to avoid being recorded in the visitors’ log.” https://t.co/us7u22YcCv
22/ What Karl Rove goons did to Siegelman after the 2002 election is one of the most appalling examples of abuse of power in the last few decades. It is discussed in the Harper’s article and in the Atticus v the Architect documentary.

More from Jennifer Cohn ✍🏻 📢

Jennifer Cohn \u270d\U0001f3fb \U0001f4e2
Jennifer Cohn ✍🏻 📢...
@jennycohn1
😳ES&S’s ExpressVote voting system reportedly has an integrated zebra technologies barcode reader whose “operation can be modified by scanning configuration barcodes,” which can “reconfigure which types of barcodes the scanner reads,” & “how it reads...&..processes them.” 1/


2/ “They could cause the barcode scanner to stop tabulating ExpressVote barcodes or to tabulate them incorrectly. They can even be used to allow sending unintended data & keyboard commands to the voting system.”

3/ “A set of carefully constructed keyboard commands could be used to manipulate the voting system software.”

4/ This is a serious problem because, with the ExpressVote, the only part of the paper record counted as your vote is the barcode....

5/ Although there is human readable text beneath the barcode, a recent study showed that voters miss 93% of inaccuracies in that text. This is an invitation to fraud, especially for down ballot races, such as for state legislature.
POLITICS
Jennifer Cohn \u270d\U0001f3fb \U0001f4e2
Jennifer Cohn ✍🏻 📢...
@jennycohn1
2000: Rs block manual recount after memory card is found to have inexplicably deleted 16k votes from Gore’s total on a Diebold machine in Volusia county; no other races were impacted. Bush declared victorious by 537 votes. History forever altered. 1/

Bev Harris later shows that a convicted embezzler had joined Diebold as its Sr VP & largest shareholder in Sept 2000. His crimes involved sophisticated computer tampering. Media yawns. 2/

Harri Hursti later shows that Diebold memory cards can be hacked without detection by subtracting votes from one candidate and adding the same number of votes to the other candidate. Documentary featuring the Hursti hack is nominated for an Emmy. Media yawns. 2/

Clint Curtis later testifies to the House Judiciary Committee that Rep. Tom Feeney (whose district included Volusia a former running mate of Jeb Bush, had asked him to design a vote flipping program for the 2000 election in Florida. Media yawns. 3/

2002: Congress passes Help America Vote Act, providing billions of dollars for new voting machines to replace punch card systems. The Bill allies money to be spent on expensive new paperless touchscreens, which make manual recounts impossible. 4/
ALL
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Jennifer Cohn \u270d\U0001f3fb \U0001f4e2
Jennifer Cohn ✍🏻 📢...
@jennycohn1
“A recorded audio conversation appears to show Colorado District 4 Congressman Ken Buck pressuring an El Paso County GOP official to falsify election results in the State Senate District 10 race.”
— 5/18/20 #GOPElectionFraud 1/

h/t @GOPisComplicit 2/

More coverage. Wow. 3/

This. Read the Denver Post piece. It is brazen. 4/
CATEGORY PDFMAKERAPP GRAB THIS READWISEIO SAVE THREAD THREADER COMPILE SUMMARIZE
Jennifer Cohn \u270d\U0001f3fb \U0001f4e2
Jennifer Cohn ✍🏻 📢...
@jennycohn1
.@CharlieKirk11’s “Turning Point Action was listed as a participant in [the] ... rally, which preceded the attack on Capitol Hill. Prior to the rally, in a tweet he later deleted, Kirk said the group wld be involved w/ sending over 80 buses...” 1/

2/ “CNBC captured a screenshot of tweet before it was deleted.
Kirk recently said on his podcast that those from Turning Point got back on their buses & left following the conclusion of the rally.”

3/ Thread


4/ 😳


5/
POLITICS
Jennifer Cohn \u270d\U0001f3fb \U0001f4e2
Jennifer Cohn ✍🏻 📢...
@jennycohn1
I lost faith in the US govt to tell me the truth re: election security when Comey & @EACgov testified that it wld be really hard to hack an election bc voting machines supposedly don't connect to the internet, & an expert explained on C-Span this was BS.1/

2/ Here is one of Halderman's C-span videos.

3/ It was like a death. Never in my life would I have thought my government would lie about something like this. Or, alternatively, be this incompetent. I spent the next three years feeling like I need to try to micromanage the situation bc I didn't trust them anymore.

4/ I know some people think it's bad for me to say this because it undermines voter confidence in elections. But guess what? I started out as an ordinary voter. This is what I found out. And I was horrified. There has been no reckoning for the lies.

5/ Reality Winner, who tried to bring a dose of reality to the situation, remains in prison. I do not trust our government re: election security. I just don't. They have never told us the full truth about 2016. They don't even try to be transparent.
ALL , ELECTIONINTEGRITY , ELECTIONS

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Larry Schweikart
Larry Schweikart
@LarrySchweikart
1) FL absentees, early voting:

*Dems as expected ("souls to the polls Sunday") had a good day and FINALLY take the early walk-in vote lead by 6,100 votes.

Rs total: 1,151,593
Ds total: 1,092,547

Rs +59,046 combined lead. This is very good for this point in the campaign.

2) At this point in 2016, Rs only led by 40,000. I could be mistaken but I think yesterday was the last day polls were open on Sunday, so the final "souls to the polls" Sunday.

3) As of yesterday, four red counties were yet to report. That would likely boost the lead back to 70k

4) I don't think the FL Rs in their wildest dreams expected to lead this late in the campaign.

5) Likewise in NV:
Clark (with its union "encouragement" for members turned out big yesterday and added net 6,000 voters.

However---big however---neither Washoe nor the rurals . . .

(5) contd. . . were open yesterday. My guesstimate is that would slice that number in half.

While this helped, the NV Ds are still looking at a significant--to potentially massive--shortfall from their 2016 numbers coming out of early voting.

6) Gotta make sure you compare days to days. Calendars and voting days differ.
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Noah Smith
Noah Smith
@Noahpinion
1/Politics thread time.

To me, the most important aspect of the 2018 midterms wasn't even about partisan control, but about democracy and voting rights. That's the real battle.

2/The good news: It's now an issue that everyone's talking about, and that everyone cares about.

3/More good news: Florida's proposition to give felons voting rights won. But it didn't just win - it won with substantial support from Republican voters.

That suggests there is still SOME grassroots support for democracy that transcends

4/Yet more good news: Michigan made it easier to vote. Again, by plebiscite, showing broad support for voting rights as an

5/OK, now the bad news.

We seem to have accepted electoral dysfunction in Florida as a permanent thing. The 2000 election has never really
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Heshmat Alavi
Heshmat Alavi
@HeshmatAlavi
THREAD

1)
@SidneyPowell1 reflects on #Iran’s meddling in the U.S. in a recent tweet to U.S. President Donald Trump.

This thread focuses on Iran’s dangerous influence in the U.S., especially through its DC-based lobby group


2)
Why is this important?

@DNI_Ratcliffe "told CBS News that there was foreign election interference by China, #Iran & Russia in November of this year [2020]."

All Americans should be informed about how Iran & its lobby group NIAC are meddling in the


3)
#Iran has been increasingly aiming to interfere in U.S. elections specifically through NIAC.

DNI John Ratcliffe had previously shed light on this vital


4)
NIAC is a lobby group in the U.S. pushing Iran’s talking points.

Listen to this Iranian regime insider explain that NIAC was established by @JZarif, the foreign minister of


5)
@tparsi is the official founder of NIAC in the U.S.

Listen to how Trita Parsi parrots Zarif’s talking
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Charlie the Fox
Charlie the Fox
@SabCharlie
For my followers who aren't experts on middle eastern politics, here's a summary and explanation of all that stuff I've been tweeting about for the last few days - Turkey, Gare, all that stuff.

Gare is a mountain in the autonomous region of Kurdistan, in Northern Iraq (also known as Başur, or South Kurdistan). It's held by the Kurdistan Worker's Party (PKK), a formerly Maoist group who share an ideology with the YPG. They're pretty great.

Last week the Turkish Army launched an operation in the area, bombarding it with planes and dropping troops from helicopters. They're a long way from home here, and had to rely on the bases of local collaborators to launch the attack.

The initial assault appears to have gone badly, with Turkish troops forced to retreat some way down the mountain. A second front, seemingly aimed at preventing PKK reinforcements from arriving, may have been more successful.

The full aim of the operation isn't clear. They may have hoped to cut Gare from other nearby mountains, and they may have been trying to destroy specific facilities. The only thing we're sure of is that an attempt was made to free a group of high value POWs.
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Ibn Arsalan - \u0627\u0628\u0646 \u0627\u0631\u0633\u0644\u0627\u0646
Ibn Arsalan - ابن ارسل...
@Scout_Captaln_
THREAD

My country is dying

Drowning in the blood of poor

My country is dying

Under the pretenses of a cure

The children of my people are starving in a corner

With their mother dressed in black, playing the role of a mourner

My country is dying, and yet no one cares

1/5


Because the tragedy that happened was yet to be theirs

My country is dying because of its people

Those who turn the other cheek when they witness evil

Acts of defiance resulted in death

Do not defy the king called Macbeth

For he knows no rules, no law to abide

2/5


And his wish remains to conquer and divide

His puppets, they dance to the rhythm of the gun

For they do not care who they shoot, a daughter or a son

It is not in their interest to care for the people

Not the old, nor the young, the fit or the cripple

3/5


This is not a stranger who lays dead on your feet

It is your brother, a comrade, a statistic on repeat

My country is dying and it's begging for help

From its children, the people, to look out for themselves

My country is dying and it's only a matter of time

4/5


Before your life will worth nothing, not even a dime.

And now your country is dying, so why don't you care?

When your home remains here, and not elsewhere.

5/5
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Thread: History of Mogadishu and it’s conquest by Imaam Al Yaqubi


One of the First Imaams of the Hiraab Imamate was Mohamed Ibn Imaam Ahmed ibn Imam Ahmed Ibn Imaam Mohamoud Ibn Imaam Cumar Halol Al Yacquubi (Abgaal) during the year 1097 hijri.


After the collapse of the Ajuuran Abgaal nomads from the interior had started moving to take over the strategic port town of Mogadishu which was then under the muzzafar dynasty. By the 1600s Abgaal warriors had captured the city and set up their base in shingaani.


Mogadishu at the time was a large and well known port town. The Abgaal clan taking over control allowed them to obtain political power and world wide recognition.


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Pangolins, September 2019 and PLA are the key to this mystery
Stay Tuned!


1. Yang


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Some bats & pangolins carry viruses related with SARS-CoV-2, found in SE Asia and in Yunnan, & the pangolins carrying SARS-CoV-2 related viruses were smuggled from SE Asia, so there is a possibility that SARS-CoV-2 were coming from
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In the Hindu Epic Mahabharata, Ashwatthama or Drauni is the son of Dronacharya and the grandson of the Bharadwaj Rishi. Ashwatthama was a Maharathi who fought alongside the Kauravas against the Pandavas in the Kurukshetra War.


According to the Mahabharata, Ashwatthama means the sacred sound associated with the sound of a horse. He was given the name Ashwatthama because when he was born, he cried like a horse.

Here are some interesting facts about Ashwatthama.

- Ashwathama is one of the Ashta Chiranjeevi, Eight Immortals. Ashwatthama was born with a jewel on his forehead, giving him power over all living beings lower than humans. The jewel protected him from hunger, thirst, and fatigue.


- His strength is almost equal to Arjuna’s, especially in archery. Among the Kuru princes, he was good friends with Duryodhan, the eldest son of Dhritarashtra. They both have jealousy towards the Pandavas.


Duryodhan felt that Yudhisthir was his obstacle in inheriting the throne of Hastinapur, while Arjun’s talent made Ashwatthama jealous because he felt that his father’s love had been divided. After all, Arjuna was Drona’s favourite student.
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On December 25 Mr Pool retweeted August 16 message about the Phoenix and that the worst was still on the horizon to come. 1/*


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Brad started it on December 22 (1/3 posts (Don't say? Sure) = 13 = Plan B). 3/*


And immediately the SEC followed dropping the bomb (1.3 billions (Don't say? Sure) = 13 = Plan B). 4/*


FUD materializes, Bitstamp is one of the first that haltes XRP trading and so on. 5/*
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Noah Smith
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Remember: Just because an idea is old doesn't mean it's good.

Knowing whether old ideas are more likely to be good requires understanding whether conditions have changed in important ways.

Horse archery was an amazing method of warfare for over a thousand years...then people invented guns, and suddenly this great idea that had stood the test of time became obsolete.

Then again, when underlying conditions don't change much, tried-and-true approaches are probably better.

"Learning the lessons of history" usually just means assuming ergodicity and stationarity in an informal time-series model...

(end)
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