Category: "My Rants, Ramblings & Daily Updates"

Tarrant County Texas Passes a Resolution Calling for an Audit

Posted by on Nov 05, 2021 in My Rants, Ramblings & Daily Updates, Texas

It seems as though this is about six months to late, but late progress is better than no progress I guess. Collin County has passed one as well. Lets see if anyone can leverage this into getting some results.

Call For A Forensic Audit of the November 2020 Election

Tarrant County Republican Party

Whereas our elections are the bedrock of our Republic and the method in which people give their consent to our elected officials to govern; and

Whereas our elections are now more complicated than at any time in our history and the methods and the technologies in use for them are beyond the understanding of both the average politician and citizen; and

Whereas there were numerous reports by major media publications and politicians describing the vulnerability of much of the nation’s election equipment prior to the November 2020 election; and

Whereas there are continuing and growing questions about the accuracy of the November 2020 election among the citizens of Tarrant County;

Now, therefore, be it:

Resolved we the members of the Tarrant County GOP Executive Committee call on the governor to call for the November 2020 election in Tarrant, Dallas, Harris, Bexar, and Travis Counties to be audited. The audit should be performed by independent examiners, and should be forensic in nature and will examine all elements of the elections to ensure that it comports to the policies, procedures, regulations, and laws in effect at the time of the election. It will insure the intent of the true and legal electorate was accurately recorded and certified, that all ballots and documents meet the specifications set for them and have a valid chain of custody documentation, the voter rolls contain only those legally eligible to vote, and that any equipment used to verify voter eligibility, to record votes and for the communication of data produced verifiably correct results and were free of outside interference or corrupt programming.

Tarrant County Texas Passes a Resolution Calling for an Audit

Posted by on Nov 05, 2021 in My Rants, Ramblings & Daily Updates, Texas

Call For A Forensic Audit of the November 2020 Election

Tarrant County Republican Party

Whereas our elections are the bedrock of our Republic and the method in which people give their consent to our elected officials to govern; and

Whereas there were numerous reports by major media publications and politicians describing the vulnerability of much of the nation’s election equipment prior to the November 2020 election; and

Whereas there are continuing and growing questions about the accuracy of the November 2020 election among the citizens of Tarrant County;

Now, therefore, be it:

My Visit to the Tarrant County Elections Center.

Posted by on Sep 20, 2021 in My Rants, Ramblings & Daily Updates, Texas

On Thursday, September 16^th I visited the Tarrant County Election Center. They were doing tests in preparation for the upcoming Constitutional Amendment election. There was a single Ballot Board Member there as an official observer and one other citizen and myself there to learn. I had the pleasure of speaking with at least four members of the staff including Heider Garcia the Elections Administrator. I wish I had recorded everyone's name, but I didn’t. Most of my discussion was with Mr Garcia and we spoke for over an hour.

I will remark that every time I’ve had contact with a Tarrant County employee, they have been very helpful and attempted to answer my questions. The County really should be commended because I see much different interactions in other counties. The staff explained the basic processes and answered every inquiry. I never detected any attempt at evasion.

They explained that the mail in ballots came in and were sorted. The ballot board opens them and reviews them for required elements - we did not discuss that process in detail. After examination the board prepare the ballots for scanning. They are scanned in one of three scanners and normally only two are in use. If a ballot is rejected for any reason a rescan can be attempted, and if still not accepted it is reviewed by the ballot board. The board is only a few feet away.

I was told that the same ballot serial number could not be scanned again once it was accepted and counted and I’m pretty certain that was demonstrated. I did not ask if it was scanned on one system and then scanned on another, if the tabulator would recognize that and reject it. I’ll circle back on that :)

When the batch is complete, the data is downloaded to a serialized thumb drive that they refer to as a “V” Drive and then the drive goes to be duplicated.

The duplicate drive goes to a workstation that is connected to the internet via a VPN to Scytle for reporting unofficial results, and the main drive goes to another workstation that is said to not be connected to the internet. I did not observe any connection to this server, but I didn’t make any special effort to do so either. This server tabulates the official results. The official and unofficial results should be identical since they are based on the same original thumb drive.

The ballot images for the mail in ballots are kept on the machine that’s attached to the scanner. They are not transferred to the thumb drive.

The data is collected periodically from the tabulation server and is taken to another workstation where it is manually entered and uploaded to the SoS site. So the data is split and sent in three different directions from three different servers. Two are internet connected and one is not. In theory anyway. We didn’t discuss it, but all three should balance.

The scanners at the precincts have a “v” drive installed in a locked and sealed compartment. There is space for two, but our current software edition only supports one. That machine arrives at a rally point, and the seal numbers are checked and the V drive is removed and duplicated. Then they make their way to the election system to go through the same process as the mail in ballots. I was very disappointed to learn that the scanners at the local voting sites do not store the ballot images. We also do not maintain the thumb drives once the data has been transferred to the tabulator.

The poll books communicate as suspected via a cellular device and actual phones have been used as backups. They communicate trough a VPN and I failed to ask where the central sever was. I presume there at the main facility. They can operate stand alone, but of course that would breed problems in an election where people can show up at any voting location. Most of the sites apparently use Verizon, but some use AT&T and the deciding factor is apparently signal strength.

I asked about the printing issues in this past election and it was explained to me to be a quality issue where the printer simply did not meet established norms. Garcia stated that they had an analysis done that demonstrated how the ink was sprayed just a bit to loose or scattered for the scanners to get a good read. I did not delve into who was or was not involved in the ballot duplication process, but I did learn a bit about it.

These ballots came from many different precincts and instead of searching out a paper ballot for each precinct, they used the touchscreen devices to generate the new ballot. Apparently keying up the right precinct on a touch screen was faster. That means that a manually written ballot was transcribed to a computer generated ballot and the computer generated ballot is what was scanned and counted. Those ballot images were not kept even though they were technically mail in ballots. I didn’t ask why. I also didn’t ask how they were paired to each other for long term identification and storage.

The local election administrators are working under the impression that the software and logs on the machines are not bound by the retention requirements. When we discussed the issue the point was made that if you were bound to keep that intact you could never enhance the equipment. I understand the argument but I’m also distrustful of the system. We did discuss the option of changing the hard drives and archiving the old ones and Garcia seemed to consider the idea. I had the idea on the way home that a bit for bit copy could be made before the drive was wiped which is mostly what we would do in an audit. There were a few times when I’d bring up a concern such as the software and he would remark why would we worry about that? We have the paper. My retort was that the public wasn’t having much success in getting our hands on the paper. I want to reiterate that none of this was a contentious discussion. It was two people having a rational conversation.

I have emailed and requested an update on the expected time frame for the software updates and I put the drive copy idea on the table.

The administrators are working with the opinion that ballot images are not required to be stored and in our case they are not stored except for mail in ballots. They have discussed capturing and storing those images in the future. The main concern that Garcia mentioned expressed, was the potential to slow scanning at a busier location. I don’t think they had tested to determine that impact yet. The local administrators also are working under the interpretation that if they do keep them, they are subject to the same rules as the paper ballots and that they can’t be accessed without a court order.

I asked about Tarrant Counties document retention policies for election materials and I was told that they were 36 months. I asked if that was written anywhere and apparently it was policy that was decided at an election board meeting. Mr. Garcia also indicated that they were expecting many FOIA requests at the 22 month mark.

I’ll make the following statements as a reasonably qualified technician with some computer and network experience, but I’m not by any means an IT professional.

I believe that this equipment is better in several ways than most of the Dominion and ES&S equipment we’ve read a great deal about. This department appeared to me to be a step above most all of the ones I’ve seen in videos, although I did and will make some suggestions for improvement.

I am not the smartest man in the room when it comes to technology, but from what I saw, a man in the middle attack, the way most all of us envision one, would be very difficult to do in the tabulation area. That doesn’t mean that isn’t possible, but it would take very inventive thinking to do it. I was almost disappointed by seeing this. Trying to balance what I have learned about how other jurisdictions worked, what we see in the data, and the topography I saw here is difficult.

I had to remind myself that as time goes on and the equipment becomes more sophisticated, that so does the adversary and we are likely looking at an adversary that has Nation State level resources. There are ways that an air gap can be jumped that don’t include WiFi. I have believed for some time that The companies such as Scytle, Clarity (recently purchased by Scytle) and Edison were the key, and today I notice that Joe Oltman is making comments to that effect as well. I don’t have the methodology figured out, but I have a few ideas.

I’m very concerned that not only here but across the country there is an attitude that the software used in these machines is not being interpreted as requiring retention. I just read the only Federal statute I could find and it’s so poorly written that varying interpretations would be easy to argue. I’m having trouble finding a full copy of the EOC 2002 version of the VSS, but the excerpts I’ve seen haven’t been iron clad either. I haven’t done enough research to know if they are binding on us here in Texas or not. I will.

I am concerned that we do not maintain the ballot images and that even if we did that they would not be published. We can make the decision to keep them at a local level, but I think that and the publication of them need to be addressed at the state level.

When something doesn’t work like I think it should, I want to take it apart and see what makes it tick.

I’m ready to do just that.

Three Factions Destroying America

Posted by on Aug 29, 2021 in My Rants, Ramblings & Daily Updates, General Coruption

This was posted on Facebook shortly after I came to the idea that what we were seeing in the administration of the country was in essence the Cloward Piven effect on a large scale.

It would take a while to process through all the various crises we have working and their potential effects as they relate to that topic.

The simple version is there are three main factions at work here. The Democratic Socialists/Progressives are the ones we see the most and they have a very key role. The Globalists/Establishment faction those are the folks around the World Economic Forum and the Davos crowd. If you doubt their realm of influence please examine your shopping patterns and the reach of Blackrock. Blackrock is the foundation of the Globalists in America. The third major faction is the Communist Chinese. I knew the last one was a bigger deal than we'd been lead to believe, but I'm learning that most all of us have greatly under estimated their penetration into our country.

Those three groups are playing each other to get what they want. The progressives are being used and they've already lost but they don't know it. The other two are acting like they'll play nice with each other. I don't think that works in the long run, but from our perspective that's not our problem.

None of those three groups find a strong America or Americas middle class to be a positive. We expect to be self determinative, we want to own stuff, and we generally value freedom and expect it.

This article is a longer and more detailed look at the Cloward Piven theory than was in the earlier article. To get to the Cloward Piven election related stuff you have to go fairly far down. We are witnessing the breaking of America as an institution. Every day it becomes more apparent that proving the fraud is the only way out of this. I don't think there is a representative of middle America anywhere in the first 17 successors to the resident.

https://farleftfacts.org/far-left-ideology/radicalization-attributes/cloward-piven/

No One is This Inept

Posted by on Aug 29, 2021 in My Rants, Ramblings & Daily Updates

This was originally written for posting on Facebook during the Afghan crises. I was and am of the opinion that this level of malfeasance cannot be ineptitude, that it has to be intentional.This was just after reports of thirteen service members being killed. By the time I posted here, the number was up to fourteen. I was looking for reasons that we would do something so harmful. Some things are becoming clear and I will make another post that just touches on what I'm seeing.

I am convinced that what we are seeing is the ultimate manifestation of the Cloward - Piven Strategy. I was aware of the welfare and spending aspect of the strategy, but I was not aware that they had worked in the election arena as well. As it turns out Cloward and Piven are a the base of many of those issues. In fact I think they are the base of all the issues we are looking at.

The article I'll link to was written in 2018 and had this as a subtitle: "Strategy for forcing political change through orchestrated crisis."

See anything that looks like an orchestrated crises? Like in any direction you look?"

I went looking for this because there had to be something that was behind what we are seeing. I've stated repeatedly that this cannot simply be ineptitude. Nobody is this dumb. I found pay dirt pretty quickly.

From the article:

"...the “Cloward-Piven Strategy” seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse."

We are watching the intentional breaking of society. I see no other explanation.

I believe the socialists/communists think they are going to break the system and rebuild it in their favor and the globalist think they are going to break the system using the "downtrodden" to do it, but think they can maintain control.

There's a lot out there to read on this. The bad guys always tell you what they are going to do. The article I'm quoting is from the Oathkeepers website. That's not a part of my normal reading, but I chose the article from many I saw because it was concise. When I posted this at Facebook, I was pretty sure the Oathkeepers link would bring me heat so I copied and pasted the article instead of linking to it. In this forum I'll provide the link to the original. There is much written on these people and this subject. Much more than I was aware of:

https://oathkeepers.org/2018/11/cloward-piven-strategy-explained/

"Strategy for forcing political change through orchestrated crisis

First proposed in 1966 and named after Columbia University sociologists Richard Andrew Cloward and his wife Frances Fox Piven (both longtime members of the Democratic Socialists of America, where Piven today is an honorary chair), the “Cloward-Piven Strategy” seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.

Inspired by the August 1965 riots in the black district of Watts in Los Angeles (which erupted after police had used batons to subdue a black man suspected of drunk driving), Cloward and Piven published an article titled “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty” in the May 2, 1966 issue of The Nation. Following its publication, The Nation sold an unprecedented 30,000 reprints. Activists were abuzz over the so-called “crisis strategy” or “Cloward-Piven Strategy,” as it came to be called. Many were eager to put it into effect.

In their 1966 article, Cloward and Piven charged that the ruling classes used welfare to weaken the poor; that by providing a social safety net, the rich doused the fires of rebellion. Poor people can advance only when “the rest of society is afraid of them,” Cloward told The New York Times on September 27, 1970. Rather than placating the poor with government hand-outs, wrote Cloward and Piven, activists should work to sabotage and destroy the welfare system; the collapse of the welfare state would ignite a political and financial crisis that would rock the nation; poor people would rise in revolt; only then would “the rest of society” accept their demands.

The key to sparking this rebellion would be to expose the inadequacy of the welfare state. Cloward-Piven’s early promoters cited radical organizer Saul Alinsky as their inspiration. “Make the enemy live up to their (sic) own book of rules,” Alinsky wrote in his 1971 book Rules for Radicals. When pressed to honor every word of every law and statute, every Judaeo-Christian moral tenet, and every implicit promise of the liberal social contract, human agencies inevitably fall short. The system’s failure to “live up” to its rule book can then be used to discredit it altogether, and to replace the capitalist “rule book” with a socialist one.

The authors noted that the number of Americans subsisting on welfare — about 8 million, at the time — probably represented less than half the number who were technically eligible for full benefits. They proposed a “massive drive to recruit the poor onto the welfare rolls.” Cloward and Piven calculated that persuading even a fraction of potential welfare recipients to demand their entitlements would bankrupt the system. The result, they predicted, would be “a profound financial and political crisis” that would unleash “powerful forces … for major economic reform at the national level.”

Their article called for “cadres of aggressive organizers” to use “demonstrations to create a climate of militancy.” Intimidated by threats of black violence, politicians would appeal to the federal government for help. Carefully orchestrated media campaigns, carried out by friendly, leftwing journalists, would float the idea of “a federal program of income redistribution,” in the form of a guaranteed living income for all — working and non-working people alike. Local officials would clutch at this idea like drowning men to a lifeline. They would apply pressure on Washington to implement it. With every major city erupting into chaos, Washington would have to act.

This was an example of what are commonly called Trojan Horse movements — mass movements whose outward purpose seems to be providing material help to the downtrodden, but whose real objective is to draft poor people into service as revolutionary foot soldiers; to mobilize poor people en masse to overwhelm government agencies with a flood of demands beyond the capacity of those agencies to meet. The flood of demands was calculated to break the budget, jam the bureaucratic gears into gridlock, and bring the system crashing down. Fear, turmoil, violence and economic collapse would accompany such a breakdown — providing perfect conditions for fostering radical change. That was the theory.