Good Friends of Election Integrity:

THIS IS IT, FRIENDS!! If the Busby race goes unchallenged, it will be replayed in 50 more races in November, scattered all over the country like runaway horses, another "shocking Republican trend."

Right now we have in front of us ONE bucking bronco, a race that may or may not have been stolen but whose vulnerability and lack of procedural integrity are manifest. The machines used in District 50 (a blend of OpScans and HAVA-engendered DREs) were taken home and stored by a variety of poll workers, entirely without chain-of-custody protections. This lack of security of course permits switching of memory cards and any other elementary tampering schemes to go undetected.

The GOOD news is that most of the ballots were in fact OpScan counted and therefore can be RECOUNTED. The purpose of such a recount would be to establish the actual margin of verifiable votes (absentee and OpScan), leaving only the far smaller batch of unverifiable DRE ballots out of the count. Depending on the margin of that recount, it may well bring to light gross disparities in the two sets of votes (verifiable and unverifiable), even a flat-out Busby victory (if the DRE ballots can not make up the victory margin). We have seen such disparities before and we expect to see them again, though by November many districts such as this one may well have gone to all-DRE, all-unverifiable systems. We won't have many chances like this one.

Here's what we should all STOP EVERYTHING ELSE to do:

1) Find out the latest on this race and what's being done about it at Bradblog (Brad's taken the lead in sounding the alarm on this race and fully understands its enormous implications not just for the politics of November but for the Electoral Integrity of November):

URL: http://www.bradblog.com/archives/00002924.htm and updates.

2) Call Busby's office(s) (phone strongly preferred, follow-up with email) and let them know why further action must be taken by them, including demand for such a recount of the verifiable ballots:

Francine Busby for Congress

Cardiff Office - Main Headquarters
2121 Newcastle Ave.
Cardiff by the Sea, CA. 92007
(760)479-0114

Encinitas Office
144-C W. D St.
Encinitas, CA. 92024
(760)753-6300
(866)632-3066 (Toll-Free)
(760)753-5211 (Fax)

Email:
Info@BusbyforCongress.org
Volunteer@BusbyforCongress.org

3) Contact Lou Dobbs, who surprisingly has sounded the alarm, and let him know how the Busby race fits into the grave concerns he has expressed. Ask him to call for such a recount and talk about the appalling lack of even basic security of the voting apparatus. If you can find a phone contact, please share it. By all means, contact other members of the media, but Dobbs should be a primary focus given the recent attention he has paid to this.
http://www.cnn.com/feedback/forms/form5.html?9

4) Spread the word on this to all you know who might be moved to act. If you have contacts to major groups such as DFA or DNC, use them for this. We see the same pattern over and over. Here, in Busby-Bilbray, we see it in glorious isolation. But it is the model for the electoral fog we are sure to see in November. We need to act on this NOW, all other priorities notwithstanding. We need to act in force.

With great appreciation--Jonathan Simon