Daily Archives: 18 July 2017

Questions for Susan Collins

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Susan Collins is the Republican Senator from Maine whose refusal to vote for the health care reform bill on offer (and any of the prior efforts) is centered on her insistence that the bill’s cuts to reductions to growth in Medicaid payments to the States—Maine in particular—are too great.  Collins needs to be asked, and required to give straight, substantive answers to, a number of questions.

What is Maine’s government doing to reduce the costs to its citizens of health care and of health coverage?

What is Maine’s government doing to make health care available to its citizens in the absence of health coverage?

On what is Maine’s government spending its citizens’ tax money on instead of Medicaid?  What does the Maine government consider to be more important than the health of its citizens?

On what basis does she insist that the citizens of New York, Illinois, California, Texas—any of the other 49 States—must be required to pay into Maine’s Medicaid program?

Election Fraud vs Election Hacking

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Certainly these are different from each other in method and often (but not always) in purpose, but is there an important difference were these successful in altering our election outcomes or in raising doubt about those outcomes?

I didn’t think so.

Why, then, are so many who should know better so obstructive of the Federal effort to understand the method and extent of election fraud?

There were nearly 150,000 attempts to penetrate the voter-registration system on Election Day 2016, State Election Commission says

That’s the subhead of Sunday’s Wall Street Journal piece on US Election Hacking Efforts. Illinois was hit as badly:

…hackers were hitting the State Board of Elections “5 times per second, 24 hours per day” from late June until Aug 12, 2016…. Hackers ultimately accessed approximately 90,000 voter records, the State Board of Elections said.

Accessed, not simply trying to, as was the case in South Carolina, the state with those 150,000 hack attempts.  In all, at least 21 states (I say “at least;” the WSJ just cited the 21) were targeted, and the intelligence community’s consensus is that the Russians were behind most of the attempts.

That should give an idea of the extent of the hacking at/into our election system.  Isn’t election fraud—another version of influencing or altering our election outcomes at least as serious?  Domestic defrauding of our elections, in some senses, would be even worse; it would be a betrayal by our own.

But so many governors refuse to cooperate with Federal efforts to characterize election fraud.

Go figure.