and it turns out that a popular drink of starbucks has a surprising. welcome back well in just the past two years since republicans swept into power in the state legislatures across the nation fourteen states have passed restrictive voting laws and taken executive actions to limit the vote and the potential impact on this election could be huge these fourteen states many of whom are swing states like florida wisconsin and virginia represent one hundred eighty five electoral votes or

sixty eight percent of the total votes needed to win the presidency the voter id laws in particular will have a huge effect on the outcome as the brennan center for justice uncovered the vast majority of americans who don't have suitable i.d.'s to vote under these laws are minorities poor people and senior citizens people who tend to vote democratic and as this chart shows a quarter of all black voters do not have the necessary identification to be able to vote under these laws a fifth of all latinos don't either and neither do eighty percent of young people nor eighty percent of senior citizens under these laws millions of democratic voters who voted just in two thousand and ten will not be able to vote this year that's why almost every single one of these laws was passed in a republican controlled state legislature and the numbers don't lie these laws can easily swing today's election which might explain why foreign election observers are on hand to make sure the voting rights of minorities are protected today when

we think of election monitors we think of third world nations practicing democracy for the first time that these observers were requested for by civil rights groups in the united states you've raised concerns over systematic efforts to restrict the votes of minorities on this election day so what do we need to know about voter access at the polls today well during. counsel for the democracy program at the brennan center for justice study and a welcome thank you now we so long lines in florida in ohio over the weekend due to restrictions on early voting for today are you noticing the effect of either voter i.d. laws restrictions on voting you know fewer precincts in operation at all gosh that's restricting some of this vote absolutely we are definitely seeing the impact of the voter id laws that passed and the interesting thing is that we have a very successful pushback against these voter id laws through litigation most of these that were passed this year were actually blocked or limited from going into

effect so for instance in pennsylvania the new voter i.d. law is not legally in effect in pennsylvania for this election but what we have been seeing is just report after report of voters being required told that they have to show id and this is leading to voters being wrongfully turned away from the polls who don't have ideas on hand when that is not in fact required so we're seeing some real fall out even in situations where the voter id law should not be in effect so it's important for voters to know what laws are in effect in which state and to demand the right to cast a vote even if they don't have photo id for instance in texas and pennsylvania these laws are not in effect this election i think there's been a lot of deception that you're talking about going on over what exactly is going on who can vote who can vote i mean i know that i showed up with my id to the polls today just to make sure that i had everything i brought my voter id card i brought everything but do you think that this is becoming

a politicized problem or it's republicans versus democrats or i or are there examples as well of democrats that are also trying to elect these really tough legislations. the restrictions that were passed over the past couple of legislative sessions as was mentioned at the beginning those have come out of states that the republicans control the legislature or the governor so that's just the fact of where these have passed but what we're seeing going on now is a lot of misinformation and confusion at the local level among poll workers and it's happening you know in all sorts of precincts and districts we are seeing as i said in pennsylvania we're also seeing in michigan people are being asked to show voter id and not being given an option to show an affidavit i think what we're seeing is the kind of system we have them place it's a pretty antiquated system we're also seeing a lot of problems with people are not on the registration rolls when they show up even though they're properly registered and they're being told they can't vote or they have to cast a provisional ballot so these are not just problems of you know republican or

democratic there are problems of our system but there's definitely partisan games a chip that has been going on this election season and we're seeing the really drastic results of that again unfortunately you know our voting system itself is left up to the whims of this kind of partisanship you know steve turn control of how they're going to run elections and when you have democrats come into power in a state they try to expand early voting they want to get as many voters out and then when you get republicans in charge of these states you see these restrictions against voting isn't it time for a constitutional federal right to vote in the nation so that we can just stop all this all this and all these games and let people vote. there's no question the question that the constitution the federal constitution protects the fundamental right to vote that's already protected by federal law at the constitutional level and a number of you know civil rights voting laws have been passed for this very purpose so what we really need is an foresman of these protections that we already have and

that is what's been done successfully so far this year in force and under the voting rights act there have been constitutional challenge that have challenges that have been successful in the courts what i think we need to see more of is as we talked about before not the kind of gamesmanship people are going to always find ways to try and game the system but what we're seeing is it doesn't work for the voters and what's most important is having our voices heard and i think we've seen now pushback at the citizen level where initiatives were passed to regain for instance in maine when they lost their election day registration citizens push to get that back i think we need to see more of that done it has been with the brennan center thank you thank you now so those are some of the legal tactics being used to squash the vote we have yet to mention the illegal tactics also being used to swing this election to i'm talking about rampant voter registration fraud easily hacked voting machines and voter intimidation and misleading it's going to precincts all around the around all around the nation yes at the end of the night the votes will

be counted it will know who the president of united states is but can we trust those counted votes for more on this we welcome brad freeman founder and editor of the broad blog brad welcome ok thanks sam going to be here we just want to kick things off quick there's this video that's going around on the internet it's a voter in pennsylvania confronting one of these touchscreen electronic voting machines and he's attempting to vote for president obama yet this is what keeps happening which play the video. so as it as you see is trying to press barack obama and it keeps highlighting mitt romney you've been on this beat about electronic voting machines and how flawed they are is this the smoking gun or at least one of them that we need. there are so many smoking guns i don't even know where to begin but let's we've seen this

election after election after election now going back almost a decade in every single election we have these touch screen voting systems that slip exactly like to see in that video you know back in two thousand and four this happened all over the country and mostly democrats and republicans used to say that oh it was these are sore losers conspiracy theorists but in fact we've had more and more video like the one that you saw showing that this is absolutely happening now does this mean the system has been hacked not necessarily of where you know one of the problems is that this just happens when they're not hacked this just happens because these machines are made so very poorly but the problem is election officials take these machines in the middle of an election when something like this happens they take these machines and they open them up and they recalibrate them at a time when they are absolutely the most sensitive to do being asked to being

manipulated when something like this happens those machines should be taken out of service period and should never be used again until they can be examined after the election so it's yeah it's a very serious concern but even at that the bigger concern is that even when those machines are working as they are supposed to they are one hundred percent on verifiable voting system there is no way to know whether any of those machines ever recorded anybody's vote accurately in any election it's insane that we're still using them and brown one of the interesting things to bring up here is that jimmy carter was recently in venezuela and he actually allowed of the the venice whale and the hugo chavez for the voting system that they have there they have a touchscreen thumbprint kind of system and yet here in the u.s. we have i pads we have holographic contests and we can't seem to get the most fundamental american right these voting systems correct is there a solution here or is that part of the well the part of the day that's been the

fact that they are right. to a certain extent i think it is part of the game but you know and i love jimmy carter but he's absolutely wrong because the systems down in venezuela frankly are no better. having a thumbprint look the problem is not the voters here the problem is not identifying the voters it is devoted to being able to know that their vote has been counted and counted accurately that cannot happen when you have an electronic system like the one you saw that was was there flipping votes and by the way if you want to flip a vote if you want to hack the machine to do it there's no reason to tell the voter you're doing it you just change the number inside the voter will never have any idea is there a solution yes now it's very complicated so get ready you take a piece of paper you take a pen and a hand mark the paper ballot you put it into a box on the table that everyone can see that sits there all day and at the end of the polling day you open up that box you count those ballots publicly in front of

everybody all parties all video cameras by hand and you post the results at the precinct before those ballots move anywhere it's not rocket science it's still done in about forty percent of the new hampshire towns which by the way are often done faster than the electronic touch screens down. you know we're looking for really rocket science and we don't need any we just need some common sense here frankly. you know nate silver's got a lot of attention at the new york times for saying that president obama has a ninety two percent chance to win this election poll after poll in ohio shows president obama winning in ohio if the election goes late tonight and ohio doesn't go for the president what are you going to be thinking. you know what i'm going to be singing for the same thing whether it goes for the president or not sam you had mentioned at the during my introduction that by tonight all the votes will be

counted and it will know who the winner is. i don't know very few if any votes will actually be counted by tonight and we may or may not know who the winner is we'll know who the computers tell us is the winner maybe but you know we've got as you guys were talking about before hundreds of thousands of absentee ballots provisional ballots that won't be counted at all but even the paper ballots that are cast tonight are only counted by computers two pewters that frequently get the election results we're going to have to wrap it there brad keep up the great work thanks a lot brad crimmin thank you all right here now is our election most ridiculous moment number four. if you've been successful you know you didn't get that on your own. didn't you didn't get that on your own. and that's ridiculous because the republicans took it

out of context built a whole convention platform on it in a stadium that was built by all of us in the government ok and our election night coverage continues after this break. here is mitt romney trying to figure out the name of that thing that americans call . a. i'm sorry i'm just a guy who cares and i want. to see. what he was saying to feature. limbaugh that's racist. because your bill is going to. we're going to distract us from what you and i should care about because

they're profit driven industry that sells a sensationalistic garbage he calls it breaking news i'm not me martin and we're going to break that. thank you. welcome to the capital of. what drives the world the great

news by politicians. today breakthrough hit thirty three in may trust no one. with the global. where we had a state. when nobody asked you our question more. than welcome back to our teams live election night coverage is just seven pm and we have polls now closing in florida georgia indiana kentucky south carolina vermont and virginia which means over the next few minutes or hours we'll be getting results from a lot of these states including some of these swing states but let's continue on with our campaign coverage here and talk about what the democrats they've been busy

trying to paint mitt romney as an out of touch plutocrat who made his living devouring american businesses and shipping jobs overseas but they've also been busy with another job that is painting over president obama's dark secrets you know the wars the surveillance the secrecy the indefinite detention all those things that the establishment left doesn't want to talk about before the. election you may remember obama beat the guy in two thousand and eight are saying bomb bomb bomb iran and then a similar covert drone war that iraq afghanistan pakistan and yemen somalia libya who knows where else and counter to this covert drone war program president obama has promised to run the most transparent administration in history that's right he has launched an unprecedented war on whistleblowers most notably thomas drake the former n.s.a. senior executive who exposed a massive illegal warrantless domestic surveillance program taking place at the n.s.a. and as these charts show some forms of phone surveillance have increased more than

sixty percent under president obama and some forms of internet and e-mail surveillance have spiked more than three hundred percent during this administration on top of that president obama signed the national defense authorization act into law on new year's eve of last year which included section ten twenty one giving him the power to use the military to indefinitely detain american citizens without a trial if they're just suspected of cordoning with terrorists you know when we think of americans when we think of undecided voters we think of americans in the middle who are trying to figure out whether they support president obama or mitt romney we really think about the voters on the left who are undecided because they really can't stomach voting for a president with a kill list to spying on everyone but they exist and whether they suck it up and vote for president obama anyway like most did in two thousand and eight or whether they vote for a third party candidate or even stay at home the fact is that these people and their voting decision could have

a major effect on today's election so joining us now to talk about president obama's secrets is national security agency whistleblower william benny william welcome so let's go ahead and state right now that first of all this is not a partisan issue the surveillance state it started under president bush it was expanded under president obama so are there political solutions to this at this point. well there are technical answers but the they don't seem to be politically acceptable to either party either of the major parties anyway i'm not sure about the libertarians i think they'd be more receptive to privacy and and less spying on us citizens because this is all heading towards a a fascist to tella tarion state and i would say one of the reasons why both parties seem to be on board with this is that most americans are really complaining about this. i mean there are a lot of us i mean there are people like you the people are complaining about it or talking very loudly about it but the vast majority of americans first off have no

idea that it's going on and second off kind of resigned to think you will i'm not doing anything wrong i don't have anything to hide. what do you want to tell americans about this race is what they're wearing us you see the problem is they don't get to determine what is right and wrong in the process it's all done by the central government deciding what people are do it's acceptable and what isn't so if they think there they may have opinions about something that's unacceptable in that case they then become a target without even believing they are so but that all of the data is being assembled to retroactively examine their entire lives so it's not a question of it's not a question of them thinking they're safe because they don't believe they're doing anything wrong it's just it's all in the perception of the administration not them it's not it's not the people's perception is the administration's perception but why why do you think it's happening i mean the justification for this from the

administration is you know this is counterterrorism efforts is that a legitimate explanation no because we could have protected privacy rights believe that explanation do you think no i believe to see this originally started even before nine eleven they were soliciting this kind of information from the telecoms. the c.e.o. of qwest testified the cords were his it's court documents show that he was approached in february of two thousand and one to produce to provide customer data to the government so they could do analysis of calling communities and things like that so to me it seemed that that was the an indication that the intent was to have a view inside the united states all along and be able to see what people were doing inside this country. so that was their intent from the beginning in my view. and it's gone beyond spying on cell phones listening into our conversations they can

actually access more information than ever before part of that is our fault as a fair because we do trust technology so much i'm speaking of course about the cloud american say store so much of their information in the cloud and they don't realize how much can be tapped how long that information is stored for and what that information in the end can be used for so can you talk about some of the things that merican maybe don't know that much about well i mean for example it may come a time when the government's doing it if you if you're applying for a job with the government they'll research your facebook account all that well that information that you have in the cloud so to speak they will look at including all the information they've accumulated on you to see if you are acceptable on their terms not yours so i mean all this information is just power being assembled by the administration and that's that's the real danger to our constitutional form of government we've also seen though as technology has increase the government has kept up with it to make sure it can still be monitored but we've also seen

organizations like wiki leaks pop up and it's become a lot easier for whistleblowers to to blow the whistle on this sort of stuff. we're going to see this kind of mouse game going who's going to win in the end. well actually i don't believe in serious accounting mask. i don't believe it's that easy for a whistle blowers to blow the whistle. but your positions like wiki leaks make it easier for them it's obviously not easy you're absolutely right there but i mean do you see it as as technology progresses and we move into the future that it will be easier no actually i think it be more difficult especially when the government goes into all these different bt and starts pulling in all this data and seeing all the all of the transactions that people have with one another in those media they'll be able to pick people out fairly quickly who are doing whistleblowing or leaking information. for example if you if you if they were looking for people who were after the leakers in the new york times in two thousand and five on that

warrantless wiretapping program well they'd have to do is look at all the calling records of the new york times and see who was calling them see see who might know about this kind of information and then target them with boeing i know that you are a former with a lower and what we do know is that you're saying that yes it is easy to blow the whistle and sure it is but it's also the repercussions are unlike anything we've ever seen before president obama has cracked down on whistleblowers in a way we've never seen before so this is one of president obama's little secrets i mean we have bradley manning locked up in here the time limit for a speedy trial is far over we don't know exactly what's going on until you decide what type of a role that can plan and so do you really think that was a boy because this is easy and maybe not as easy but as accepted absolutely not after all that they're going to send i guess john kiriakou is just is pleading out nobody is out for them or exposes them right this fellow who exposed the torture is

going to jail and the people who committed the crimes of torture are not. obama's don't look back only when we want to keep you quiet well that's well let's talk about president obama since you know he's the guy who's running for reelection he's a constitutional lawyer. it seems like he has to understand what's going on is at best a gray area and that given his experience in his claims to be a progressive that he would want to stay away from the stuff what do you think is going on and i mean this is just a guess but what do you think is going on what do you think is motivating these decisions as a man you know well part of it is now since i've been in the intelligence community i know they bamboozle congress so i mean they do as you know they get control they get. well i don't think he understands what they're saying ok i think they're they're using technobabble to convince him of argue their argument is the correct way in other words they're saying things like if we if we can't if we can't do all the spying we won't be able to find the bad guys and you know the country will be

vulnerable which is absolutely false ok we could have protected all the candidates of all u.s. citizens or anyone in the world for that matter and still get in the back. and we'll go ahead and jump in here sam i do want to just kind of wrap this segment up and bring it back to the cabinet session between president obama and mitt romney will any of these problems be fixed under a president romney administration or will they be fixed or adjusted under and at president obama's second term or not or is this the security industrial complex i think. i'm i'm not i'm skeptical of all of this because quite frankly we know what obama is doing he's not going to fix this and romney has an advisor general hayden who started this surveillance program to begin with so so i i'm not too terribly optimistic that he would change either so in fact i haven't seen any any any move by either of the major parties to do anything to stop this in

congress either so i guess it comes out of the common theme we're seeing tonight is it's going to take a movement at some point to end this sort of stuff and of course political parties to to to change this stuff william bennett thank you so much for joining us thank you. right now moving right on down i. our election list of most ridiculous moments here is number three and number two. why leave. their. house. and i'll tell you. it's three agencies of government when i get there that are gone commerce education and the what's the third one there let's see.

five ok commerce education and the. right thing seriously. is e.p.a. we're talking about a no no so we're talking about the. agencies of government e.p.a. needs to be rebuilt but you know here out about you can't name the third one the third agency of government i would i would do away with education the. commerce and let's see i can't the third so i. gotta love rick perry that was that loops heard around the world ok real quick we have some alexion results coming in tonight this is exciting looks like mitt romney has won the first states of the night kentucky and indiana and president obama has won vermont so that leaves the electoral college count now at nineteen to three

it's going to be a long night more of our tease election night coverage coming up after the break. r t is the state run english speaking russian channel it's kind of like al-jazeera .

russia today has an extremely confrontational stance when it comes to us. sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else you hear or see some other part of it and realize that everything you saw. was a big picture. of american power continues. to be.