Jonathan Simon is licensed to practice law in the state of Massachusetts. In the first half, he discussed his work with the Election Defense Alliance, whose mission is to restore observable vote counting to American elections and reform the current vulnerabilities of electronic voting systems. While voter suppression is also an issue, Simon's focus is on the counting process. It's a system that's designed to be concealed, and "votes are counted in the pitch darkness of cyberspace," he remarked. Many of the electronic voting systems are owned by companies that are partisan, and election results can be changed quite easily on memory cards and in the processing via the Internet, he added.
The pattern that Simon observed is what he calls a "red shift" in which right-wing candidates seem to be favored in elections. If it was a glitch or accident, it would work both ways, but "we see it all going in the same direction as if there were a magnet off stage somewhere." He cited the 2014 midterm elections as a case of possible tampering. The Republican congress at that time had a record low approval rating of only 8%, yet out of 222 candidates running, 220 were re-elected. "Whether we're right, left, or center" Americans should all want an observable count-- something that everyone can place their trust in, he stated.
---------------------------
Mark Muncy is the creator of Hellview Cemetery, a charity haunted house in central Florida that was so infamous it was banned by the City of St. Petersburg. In the latter half, he detailed strange and unusual locations in Florida, as well as odd creatures, and tragedies and scandals. There's a ¼ mile stretch of highway in the middle of Florida known as the "I-4 Dead Zone" which has more accidents than the rest of the Interstate combined. There was a family that lived there in the 1800s, he said, who died from yellow fever and were buried on the land, which seemed to be cursed afterward. They didn't remove the bodies when they started building the Interstate, and just at that time, the deadly Hurricane Donna swept through the area. To this day, Muncy noted, people see phantom hitchhikers and strange shadow shapes along the road.
He also talked about Koreshan State Park, where a cult believed that the Earth was hollow; a giant turtle in Punta Gorda said to save a family from a hurricane in 1932 as they staved off drowning by huddling on top of it; "Pinkie the Sea Monster," a Nessie-like creature the color of boiled shrimp that was popularized in the 1970s; and accounts of the Skunkape, Florida's answer to Bigfoot. One of the wildest stories Muncy recounted was that of Count Von Cossel of Key West, who treated and then married a beautiful young woman suffering from TB. After she died, the Count removed her from the mausoleum and brought her to his makeshift lab where he "resurrected" her with such materials as wax and papier-mâché. For more, check out accompanying images and illustrations.
News segment guests: Catherine Austin Fitts, Steve Kates