BIPARTISANLY YOURS: COAKLEY WON THE HAND COUNTS

Posted in Bev Harris, Black Box (Electronic) Voting on January 20th, 2010

This article is about our right to know, not about Martha Coakley or Scott Brown. And lest you think something here favors a Democrat, just you wait, I’m still working on anomalies in the NY-23 election that are just plain hard to ‘splain. As Richard Hayes Phillips says when people tell him to forget it, “I’m a historian, I’ve got all the time in the world.” NY-23 still has history to be written. My public records are starting to arrive. But that’s another story.

Back to Massachusetts, I think you have a right to know that Coakley won the hand counts there. You can discuss this here:
http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/8/80830.html

That’s right.

According to preliminary media results by municipality, Democrat Martha Coakley won Massachusetts overall in its hand counted locations,* with 51.12% of the vote (32,247 hand counted votes) to Brown’s 30,136, which garnered him 47.77% of hand counted votes. Margin: 3.35% lead for Coakley.

Massachusetts has 71 hand count locations, 91 ES&S locations, and 187 Diebold locations, with two I call the mystery municipalities (Northbridge and Milton) apparently using optical scanners, not sure what kind.

ES&S RESULTS

The greatest margin between the candidates was with ES&S machines — 53.64% for Brown, 45.31% for Coakley, a margin for Brown of 8.33%. It looks like ES&S counted a total of 620,388 votes, with 332,812 going to Brown and 281,118 going to Coakley. Taken overall, the difference — 8.33% Brown (ES&S) added to 3.35% Coakley (Hand Count) shows an 11.68% difference between the ES&S and the Hand Counts. Of course, as Mark Twain used to say, there are three kinds of lies: Lies, damned lies, and statistics. These statistics don’t prove anything, and probably shouldn’t be discussed without a grain of salt handy before examining more detailed demographics.

As a point of reference, however, in the Maine gay marriage issue recently there was no significant overall difference between machine count and hand count locations.

DIEBOLD RESULTS

Diebold’s results are 51.42% for Brown, with 791,272 Republican votes counted by Diebold, vs. 47.61% for Coakley, with 732,633 Democratic votes counted by Diebold, for a spread of 3.81% favoring Brown.

LATE-REPORTED RESULTS

It’s always interesting to watch hand counts beat machine count results to the newspaper.

In the Massachusetts special senate election, results from six of 71 hand count locations were reported about 2 1/2 hours after the polls closed, with the remaining 65 hand count locations in right away. The slower hand count results represent 8.45% of all hand count locations.

These latecoming hand-counted results favored Coakley very heavily (she got 55.68% of these, earning 4,610 votes to Brown’s 42.9%, representing 3,552, a 12.78% margin) Whether the reports came to the media late or the media posted them late is unclear.

ES&S SLOWPOKE VOTES

ES&S had 12 of its 91 locations reported at least 2 1/2 hours after polls closed, a total of 13.2% of all its locations (as compared with just 8.45% of slower reporting hand count locations). So ES&S certainly wasn’t faster than hand counts, overall!

These slow-arriving votes represented 88,288 of ES&S’s 620,388 votes. Overall Brown got 46,257, for 52.39% of the late-arriving ES&S votes, and Coakley got 41,238, for 46.71%, yielding a margin of 5.68% of the late-arriving votes going to Brown, for a net gain of 5,019 votes to Brown.

North Attleboro and Paxton appear to be the last locations in the state to be reported, and they are both ES&S. North Attleboro brought in 10,881
very late votes, 71.48% of them going to Brown; Paxton brought in 2,036 votes, 65.37% going to Brown.

THE SLOW BOAT FROM DIEBOLD

Yes, I know they’re supposed to be called Premier machines now, and ES&S bought the company so it’s now all one big monopoly family, and then the whole kit and kaboodle in New England — Premier and ES&S — is programmed by the juicy little LHS Associates guys. But I like to just call them Diebold, that familiar name which we all know and love.

Twenty-four of Diebold’s 187 locations wandered in late, smoking cigarettes and wearing a bathrobe. That’s 12.83% of all its locations. Apparently it was faster to hand count 8,497 ballots, as they did promptly in Newburyport, or 7,339 ballots, as they hand counted in public for all to see in Milton, than to push a button and wait five minutes for the machine to spit out a Diebold results report in Pelham where they had 725 votes. East Brookfield’s 899 Diebold votes must have run out of gas somewhere; they weren’t reported for hours.

All in all, a total of 170,594 Diebold votes took a long time to stumble in the door, These votes — surprise! — favored Coakley. She got 86,214 of them, for 50.54%, and Brown got 82,911 tardy Diebold votes, for 48.60%, putting Coakley on the plus side of the late arrivers by a 1.94% margin, for a net gain of 3,303 slow-moving votes.

They’d called the election by the time the 170,594 tardy Diebold votes showed up. Coakley had conceded. And of course, there are many ways to look at this if you don’t trust voting machines, and why should you? It’s hard to know who was fooling around, or if anybody was.

You see, the Diebold latecomers represented the strongest showing for Coakley of all and in some heavily populated areas. 32 of 33 Cambridge polling place results couldn’t find their way to the media for a long time. Cambridge finally came in with 27,268 votes for Coakley — 84.11%. Brown was only able to locate 4,921 votes from Cambridge when all was said and done.

And the media couldn’t seem to rustle up any Amherst votes for any of its 10 polling places until races were called and candidates had conceded. Amherst generated 84% of its votes for Coakley with only 15% going to Brown.

So this is all very interesting, and hopefully is accurate because I’m spreadsheeting after midnight. And we’re talking statistics based on premature and unofficial results which came from the media and not the government, and the Massachusetts Secretary of State doesn’t officially tell us which place is using which system, so we’re relying on volunteers from the VerifiedVoting Web site who hunted it down.**

** A public service announcement from Disclaimers-R-Us, a subsidiary of the US Elections Industry.

GET OVER IT, SCOTT BROWN WON

Actually, I think any intellectually honest person will see that Brown garnered financing and executed brilliantly, and that’s just politics.

He probably DID win. In 71 Massachusetts locations we could watch the counting (woops, he lost those, overall). But in 277 locations, the counting was on computerized voting machines and concealed from the public.

So we can never really know who won, and that is unfair to both Scott Brown and Martha Coakley. But it’s most unfair to the citizens of Massachusetts, who have an inalienable right to choose their own governance. You can’t hold sovereignty over the choosing process if you can’t see it.

Black Box Voting is a national, nonpartisan, nonprofit 501c(3) elections watchdog organization. We need your support in 2010 very much. If you think our work is important, do support us.

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Kucinich Presents 35 Articles of Impeachment for George W. Bush

Posted in '04 Election, American Fascism, Dennis Kucinich, Disenfranchisement, Hurricane Katrina, Raw Story, Video on June 9th, 2008

35 ARTICLES OF IMPEACHMENT

Article I

Creating a Secret Propaganda Campaign to Manufacture a False Case for War Against Iraq.

Article II

Falsely, Systematically, and with Criminal Intent Conflating the Attacks of September 11, 2001, With Misrepresentation of Iraq as a Security Threat as Part of Fraudulent Justification for a War of Aggression.

Article III

Misleading the American People and Members of Congress to Believe Iraq Possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction, to Manufacture a False Case for War.

Article IV

Misleading the American People and Members of Congress to Believe Iraq Posed an Imminent Threat to the United States.

Article V

Illegally Misspending Funds to Secretly Begin a War of Aggression.

Article VI

Invading Iraq in Violation of the Requirements of HJRes114.

Article VII

Invading Iraq Absent a Declaration of War.

Article VIII

Invading Iraq, A Sovereign Nation, in Violation of the UN Charter.

Article IX

Failing to Provide Troops With Body Armor and Vehicle Armor

Article X

Falsifying Accounts of US Troop Deaths and Injuries for Political Purposes

Article XI

Establishment of Permanent U.S. Military Bases in Iraq

Article XII

Initiating a War Against Iraq for Control of That Nation’s Natural Resources

Article XIIII

Creating a Secret Task Force to Develop Energy and Military Policies With Respect to Iraq and Other Countries

Article XIV

Misprision of a Felony, Misuse and Exposure of Classified Information And Obstruction of Justice in the Matter of Valerie Plame Wilson, Clandestine Agent of the Central Intelligence Agency

Article XV

Providing Immunity from Prosecution for Criminal Contractors in Iraq

Article XVI

Reckless Misspending and Waste of U.S. Tax Dollars in Connection With Iraq and US Contractors

Article XVII

Illegal Detention: Detaining Indefinitely And Without Charge Persons Both U.S. Citizens and Foreign Captives

Article XVIII

Torture: Secretly Authorizing, and Encouraging the Use of Torture Against Captives in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Other Places, as a Matter of Official Policy

Article XIX

Rendition: Kidnapping People and Taking Them Against Their Will to “Black Sites” Located in Other Nations, Including Nations Known to Practice Torture

Article XX

Imprisoning Children

Article XXI

Misleading Congress and the American People About Threats from Iran, and Supporting Terrorist Organizations Within Iran, With the Goal of Overthrowing the Iranian Government

Article XXII

Creating Secret Laws

Article XXIII

Violation of the Posse Comitatus Act

Article XXIV

Spying on American Citizens, Without a Court-Ordered Warrant, in Violation of the Law and the Fourth Amendment

Article XXV

Directing Telecommunications Companies to Create an Illegal and Unconstitutional Database of the Private Telephone Numbers and Emails of American Citizens

Article XXVI

Announcing the Intent to Violate Laws with Signing Statements

Article XXVII

Failing to Comply with Congressional Subpoenas and Instructing Former Employees Not to Comply

Article XXVIII

Tampering with Free and Fair Elections, Corruption of the Administration of Justice

Article XXIX

Conspiracy to Violate the Voting Rights Act of 1965

Article XXX

Misleading Congress and the American People in an Attempt to Destroy Medicare

Article XXXI

Katrina: Failure to Plan for the Predicted Disaster of Hurricane Katrina, Failure to Respond to a Civil Emergency

Article XXXII

Misleading Congress and the American People, Systematically Undermining Efforts to Address Global Climate Change

Article XXXIII

Repeatedly Ignored and Failed to Respond to High Level Intelligence Warnings of Planned Terrorist Attacks in the US, Prior to 911.

Article XXXIV

Obstruction of the Investigation into the Attacks of September 11, 2001

Article XXXV

Endangering the Health of 911 First Responders

Read the rest of this entry »

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Where Paper Prevailed, Different Results

Posted in '08 Election, Optical Scan on January 9th, 2008

By Lori Price, www.legitgov.org

2008 New Hampshire Democratic Primary Results –Total Democratic Votes: 286,139 – Machine vs Hand (RonRox.com) 09 Jan 2008

Hillary Clinton, Diebold Accuvote optical scan: 39.618%


Clinton, Hand Counted Paper Ballots: 34.908%


Barack Obama, Diebold Accuvote optical scan: 36.309%

Obama, Hand Counted Paper Ballots: 38.617%

Machine vs Hand:


Clinton: 4.709% (13,475 votes)


Obama: -2.308% (-6,604 votes)

2008 New Hampshire Republican Primary ResultsTotal Republican Votes: 236,378 Machine vs Hand (RonRox.com) 09 Jan 2008

Mitt Romney, Diebold Accuvote optical scan: 33.075%


Romney, Hand Counted Paper Ballots: 25.483%


Ron Paul, Diebold Accuvote optical scan: 7.109%

Paul, Hand Counted Paper Ballots: 9.221%

Machine vs Hand:

Romney: 7.592% (17,946 votes)

Paul: -2.112% (-4,991 votes)

NH: “First in the nation” (with corporate controlled secret vote counting) By Nancy Tobi 07 Jan 2008 81% of New Hampshire ballots are counted in secret by a private corporation named Diebold Election Systems (now known as “Premier”). The elections run on these machines are programmed by one company, LHS Associates, based in Methuen, MA. We know nothing about the people programming these machines, and we know even less about LHS Associates. We know even less about the secret vote counting software used to tabulate 81% of our ballots. [See also CLG‘s Coup 2004 and Yes, Gore DID win!.]

New Hampshire Primary – ALL Diebold, ALL the Time By Michael Collins 08 Jan 2008 It’s been nearly eight years since the debacle of Florida and nearly six since the miracle Chambliss win against Cleland. Surely we have reliable, verifiable voting systems in place? It’s been almost four years since the nationwide disaster of the 2004 election with irregularities still emerging. Hasn’t all this been fixed? You’d think so. But, the answer is definitely no. Votes are still taken by voting machines produced by vendors highly sympathetic to the Republican Party. The machines are still off limits to those who want to examine how they operate and observe real vote counting.

Click here!

Email this page to a friend.

Permanent URL for this page: http://www.legitgov.org/nh_machine_vs_paper.html

Digg!

 Complete breakdown of the numbers is here.

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SEQUOIA TOUCH-SCREEN VOTING MACHINES HACKED, FOUND VULNERABLE TO VOTE-FLIPPING BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY!

Posted in Black Box (Electronic) Voting, General on February 13th, 2007
New Jersey Attorney to Ask Judge for Decertification of Company’s ‘AVC Advantage’ System After Machines Found Untested by State
Princeton Professor Paid $86 For Online Purchase of 5 Machines That a NJ County Paid $40,000 for…

Guest Blogged by John Gideon, with additional reporting by Brad Friedman

“We can take a version of Sequoia’s software program and modify it to do something different — like appear to count votes, but really move them from one candidate to another. And it can be programmed to do that only on Tuesdays in November, and at any other time. You can’t detect it,” Princeton’s Professor of Computer Science Andrew Appel explains in New Jersey’s Star-Ledger today.

Like Diebold’s touch-screen machines before them, Sequoia’s voting machines have now been found to be hackable in seconds by a Princeton University professor who says the systems could be “easily…rigged to throw an election.” Someone may wish to let the folks in Riverside County, CA, know since County Supervisors there recently issued a “thousand to one” bet that their Sequoia voting systems couldn’t be manipulated.

In the same report, it was revealed that an attorney has filed suit, claiming the Sequoia AVC Advantage Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machines used in 18 of New Jersey’s 21 counties were never reviewed by the state before they were improperly certified for use and that Princeton’s Appel was able to acquire five Sequoia voting machines for only $86. The same machines were recently purchased by the state for $8,000 apiece.

According to the Star-Ledger

[Attorney Penny] Venetis filed legal papers Friday claiming the state never certified some 10,000 Sequoia AVC Advantage machines as secure or reliable as required by law.

“There is zero documentation — no proof whatsoever — that any state official has ever reviewed Sequoia machines,” Venetis, co-director of the Rutgers Constitutional Litigation Clinic, said in an interview. “This means you cannot use them. … These machines are being used to count most of the votes in the state without being tested in any way, shape or form.”

Venetis argues that the state certification is in violation of NJ state law which says such systems must “correctly register and accurately count all votes cast,” be “of durable construction” to be used “safely, efficiently, and accurately.”

The lack of documentation and testing, however, is hardly the only problem, as reported by the paper today. “Had the machines been tested,” Election Integrity advocates have found, “they would have proved to be a hacker’s dream.”

Princeton Computer Science Professor Andrew Appel revealed that he bought 5 of the Advantage voting machines from an on-line government equipment clearinghouse for a total of $86. Virtually identical machines were bought in 2005 by Essex County New Jersey for $8,000 per machine.

“Appel had to submit only minimal personal information and a cashier’s check to close the deal,” the Star-Ledger reports. He and his team then put the 5 machines to good use…

A Princeton student picked one machine’s lock “in seven seconds” to access the removable chips containing Sequoia’s vote-recording software, Appel said.

“We can take a version of Sequoia’s software program and modify it to do something different — like appear to count votes, but really move them from one candidate to another. And it can be programmed to do that only on Tuesdays in November, and at any other time. You can’t detect it,” Appel said last week.

And what does Sequoia systems vaunted crisis-management team have to say for itself?


Citing more than a century in the election business, Sequoia Voting Systems asserts on its Web site that “our tamperproof products, including … the AVC Advantage, are sought after from coast to coast for their accuracy and reliability.”

While promising to look into Appel’s claims, Sequoia’s Michelle Shafer asserted that hacking scenarios are unlikely. “It’s not just the equipment. There are people and processes in place in the election environment to prevent tampering and attempts at tampering,” she said.

Appel counters:

But Appel said voting machines often are left unattended at polling places prior to elections. He is confident his students and other recent buyers of 136 Sequoia machines sold on GovDeals.com — where bidders also can find surplus coffins, locomotives and World War I cannons — will crack Sequoia’s code.

Then, he said, it will be fairly simple for anyone with bad intentions and a screwdriver to swap Sequoia’s memory chips for reprogrammed ones.

Of course, this is not the first time that Sequoia’s “tamperproof products” have been found to be highly tamperable.

In March of 2006, just prior to the Pennsylvania’s Primary Election, Carnegie Mellon University’s Dr. Michael Shamos, — a long-time advocate of electronic, touch-screen voting — accidentally “hacked” a Sequoia system during a demonstration of the system’s “invulnerability” to tampering. Shamos was in charge of testing systems for the state.

As well, last November, just days before the General Election, in a stunning report by The BRAD BLOG we revealed the “yellow button” on the back of every Sequoia touch-screen machine which, when pressed once in a simple sequence, places the machine into “manual mode,” allowing anybody to cast as many votes as che or she wishes on that machine.

In Riverside County, CA, just before the end of last year, County Supervisor Jeff Stone challenged Election Integrity advocates during a public, video-taped meeting to bring a hacker in to try and manipulate the county’s Sequoia voting systems. Riverside was the first county in the country to move to touch-screen voting in the late 90’s. Election Integrity advocates on the ground there have been challenging that decision ever since.

Though noted computer security expert Harri Hursti, who has hacked several Diebold systems, quickly agreed to meet Stone’s “thousand to one” challenge, Stone has been balking ever since. So far, he has failed to allow Hursti and the Election Integrity advocates from DFA-Temecula Valley to take him up on his ill-considered challenge, citing unsubstantiated concerns about state law and universally attempting to establish “ground rules” which have been dismissed as unrealistic by both Hursti and a number of internationally recognized computer scientists and security experts.

We suspect there will be much fallout from this latest chapter in New Jersey. Stay tuned…

UPDATE: Princeton Professor Appel has described the act of purchasing the Sequoia Advantage machines and what he found on opening the machines and the actions that students are taking in his blog “How I bought used voting machines on the Internet”. His blog includes the following:

I was surprised at how simple it was for me to access the ROM memory chips containing the firmware that controls the vote-counting. Contrary to Sequoia’s assertions in their promotional literature, there were no security seals protecting the ROMs. Indeed, I found that certain information in the “AVC Advantage Security Overview” (from Sequoia Voting Systems, Inc., 2004) was untrue with respect to my machine. Sequoia’s document states,

“The vote counting instructions in each voting machine are written into integrated circuit chips during the manufacturing process. These chips are incorporated into each machine’s circuit boards. Access to the machine should be limited by administrative procedures and is also limited by the physical design of the machines. Design features include door locks and a numbered seal on the CPU cover.”

I found this to be incorrect, with respect to the machines delivered to me. I did not have to remove any seals, whether of tape, plastic, or wire. The sheet-metal panel covering the computer circuit board is the only component I found that could possibly be described as a “CPU cover”, and it had no numbered seal. (If there ever was a numbered seal holding the CPU cover down, then Buncombe County’s technicians would have to remove it and replace it every time they change the four AA batteries on the motherboard!)

The AVC Advantage can be easily manipulated to throw an election because the chips which control the vote-counting are not soldered on to the circuit board of the DRE. This means the vote-counting firmware can be removed and replace with fraudulent firmware. Under the sheet-metal panel (the “CPU cover”), I found the circuit board containing computer chips, other electronic chips, and four chips that–unlike most of the chips on the circuit board which are soldered in place–are mounted in sockets so that they can be removed and replaced. These are ROM (read-only memory) chips that hold the computer program (firmware) that operates the voting logic. These chips are not held in place by any seals. They can be removed using an ordinary screwdriver and they (or other ROM chips containing other firmware) can be replaced simply by pressing them into place. You can see the ROM chips in the picture above; they have the white labels pasted onto them, and you can see me in the process of prying one loose with a screwdriver.

Like the purchasers of all the other lots sold by Buncombe County, I am now at leisure to examine the contents of the firmware on the ROM chips, and to modify it. If I had the inclination to cheat in an election (which I do not) I could prepare a modified version of the firmware that subtly alters votes as the votes are cast, with no indication of the alteration made visible to the voter. I would write this modified firmware onto new ROM chips. Then, if I had access to one of New Jersey’s voting machines (for example, in an elementary school or firehouse where it is left unattended the night before an election), I could open the door of the machine, unscrew 10 screws, replace the legitimate ROM chips with my own fraudulent ones, reinstall the cover panel with its 10 screws, and close the door of the machine.



by John Gideon for The BRAD BLOG 

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Report: Group Says Exit Polls Show ‘Landslide Denied’ Democrats In Last Week’s Election!

Posted in '06 Election, Brad Blog, Exit Polls, General on November 17th, 2006
Election Defense Alliance Says ‘Major Miscount In U.S. Election’ Cost Dems 3 Million Votes Nationwide!
National Exit Poll Once Again Adjusted to Match Vote Totals, Report Says

Guest blogged by Emily Levy of Velvet Revolution for The BRAD BLOG


Election Defense Alliance (EDA), a national election integrity organization, issued a press release yesterday announcing their new report, “Landslide Denied: Exit Polls vs. Vote Count 2006.”

According to EDA, the Edison-Mitofsky National Exit Poll, conducted by a consortium of news organizations, showed at 7 p.m. on Election Night an 11.5% vote margin in favor of Dems nationwide. But by 1:00 p.m. on the following day, according to EDA, “[T]he Edison-Mitofsky poll had been adjusted, by a process known as ‘forcing,’ to match the reported vote totals for the election.” The adjusted exit polls showed “a 7.6 percent margin exactly mirroring the reported vote totals.”

It was EDA co-founder Jonathan Simon whose foresight in downloading the Edison-Mitofsky exit polls on Election Night 2004 before those polls were adjusted made the discovery of the now-infamous “red shift” possible. Analysis of the original exit polls from 2004 became one of the most compelling bodies of evidence to suggest that the 2004 election was stolen on behalf of George W. Bush.


Now EDA reveals evidence of similar manipulation of this year’s election. In his story Clear Evidence 2006 Congressional Election Hacked, executive editor of OpEdNews Rob Kall quotes Simon as saying:

We see evidence of pervasive fraud, but apparently calibrated to political conditions existing before recent developments shifted the political landscape…so ‘the fix’ turned out not to be sufficient for the actual circumstances….”When you set out to rig an election, you want to do just enough to win. The greater the shift from expectations, (from exit polling, pre-election polling, demographics) the greater the risk of exposure–of provoking investigation. What was plenty to win on October 1 fell short on November 7.

The BRAD BLOG wishes to point out the difference between election “hacking” and “rigging.” Hacking can be done by outsiders armed with such difficult-to-obtain weapons as a hotel mini-bar key (in the case of the Diebold TSx) or a finger (in the case of the Sequoia touchscreen machines). Rigging would be done by an insider such as someone working for an electronic voting machine company or a department of elections. The evidence of skewed results in the 2006 Congressional election doesn’t specifically prove whether hacking or rigging or both occurred, but certainly magnifies the call for further investigation into irregularities in the 2006 elections. Will this new report help the newly-elected-but-apparently-robbed-of-its-landslide Democratic Majority Congress understand the importance of revamping our election system before 2008?

The next phase of Election Defense Alliance’s work will be to analyze results of specific Congressional races. This work will include analysis of exit polls commissioned by Velvet Revolution (of which The BRAD BLOG is a co-founder) and other independent organizations. Perhaps then we will find out how many Democratic (or even Republican) candidates who have been declared losers actually won their races.


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Never Mind the ‘Results,’ Election 2006 Was a Disaster for E-Voting Systems Across the Nation

Posted in '06 Election, Black Box (Electronic) Voting, Brad Blog, Disenfranchisement, General, TAKE ACTION! on November 11th, 2006
(Will Someone Please Tell the Headline Writers at the New York Times and the Associated Press?)

by Brad Friedman of The BRAD BLOG for ComputerWorld.com 

Opinion: E-voting transition a disaster

A smooth transition to electronic balloting? Not so fast, America

November 10, 2006 (Computerworld)

ELECTRONIC VOTING MACHINE SLAYS NINE

Terrorizes Florida in Thrill-Kill Rampage

That headline was from a satirical column written by Andy Borowitz published last Monday, the day before Tuesday’s midterm elections. Unfortunately, given the post-election coverage by some of the nation’s leading media — or at least their headline writers — it seems that only an event such as a Diebold voting machine becoming “unmoored from the floor and…trampling everyone and everything in its path,” as Borowitz wrote, would qualify as anything more than a “glitch,” “hiccup,” “snag” or “snafu.”

“Voting System Worked, With Some Hiccups,” declared the AP headline on Wednesday. “Polling Places Report Snags, but Not Chaos,” echoed The New York Times. “Hiccups”? “Snags”? Try telling that to the thousands of voters around the country who were unable to simply cast a vote last Tuesday because new, untested electronic voting machines failed to work. Monumentally. Across the entire country.

“Not Chaos”? Apparently the Times headline writers failed to check with the folks in Denver who were lined up around the block for hours to vote. They didn’t even bother to read the Denver Post article headlining the problem as a “Voting Nightmare” during the day on Tuesday and quoting voter Lauren Brockman saying, “We will not get to vote today,” after he had shown up before work to vote at 6:45 a.m. at the Botanic Gardens only to wait on line for an hour before giving up.

They didn’t check with Bill Ritter, the Colorado gubernatorial candidate, who had to wait almost two hours to vote, or with Sean Kelley, a Denver resident, who said to the Post, “I can’t believe I’m in the United States of America,” before he gave up and went home without voting after waiting three hours in line when electronic machines broke down. Despite an emergency request, the courts in Colorado refused to allow the city’s new consolidated “Election Centers” to remain open for extra hours that night.

Similar problems led to slightly more responsible officials ordering polls to be kept open longer than scheduled in at least eight other states due to voting machine problems.

In a Times story published the day before (which apparently the headline writers of the previously mentioned piece failed to read), it was reported that in Illinois “hundreds of precincts were kept open … because of late openings at polling places related to machine problems” and in Indiana “voting equipment problems led to extensions of at least 30 minutes in three counties.”

Other states where polls remained open late due to the inability of legally registered voters to vote when they showed up earlier in the day include Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Ohio, Georgia, North Carolina, Indiana and Ohio.

But the list of problems and, yes, meltdowns is still pouring in from around the country. My in-box has been beyond readability since polls opened on Tuesday morning, and my ability to keep up had already been near the breaking point in the weeks prior just from similar reported disasters that occurred with these failing, flipping and flimsy machines during the early voting period in Florida, Arkansas, Missouri, Ohio, Tennessee, Virginia, Texas and California, just to name a few.

On Election Day, the Electronic Frontier Foundation had received about 17,000 complaints on its toll-free hot line by 8 p.m. Common Cause received 14,000 calls by 4 p.m. John Gideon at VotersUnite.org performed the herculean task of logging as many news reports as he could in a searchable online database of reported election problems that day.

The nation dodged a significant bullet when George Allen conceded in his Virginia Senate race Thursday. Had he not chosen to do so, America would have found itself smack-dab in the middle of another Florida 2000 crisis with the balance of Congress depending on voting machines that offer absolutely no way to recount ballots to achieve any form of accuracy or clarity in the race. The battle of the forensic computer scientists trying to figure out what happened would have been another long national nightmare.

But that didn’t happen, so everything’s cool. Right?

We dodged another bullet when Sen. Rick Santorum conceded. Earlier in the day, he and the Pennsylvania Republican Party sent a letter to the secretary of the commonwealth demanding that voting machines in 27 counties be impounded after they received reports of touch-screen votes flipping from the Republican candidate to his Democratic opponent.

Imagine, by the way, if Democrats had taken such a responsible position to impound machines every time votes were reported to have flipped from Democrat to Republican — certainly the more commonly reported occurrence on Tuesday. There wouldn’t be a voting machine left in the country. It’s a pity the Democrats haven’t figured that out. Yet.

They’re so delighted to have won anything they haven’t stopped to realize they might have taken 40 seats in the House instead of just 30 had they bothered to fight for an accountable, secure, transparent electoral system and instructed their candidates to concede nothing until every vote was counted, verified and audited for accuracy.

And still, the Times and AP headline writers — who seem to have failed to read the stories they were headlining, given that each outlined a litany of such meltdowns — believe there’s nothing to be concerned about.

18,000 votes seems to have vanished into thin air via ES&S iVotronic touch-screen machines (no paper “trails,” much less countable paper ballots ) in Sarasota County, site of Florida’s 13th U.S. Congressional District contest between Vern Buchanan and Christine Jennings. There’s currently a 368-vote difference between them, but there’s no paper to to examine to figure out what may have gone wrong and explain how a 13% undervote rate was found in only in that race.

On the very same ballot above that race, the gubernatorial contest had only a 2.6% undervote rate. A hospital board election below it had only a 1% undervote rate. On absentee ballots for the Jennings/Buchanan race, the undervote rate was just 1.8%. Some of the 120 complaints from touch-screen voters that came into the Herald Tribune on Tuesday are published on the newspaper’s site.

18,000 undervotes. In Florida. With no paper ballots to go back and check to see if all of those voters simply chose not to vote in that race for some inexplicable reason. Faith-based voting in a race that Florida election officials in the secretary of state’s office have said they have no plans to investigate.

Good thing the balance of the U.S. House doesn’t hang on that race. Or a presidential election. But why worry about something like that? After all, a mere 18,000 disappeared votes on an electronic voting machine in a single county in Florida could never affect the outcome of a national presidential race. (Again, for the sarcasm-impaired: Right.)

In San Diego, thousands of hackable Diebold voting machines were sent home for three weeks prior to the election with poll workers (most of them apparently high-school teenagers hired by the county’s registrar of voters, Mikel Haas) on “sleepovers.” As Princeton University demonstrated, a hotel mini-bar key and just 60 seconds of unsupervised time with a single machine is just about all a single person would need to steal votes from every machine in the county. Nobody would ever be able to prove it. Thus, there is no basis for confidence in any reported results from any election this year in San Diego County. 50th Congressional District candidate Francine Busby has, so far, appropriately refused to concede despite the wide margin being reported in her race from the tainted, effectively decertified voting machines Haas disgracefully used for the first time this year across the entire county.

In Orange County, Calif., voters were turned away without being able to vote at all when machines failed to work and there were not enough paper ballots for voters to cast their votes. Many reportedly opted to vote on Chinese and Vietnamese ballots when English emergency paper ballots had run out (in places where they even had paper ballots to chose from), just so they could exercise their franchise. Many voters were simply told to “come back later,” when poll workers hoped the machines would be working again.

It is not yet a felony in the United States of America to turn a legally registered voter away from the polls without allowing him to cast a vote. But it damned well should be.

Victoria Wulsin currently trails Jean Schmidt by less than half a percentage point in their Ohio 2nd Congressional District race for the U.S. House. Wulsin has also appropriately refused to concede until every vote is counted, accounted for and verified. But a recount will rely on both the same hackable Diebold AccuVote TSx touch-screen machines used in San Diego and the same ES&S optical scan machines that were found to have mistabulated at least nine Republican primary races in Pottawatomie County, Iowa, last June.

Ten other House races still remain “too close to call.” Many of them will rely on “results” reported by inaccurate, unreliable, untested electronic voting machines.

Fortunately, the balance of the House doesn’t rest on any of those races either, so all is well.

When Warren Stewart of the nonpartisan VoteTrustUSA.org noted a number of Voting Machine Company apologists — from the U.S. Elections Assistance Commission’s Paul Degregorio to California’s unelected secretary of state, Bruce McPherson, to the Election Center’s Doug Lewis and ElectionLine.org’s Doug Chapin — joining the “everything’s fine” crowd, he noted:

They agree that the election went “better than expected,” “relatively smoothly,” with “isolated problems,” “just a few glitches,” “minor issues,” “no major problems.”

So, with multi-hundreds of news reports of election problems across the country — a fraction of the problems that actually occurred — you have to wonder what a meltdown would have to look like.

What would it look like, indeed?

I guess before the voting machine company flunkies and Times and AP headline writers would notice, it would have to look like Borowitz’ “Diebold Rampage” scenario. Though even that would likely have a predictable ending…

The touch-screen terror then cut a swath of death and destruction across the state, despite attempts by the state police to apprehend it.

Florida Gov. Jeb Bush appeared on television later in the day to urge calm, telling residents, “Clearly, Florida’s electronic voting machines are still very much a work in progress.”

At the White House, spokesman Tony Snow did not directly address the issue of the voting machine’s deadly rampage, choosing instead to make general remarks about the electoral process.

“This administration remains steadfast in its support of free and fair elections,” he said, adding, “in Iraq.”

by Brad Friedman of The BRAD BLOG for ComputerWorld.com 

 

 

 

 

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Dems Must Use Successful Midterm as Opportunity to Improve Elections, not Reason to Stop Fighting

Posted in '06 Election, Disenfranchisement, General, TAKE ACTION! on November 11th, 2006

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS

The dust has settled and it is time to step back and look at voting irregularities across the nation. Unlike their counterparts, Democrats have long championed electoral reform, especially after the Florida debacle in 2000 that cost America its duly elected president. Now that Democrats have secured a decisive victory and control Congress without dispute, they should fight even more aggressively to improve elections since they can no longer be dismissed as merely sore losers.

We did not see a catastrophic meltdown last Tuesday as some feared, but there were clearly a plethora of serious problems. Many irregularities stemmed from faulty equipment. For example, about 18,000 touch-screen votes in one county were not recorded for the contest over Katherine Harris’ old House seat, which was decided by a razor-thin margin. Some New Jersey machines began pre-selected for a candidate and responded erratically when changed.

We also know that registration issues turned many people away. Rep. Steve Chabot (R-OH) and Gov. Mark Sanford (R-SC) were the two most infamous cases of such troubles, and even Chelsea Clinton was told that her name was not on the rolls. If these three high profile voters had problems, there were surely countless more whose stories are not being reported.

Additionally, there was also blatant voter intimidation. Virginians in Democratic areas were told over the phone they would be “charged criminally” if they showed up to vote, while other voters were subjected to far worse:

“In Arizona, Roy Warden — an anti-immigration activist with the Minutemen — and a handful of supporters staked out a precinct in the city of South Tucson and questioned Latino voters as they entered the polls to determine if they spoke English.

“Armed with a 9mm Glock automatic strapped to his side, Warden said he planned to photograph as many Latino voters entering polls at as many as 20 precincts in an effort to identify illegal immigrants and felons.”

A quick browse around the internet or a recollection of Tuesday afternoon news reports reveal many other significant issues, such as voters waiting several hours in line. It will be easy for the new Democratic Congress to forget about all of this since they won, but there is still substantial urgency. Given the amount of time it takes elections officials to act, it is not too soon to start thinking about 2008, when the White House will be at stake and the hacks at Diebold will have even more reason and opportunity to rig the outcome.

There is simply no institution in a democracy more vital than the election process. As we saw this week, the people can stand up against a corrupt government and instigate solutions to nearly any problem. With such a long way to go before truly free and fair elections, Democrats should not mistake the 2006 midterms as a reason to cease electoral reform but rather an opportunity to finally begin it effectively.

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS

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Think the 2006 Mid-Terms were clean? Think again…

Posted in '06 Election, Brad Blog, General, Greg Palast on November 8th, 2006

Now is certainly not the time to give up, or even back down the slightest bit in the election reform movement.  This seemingly landslide victory by the Democrats would have been even larger had it not been for dirty tricks and suppression on the part of Republicans.

Greg Palast’s “HOW THEY STOLE THE MID-TERM ELECTION” states, “Two million legitimate voters will be turned away because of wrongly rejected or purged registrations. Add another one million voters challenged and turned away for ‘improper ID.’ Then add yet another million for Democratic votes ‘spoiled’ by busted black boxes and by bad ballots. And let’s not forget to include the one million ‘provisional’ ballots which will never get counted. Based on the experience of 2004, we know that, overwhelmingly, minority voters are the ones shunted to these baloney ballots. And there’s one more group of votes that won’t be counted: absentee ballots challenged and discarded. Elections Assistance Agency data tell us a half million of these absentee votes will go down the drain. Driving this massive suppression of the vote are sophisticated challenge operations. And here I must note that the Democrats have no national challenge campaign. That’s morally laudable; electorally suicidal. Add it all up — all those Democratic-leaning votes rejected, barred and spoiled — and the Republican Party begins Election Day with a 4.5 million-vote thumb on the vote-tally scale.”

Brad Friedman of the BRAD BLOG reported on several “irregularities” throughout the day, such as:

Also, many thousands of complaints were logged on the Election Incident Reporting System (1-866-OUR-VOTE).  5140 complaints to be exact, and growing.

There was also the last minute Republican dirty trick of the Rovian Robo-Call.  According to TPMMuckracker.com, these calls (of which there appear to have been many thousand), have occured in at least 20 separate congressional districts, and were paid for by the RNCC.  From TPMMuckracker: “In a letter dated Nov. 6, Michigan Reps. John Conyers and John Dingell ask attorney general Alberto Gonzales, FCC chairman Kevin Martin and FEC chairman Michael Toner to probe whether a sudden rash of last-minute phone calls paid for by the National Republican Congressional Committee violated any of a number of federal and state laws and requirements. Conyers is the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, while Dingell is the top Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee.”

Then you have Laura Ingram suggesting right wingers jam the Democratic voter information line

At this point you might be asking, “how did the Dems win?”.

Here’s how – the media started (albeit barely) to do their job!

HBO’s Documentary “Hacking Democracy” was aired prior to the election.  Also, Lou Dobbs had been extensively covering e-voting insecurity for at least a couple months prior.  The blogosphere (Democratic Underground and BradBlog in particular) has been more active than ever with this issue as well.  Basically, if they had tried to swing this election too far, it would have been painfully obvious.

Also, the Dems just weren’t going to put up with it this time.  There are at least a couple of congressional races that the Democratic candidate has NOT conceded, Clint Curtis’ campaign against Tom Feeney being one, with Curtis vowing to make sure every vote is counted. Francine Busby is another who is not conceding until all votes are counted.  Why should she trust the official result, what with the machine “sleepovers” in her district.  Also, election activist Bob Fitrakis is not conceding his Green Party gubernatorial bid in Ohio, he knows better than to just give up in that state.

Lastly, the turnout was considerably larger than expected, and the election protection presence on the ground was much more evident, both factors making fraud more difficult.

In conclusion, there were many problems that still occurred, and many that were prevented, but we CAN NOT rest on this victory.  Now is the time, with a Democratic majority, to make major gains in the area of election reform.  With Dennis Kucinich’s HR 6200 for hand counted paper ballots, with results posted at the precinct level, and with friend of democracy Congressman John Conyers Jr. the head of the House Judiciary Committee, we can definitely get some work done to repair our democracy.

by Organik for ElectionFraudBlog.com

 

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A Democratic Romp; Or a Stolen Election?

Posted in '06 Election, General on October 30th, 2006

by Jpol

http://www.opednews.com

While Karl Rove expresses confidence that the GOP will maintain control of both the House and the Senate on November 7th and darkly hints about “private polls” containing “the numbers” that assure a GOP triumph, a growing number of not-so-private polls suggest that Rove has little to be cocky about.

The new AP/Ipsos poll out today is such a poll. The AP story (Poll: Middle class voters abandoning GOP) paints a rosy picture of the Democrats’ chances for taking the House. Excerpts of the AP story follow:

Poll: Middle class voters abandoning GOP

The 2006 election is shaping up to be a repeat of 1994. This time, Democrats are favored to sweep Republicans from power in the House after a dozen years of GOP rule.

Less than two weeks before the Nov. 7 election, the latest Associated Press-AOL News poll found that likely voters overwhelmingly prefer Democrats over Republicans. They are angry at President Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress, and say Iraq and the economy are their top issues.

At the same time, fickle middle-class voters are embracing the Democratic Party and fleeing the GOP – just as they abandoned Democrats a dozen years ago and ushered in an era of Republican control…

The AP-AOL News telephone poll of 2,000 adults, 970 of whom are likely voters, was conducted by Ipsos from Oct. 20-25.

In it, 56 percent of likely voters said they would vote to send a Democrat to the House and 37 percent said they would vote Republican – a 19-point difference. Democrats had a 10-point edge in early October…

Likely voters have low opinions of both Bush’s job performance and that of the GOP-controlled Congress. The president’s approval rating is at a dismal 38 percent while Congress’ is even lower – 23 percent. Two-thirds of adults say America is on the wrong track…

Voters have grown increasingly angry at the Bush administration and Republican leadership in Congress throughout October.

Only 12 percent of likely voters say they are enthusiastic about the administration. The percentage of those who say they are angry with it has grown to 40 percent from 32 percent in early October. As for the GOP-controlled Congress, 32 percent of likely voters call themselves angry, up from 28 percent.

Groups of voters who grew more angry throughout the month include: women, minorities, liberals, moderates, Democrats and people who voted for Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., for president in 2004…

As strong as this AP article makes the Ipsos poll appear for Democratic House candidates, I was struck by how much stronger the actual data appeared to be when I reviewed the poll for myself. I was also impressed at the lengths Ipsos appears to have gone to, and the transparency they showed in determining just who among their sample of 2,000 adults was most likely to actually vote (they came up with a sub-sample of 970 “likely voters”). Every pollster has its own formula for determining “likely voters,” many of them highly suspect. Rarely do they share with the public the questions they use to determine just who is likely to vote. Ipsos does, and clearly a respondent’s insistence that he or she plans to vote is not good enough for Ipsos to determine that they actually will.

Below are some of my observations from reading the actual poll that I did not think were readily apparent from simply reading the AP article:

President Bush’s Job Approval Rating

  • 61% of the likely voters disapprove of Bush’s job performance versus only 37% who approve. Those are scary numbers for Republicans to contemplate on their own, but the intensity of feelings is even grimmer (or brighter, depending upon your point of view).
  • More than twice as many “strongly disapprove” of Bush (42%) than “strongly approve” of him (19%)

Congress’ Job Approval Rating

  • 75% of the likely voters disapprove of Congress versus only 23% who approve, but again the intensity of those feelings are remarkable.
  • 43% “strongly disapprove” of the job Congress is doing versus only 4% who “strongly approve. That is a stagerring ratio of 10 to 1.

How do likely voters plan to vote in upcoming Congressional elections?

  • Among “likely voters” 56% say they plan to vote for Democrats versus 37% who say they plan to vote for Republicans, a very strong 19-point Democratic advantage. But again, the fine print suggests an even stronger Democratic advantage.
  • Of likely voters who will “definitely” or “probably” vote Democratic, only 11% say they might change their minds.
  • On the other hand, 18% of likely voters who currently plan to vote Republican say they still might change their minds.
  • Even if all of the Democratic leaners who say they might change their minds actually did so and switched to the Republicans, and none of the fence-sitting Republicans ended up switching (and the probability of that happening is virtually nil), The Democrats would still come out ahead with 50% of the votes to 44% for the Republicans. That suggests that even a stampede of second thoughts about voting for the Democratic House candidates would still leave the Democrats with a solid, statistically significant advantage over the Republicans.
  • Regardless of who they plan to vote for, likely voters prefer a Congress controlled by the Democrats to one controlled by the Replicans by a margin of 55% to 37%.

The Bush Factor


  • 33% of likely voters say their vote for Congress will at least in part be to “show opposition to President Bush.”
  • 15% of likely voters say their vote for Congress will at least in part be to “show support for President Bush.”



Lots of Anger, Little Enthusiasm

Asked: “Which comes closest to your feelings about the Bush Administration?”

  • 65% of likely voters expressed dissatisfaction, but nearly two-thirds of those, 40%, expressed “anger.”
  • 37% of likely voters indicated they were satisfied, but less than one-third of those, only 12%, said they were “enthusiastic.”

Asked the same question about the Republican Leadership in Congress:

  • 65% of likely voters said they are dissatisfied, and nearly half of those, 32%, are “angry.”
  • Only 34% said they were satisfied and less than one in five of those, 6%, said they were “enthusiastic.”
  • 63% of likely voters indicated that “recent disclosures of corruption and scandal in Congress” were “moderately” to “extremely” important and would influence how they voted in Congressional elections.
  • Only 23% indicated that these disclosures were “not at all important.”

Likely Voters on the Issues

Issues favored by the Republicans rank far down the list of issues that are important to likely voters. Issues considered “Extremely/Very Important” in declining order are:

  • Iraq: 90%
  • The economy: 89%
  • Health Care: 84%
  • Terrorism: 80%
  • Social Security: 77%
  • Political Corruption: 76%
  • Taxes: 75%
  • Gas Prices: 65%
  • Immigration: 61%
  • Same-sex Marriage: 40%

Democrats are the Party Likely Voters Trust to do a Better Job

On virtually every issue likely voters trust Democrats more than Republicans to do a better job:

  • Terrorism: Democrats 43%; Republicans: 42%
  • Protecting the country: Democrats 45%; Republicans 42%
  • Handling the situation in Iraq: Democrats 51%; Republicans 36%
  • Handling the economy: Democrats 52%; Republicans 39%
  • Taxes: Democrats 47%; Republicans 41%
  • Health Care: Democrats 58%; Republicans 30%
  • Social Security: Democrats 55%; Republicans 32%
  • Same-sex marriage: Democrats 46%; Republicans 36%
  • Immigration: Democrats 45%; Republicans 37%
  • Gas prices: Democrats 52%; Republicans 29%
  • Political corruption: Democrats 43%; Republicans 25%

You may recall that I titled this post: “A Democratic Romp; Or a Stolen Election?” By way of a postscript allow me to point out another AP/Ipsos poll released last week but almost totally ignored by the mainstream media. That poll interviewed 1,000 adults in each of nine countries including the United States and asked: “How confident are you that votes in [the United States] elections are counted accurately?” The findings for residents of the United States are extremely interesting:


  • Very confident: 26 percent
  • Somewhat confident: 40 percent
  • Not very confident: 20 percent
  • Not at all confident: 14 percent

The actual poll is hidden behind a subscription wall, but of the 9 countries surveyed (Canada, France, Italy, Germany, Mexico, South Korea, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States), only Italians expressed less confidence in the integrity of the vote count than Americans.

Based on the AP/Ipsos poll regarding likely voters and the general elections as well as other polls that suggest similar conclusions, I see no way the Republican Party can maintain control of the House of Representatives… unless, that is, they get a strong assist from the likes of Diebold and ES&S.

I’ve paid my rent through the years in ad sales management, but I’ve been extensively published in publications that include Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, New Times Magazine, The Washington Star, The New York Times Op-Ed page, The Realist, and in several book anthologies. My primary area of expertise is the JFK assassination. I am a front-page blogger at Booman Tribune and frequently cross-post at Daily Kos.

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by jpol from OpEdNews 

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Citizen-gathered evidence shows an increasing likelihood of electoral fraud

Posted in '06 Election, Bev Harris, Black Box (Electronic) Voting, General, TAKE ACTION! on October 10th, 2006

It’s going to be up to us to make the case. We can’t solve a problem if we refuse to look. Citizens are fed up with black box elections, and are mustering up evidence of improper behavior that will swing the pendulum back in the direction it belongs.

Examples of the astonishing evidence uncovered by candidates and extraordinary citizens follows.

At first, we proved that the machines “theoretically’ could be tampered with. Then, in experiments in Leon County and Emery County, citizen-led investigations machines could ACTUALLY be tampered with.

At first, public records requests from Black Box Voting and others proved that election results were not authenticatable using available audit records. And now, Black Box Voting and citizens are coming up with audit records that show strong indications of improper behavior.

Be aware that we are not going to see a Perry Mason moment. Proof of corruption will be incremental, but it will come.

In 2006, your job will be to embark on the biggest citizen evidence-gathering expedition in history, to take this past the tipping point and achieve real change. Nothing will do but a reversal of the pendulum, back to citizen ownership and oversight of our own government and its electoral processes.

Let’s take a look now at some of the evidence citizens — and Black Box Voting — are uncovering:

1. Memphis: Candidates in Memphis asked Black Box Voting for help securing public records from the Aug. 3, 2006 election. Black Box Voting recommended getting a copy of the Diebold GEMS database, along with the Windows event log. What we found shocked us: The sheer number of legal and security violations in the event log were horrifying, and it also showed that Shelby County — or someone — was accessing the file during the middle of a Temporary Restraining Order prohibiting this.

– A remote access program called PC Anywhere was found resident in the system

– Evidence of insertion of an encrypted Lexar Jump Drive was present

– Evidence of attempts to alter or write HTML files (used to report results) was present

– Apparently without a firewall, the GEMS system was opened up to the County Network

– A prohibited program, Microsoft Access, which makes editing the election chimpanzee-easy, was installed on the system AND USED shortly after the election.

To read more about Memphis, click here: http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/1954/44242.html

2. Alaska: In early 2006, the Alaska Democratic Party asked Black Box Voting for help. The election numbers simply didn’t add up. BBV’s Jim March urged them to fight for the right to obtain the Diebold GEMS database, which Diebold had until then been asserting proprietary rights over. After months of hard-fought battling, they prevailed. That database was released publicly at Black Box Voting here: http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/2197/44183.html



You can open it yourself in Microsoft Access, and when you do, choose the table called “audit.” In this table you will see evidence that someone was changing things as recently as July 2006 — after the matter was in court, before the file was released. The changes are substantial, and involve redefining ballot and candidate items, along with a reference to a second memory card.

If you don’t have MS Access, here is a pdf copy of that controversial log: http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/2197/44278.html

3. In Georgia, Cynthia McKinney contacted Black Box Voting. Very odd things were happening in the 2006 primary and the runoff election that followed — Democrats were being served up Republican primary ballots on the Diebold touch-screens, McKinney’s name was left off some ballots, but reportedly appeared on other ballots nowhere near her district. The electronic poll books — something Georgia voters never asked for and a whole new source of glitches — were malfunctioning regularly.

Black Box Voting advised McKinney to seek the troubleshooter and pollworker logs. What we found on these shocked us — in an election reported as “smooth” by the press, was evidence of dozens and dozens of voting machine malfunctions, electronic pollbook glitches, and most disturbing of all (given the dire consequences available based on the Hursti and Princeton studies), the seals for dozens of voting machines were missing, broken, and mismatched — yet the machines were used anyway.

To view a list of the problems in Dekalb County, Georgia, click here: http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/1954/44150.html

4. In Ohio, Richard Hayes Phillips examined ballots from the 2004 presidential election. They’d been kept locked up for 22 months, and he was under immense pressure to look at as many as he could before they were destroyed. What he found shocked him: Patterns of tampering, as evidenced by statistically impossible overvotes, strategically placed and favoring George W. Bush.  He listed his findings here: http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/2197/44285.html

This is the tip of the iceberg. The missing ingredient is, and has been, the active oversight of the citizenry. In 2006, please join the movement as an active participant in overseeing and authenticating your election. We’ll help. Start here:

Citizen Tool Kit: http://www.blackboxvoting.org/toolkit.pdf

Bev Harris

Founder

Black Box Voting 

From BlackBoxVoting.org 

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