Election Fraud Blog

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:

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.

by Bob Fitrakis, Harvey Wasserman and Ron Baiman

November 14, 2006

Original Article @ http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2006/2250

The percentage of uncounted votes in the allegedly “fraud free” 2006 Ohio election is actually higher than the fraud-ridden 2004 election, when the presidency was stolen here. A flawed voting process that allowed voters to be illegally turned away throughout the morning on Election Day may have cost the Dems at least two Congressional seats and a state auditor’s seat.

The evidence comes directly from the official website of GOP Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell Blackwell website. But researchers wishing to verify the number of uncounted ballots from that web site should do so immediately, as Blackwell is known for quickly deleting embarrassing evidence. In 2004, Blackwell deleted the evidence of excessive uncounted votes after the final results were tallied.

Despite Democratic victories in five of six statewide partisan offices, an analysis by the Free Press shows a statistically implausible shift of votes away from the Democratic Party statewide candidates on Election Day, contrasted with the results of the Columbus Dispatch’s final poll. The Dispatch poll predicted Democratic gubernatorial candidate Ted Strickland winning with 67% of the vote. His actual percentage was 60%. The odds of this occurring are one in 604 million. 

(Freepress has numbers matrix/chart in this area)

The final Columbus Dispatch poll wrapped up on Friday before the Tuesday election. This poll was based on 1541 registered Ohio voters, with a margin of error at plus/minus 2.2 percentage points and a 95% confidence interval. The Dispatch noted “The survey’s 7-point variance from Democrat Ted Strickland’s actual percentage total broke a string of five straight gubernatorial elections in which the poll exactly matched the victor’s share of the vote.”

The hotly disputed central Ohio Congressional race between incumbent Deborah Pryce, a close friend of George W. Bush, and challenger Mary Jo Kilroy, a Democratic Franklin County Commissioner has not been officially resolved as of today, November 14. The Franklin County Board of Elections has postponed the official recount of this race until after the November 18 Ohio State-Michigan football game. Another bitterly disputed Congressional race, on the outskirts of Cincinnati, also awaits a recount.

The major news leaking from the Blackwell web site is the stunning percentage of uncounted votes still outstanding throughout the state. When John Kerry conceded the day after the 2004 election, there were some 248,000 Ohio votes still uncounted, out of 5,722,443 officially cast. This was an astonishing 4.3% of the votes.

George W. Bush’s alleged margin of victory at the time was about 136,000 votes, which dropped to about 118,000 after a fraudulent recount. More than two years later, more than 100,000 votes from Ohio’s 2004 election remain uncounted including 93,000 machine rejected ballots.

Today, in 2006, the percentage of the official total vote that remains uncounted is actually higher than in 2004. According to Blackwell’s web site, there are 211,656 absentee and provisional ballots still uncounted in 2006, out of 4,177,498 votes officially cast. This is 5.1% of the total official vote.

The high percentage of provisional ballots is due mainly to new strategies used by Blackwell and the GOP legislature to eliminate votes in targeted areas. In Franklin County (Columbus), which is now heavily Democratic, there were 14,462 provisional ballots—2.7% of total votes—cast in 2004. In 2006 the number soared to 20,679, a substantial jump constituting more than 6% of all voters, in an election in which fewer total votes were cast.

Provisional ballots are issued when poll workers challenge citizens’ rights to a regular ballot. The provisional ballot will allegedly be counted later if proof of registration and proper residency are established. But to this day, some 16,000 such provisional ballots from 2004 have never been tallied.

According to Blackwell’s site, in 2006, there are 46,458 uncounted ballots in Franklin County alone. According to Matt Damschroder, Director of the Franklin County Board of Elections, some 19,524 are in Franklin County, where Kilroy is a Commissioner. Another 900 or so Kilroy-Pryce votes remain uncounted in the Madison and Union Counties.

The preliminary vote count finished election night gave Pryce a margin of some 3,536 votes. But Kilroy has refused to concede.

In 2004, Blackwell listed 788 precincts in Franklin Country, with 845,720 registered voters and some 533,575 votes cast, a 63.09% official turnout.

After the 2004 vote, the GOP-controlled board of elections purged some 170,000 Franklin County citizens from the registration rolls. The GOP claimed the right to eliminate those who had not voted in the previous two presidential election cycles. This is allowed by federal law not mandated. The impact has carried over to 2006.

For 2006, Blackwell has listed 834 precincts with 766,490 registered voters and 342,958 votes cast, an official 44.74% turnout. He lists 46,458 absentee and provisional votes cast in Franklin County. But much of the lower turnout and high provisional vote count may have to do with partisan restrictions imposed by Blackwell and the GOP, aimed at stealing elections precisely like the one between Pryce and Kilroy.

New voting requirements imposed by Ohio’s HB 3, passed by the GOP legislature just after the 2004 election, led to the “flagging” of hundreds of thousands of voters in Ohio. Free Press reporters have observed a “Stop Sign” icon next to the name of between 20-40% of the voters in inner city and campus precincts in Columbus.

The stop sign is outlined on page 50 of the Franklin County Board of Elections “Precinct Elections Training Manual.” It is tied to a “60-day election notice” sent to voters, but being returned as “undeliverable.” Ballots cast by voters with stop signs next to their names have been electronically recorded as provisional, according to the Training Manual, and many are likely to go uncounted because the voters were in the wrong precinct.

Traditionally, Ohioans have been able to cast a provisional ballot in any precinct in their home county. But Blackwell issued a directive in the lead-up to the 2004 presidential election ordering that citizens voting in the wrong precinct would not have their votes counted at all.

Free Press observers, and statements called into the Free Press, indicate that poll workers imposed large numbers of provisional ballots on voters in Kilroy’s strongholds at the Ohio State University campus and elsewhere in Columbus. A single election observer with the Five Candidates Election Observer Project 2006 reported that 1000 complaints an hour were coming into the Franklin County Board of Elections. So many were logged early in the day that the phone lines set up for the precinct workers failed. The phones for the public had to be diverted to answer the deluge of questions from pollworkers.

The Kilroy race thus may hinge on how many provisional ballots were trashed at the polling stations or will be discarded during the recount. Because the vast bulk of the uncounted ballots are in Kilroy’s strongholds, the she would normally be expected to pick up enough votes to eradicate Pryce’s current margin. On election night, Fox News initially announced that Kilroy would win.

But Franklin County’s Republican BOE Director Matt Damschroder has postponed the recount until after Saturday’s home game between number one-ranked Ohio State and number two-ranked Michigan. Rioting has traditionally broken out after this game, but the ballots are being stored at the BOE downtown, far from Buckeye Stadium.

The stunning number of uncounted, absentee and provisional ballots listed by Blackwell indicates that there may have been deeper problems with the 2006 Ohio election than widely believed.

Another Congressional race is being bitterly contested in three counties outside Cincinnati that of themselves gave George W. Bush his official margin of victory in 2004. In one of them, Warren County, an unexplained Homeland Security alert was declared just as the polls closed, with independent observers then banned from the vote count. This alert has yet to be explained by the HSA or FBI. In a special 2005 election this district, dubious computer glitches and scantron ballot problems resulted in a late night surge that gave a narrow and much-doubted margin to the Republican, Jean Schmidt, whose re-election by another narrow margin is now being angrily questioned. How many other tight races in Ohio may have been swung by dubious manipulations remains to be seen.

Though it’s just a week since the votes were cast here, reports of parallel irregularities pouring in from around the country indicate that the Rove/Blackwell election theft machine was in high gear on November 7. Thousands of grass-roots volunteers who monitored procedures around the US clearly made a difference.

But the full story of what really happened in Ohio 2006 and elsewhere almost certainly won’t be known until well after this year’s college football season.

–

Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman are co-authors, with Steve Rosenfeld, of WHAT HAPPENED IN OHIO?, just published by the New Press. They are of counsel and plaintiff in the King Lincoln lawsuit which helped unearth many of the irregularities in the 2004 and 2005 election. Fitrakis was an independent candidate for governor in Ohio 2006, endorsed by the Green Party. Wasserman’s SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH, A.D. 2030, is available at www.solartopia.org. Ron Baiman is a statistician and researcher at Loyola University. Read more of their work at http://freepress.org.

Once again, the FINAL National Exit Poll does NOT compute.
http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2006/pages/results/states/US/H/00/epolls.0.html

THE DEMOCRATS DID MUCH BETTER THAN THE FINAL EXIT POLL
INDICATES!

They always do.

Remember Kerry in 2004?

He won the 13047 respondent National Exit Poll timeline
at 12:22am by 51-47%.

But the Final Exit Poll (13660 respondents at 2pm) said Bush
won by 51-48%.

Fast forward to 2006.

The 7pm Montana exit poll said Tester won by 53-46.
The Final Exit Poll: 50-47.5
The recorded vote: 49-48

The 7pm Virginia exit poll said Webb won by 53-46.
The Final Exit Poll: 50.1-49.9	
The recorded vote: 50-49.

What do 2004 and 2006 also have in common?
The Final Exit Poll was matched to the recorded vote.
It always is. That's SOP.
The Democratic vote was 3% too low.

Bottom line:

If the recorded vote was bogus and the election was rigged
through uncounted ballots and switched votes, you would
never know it from the Final Exit Poll.

But if you view the earlier exit poll timeline, you would
be alerted to fraud. And if you analyze the demographics,
you would confirm the theft.

Let's start our analysis with the 116 GENERIC PRE-ELECTION
POLL TREND LINE.  The Democratic vote share has been a
steadily increasing trend line.

On Nov. 7, the Dems held a 14.6% lead over the GOP.

Here's graphic proof:
http://www.geocities.com/electionmodel/Election2006_16921_image001.png

The Generic trend line on Nov.7:
Dem 51.8% - GOP 38.6%
Convert to 2-party shares:
Dem 57.3% - GOP 42.7%
That's a 14.6% spread.
We will refer to the 14% spread in the following analysis.
_________________________________________

Lets look at the 2006 NATIONAL EXIT POLL, posted on CNN:

PARTY-ID			
.....	Mix	Dem	Rep
Dem	38%	90%	9%  C 38% too low, 90% too low, 9% too high
Rep	38%	7%	93% C 38% too high, 93% too high, 7% too low
Ind	25%	49%	46% C 49% WTF! Independents voted 60/40 for Dems

Total	101%	49.1%	50.3% C WTF! Are they serious?

IT'S PROOF THAT THE 2006 FINAL EXIT POLL IS BOGUS:
According to poll, the GOP won by 50.3-49.1%.
Really?

1) 2006 Voters identified as 38% Democratic, 38% Republican,
25%
Independent.

THIS IS ABSOLUTELY IMPOSSIBLE !

Here's why:

a) The weights don't sum to 100.
OK, no big deal here.

b) Dems outnumbered Repubs.
Who was more motivated to vote this time?

c) The weights were 38D-35R-27I at the 12:22am 2004 NEP
timeline.
Look it up.

d) THE CLINCHER:
The 2006 vote based on PARTY-ID weights/vote shares
are IMPOSSIBLE! If the weights/shares are to be
believed, then the GOP won the Generic vote! Why,
then, would you believe them?

The NEP UNDERSTATES the Democratic Generic vote share by 7%.

It OVERSTATES the GOP Generic vote share by 7%.

How do we know this?

Simple. The Dems won the final Generic Polls by more than
14%!

Since 2004, the Final NEP has become laughable, a sick joke.
Don't they realize they can't fool us anymore?
Don't they realize that we can crunch the numbers?
Would someone please get this to Olbermann?

2006 NATIONAL EXIT POLL
Sample 13208 MOE 0.87%
Weights/shares adjusted to derive a 12% Democratic Generic
spread

PARTY-ID (adjusted)			
Dem	40%	93%	7%
Rep	35%	11%	89%
Ind	25%	60%	40%

Total	100%	56.1%	44.0%

That's more like it!
________________________________________________

HOW VOTED IN 2004
Using this demographic, the spread is 55.8 Dem-44.2 GOP.
That's an 11.6% spread. But it's too low. Why?
Because the Bush/Kerry/Other weights are bogus.
Kerry won by 52-47%. The third party vote was 1%.

This is an analysis of how impossible Final Exit Poll weights

were used to match a corrupt 2004 vote count:
http://www.geocities.com/electionmodel/BogusWeights.htm

2006 NATIONAL EXIT POLL
Sample 13208 MOE 0.87%

HOW VOTED in 2004
........Mix Dem GOP
Kerry   45% 94% 5%
Bush    46% 13% 85%
Other    5% 62% 21%
No       4% 79% 18%

Total 97.6% 54.5% 43.1%
2-pty  100% 55.8% 44.2%

Now let's adjust the weights and vote shares to
derive a 14% spread.

We use 51 Kerry/46 Bush/1 Other/2 No weights.

The adjusted weights are based on the TRUE Kerry/Bush
vote BEFORE it was stolen with uncounted spoiled/lost
ballots and vote switching.

2006 NATIONAL EXIT POLL

VOTED IN 2004
(adjusted weights and vote shares)			
........Mix   Dem    GOP
Kerry	  51%	 94%	5%  C Kerry's true 2004 vote
Bush	  46%	 13%	85% C Bush's true vote
Other	   1%	 62%	21% C Third parties had 1% of the vote
DNV	   2%	 79%	18% C did not vote in 2004

Total	98.3%	 56.1% 42.2%
2-pty	 100%  57.1% 42.9%

The adjusted Democratic 2-party national vote
share is now 57.1%.  That's within 0.2% of the
Nov.7 trend line (see above).

_______________________________________________________________

GENDER
Based on the 2006 National Exit Poll 2-party vote shares,
the national split was 54.4% Dem-45.6% GOP.
That's an 8.8% spread. Much too low.

2006 NATIONAL EXIT POLL
GENDER
(adjusted weights and vote shares)			
.......Mix Dem GOP
Male   48% 51% 47%
Female 52% 56% 43%

Total 98.5% 53.6% 44.9%
2-pty  100% 54.4% 45.6%

Ask these questions, regarding national vote shares:

WHY THE 2.8% DISCREPANCY BETWEEN "GENDER" AND
"HOW
VOTED"?

WHY THE 5% DISCREPANCY BETWEEN "GENDER" AND
"PARTY-ID"?

Once again, let's adjust the weights and vote shares to get a
result which
approximates the Generic vote.

GENDER (Adjusted) 			
.......Mix Dem  GOP
Male 	46% 53%  47%
Female 54% 57%  43%
Total 100% 55.2% 44.8%

This is just further confirmation that the Final
2006 NEP was matched to a corrupt vote count,
just as it was in in 2004 and 2000.

Edison-Mitofsky never consider the possibility
of a corrupt vote
count in discussing their exit poll methodology.

WHY DO THEY DO THIS?
WHY DO THEY ALWAYS ASSUME ZERO FRAUD?
WHY DO THEY ALWAYS ASSUME A PRISTINE VOTE COUNT?

THAT'S WHY THE FINAL NATIONAL EXIT POLLS ARE ALWAYS WRONG.

THAT'S WHY THE FINAL EXIT POLLS ALWAYS LOW-BALL THE
DEMOCRATIC VOTE.

THAT'S WHY THE FINAL EXIT POLLS NEVER MATCH FINAL
PRE-ELECTION POLLS.

THAT'S WHY THE EARLY, UNCONTAMINATED EXIT POLLS ARE CLOSE TO
THE TRUTH.

AND THAT'S WHY THEY'LL NEVER SHOW US RAW EXIT POLL DATA.

by TruthIsAll, posted on Democratic Underground by Autorank
________________________________________________

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 

By Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet. Posted November 10, 2006.

Don’t confuse a good political outcome with a bad electoral process.

Election integrity activists face a quandary this week. After an Election Day where new voting machines failed from coast to coast, and GOP-favoring voter suppression tactics unfolded in state after state, this largely liberal-leaning community knows all too well that the machinery used to slam the breaks on the dreadful Bush administration is deeply flawed, that Tuesday night’s vote counts shouldn’t fully be trusted.

But will they say so? Will they stand with, gag, the apparently dethroned Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., and demand the electronic machines in 27 counties be impounded and examined for vote-count problems? That could reveal, once and for all, why new electronic machines need to be junked. Or will political victory throw a wet blanket on a fired-up election integrity movement?

Election integrity activists were true model citizens on Tuesday. As people turned out in droves to vote, activists helped citizens in state after state document failing voting systems. They noted voting system breakdowns that went beyond the nasty partisan mailings, robo-calls, registration challenges and other tactics that largely were GOP ploys to suppress Democratic turnout.

The 866-OUR-VOTE hotline, created by People for the American Way, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and others, logged thousands of complaints about misbehaving machines, in addition to poll worker confusion. Indeed, thanks to the spunk of videographers and YouTube, Americans could watch elected officials — including members of Congress — seeing their ballots rejected by optical scan voting machines.

Election integrity issues are no longer conspiracy theory. Too much of Middle America saw just how real voting problems have become. This raises a thorny question: How can new electronic voting systems, used by one-third of the electorate for the first time, fail so miserably during the voting phase of the day but be trusted during vote counting on election night, especially when there is no paper trail to audit results?

That question — of which races are affected and which electronic tallies can be trusted — is very hard to answer and won’t be known for days, if at all. Unless candidates challenge results and demand machines be impounded and examined, the new electronic voting systems may be packed up until the next problem-plagued election. But even that happens — and it shouldn’t — there was so much else that went wrong on Tuesday that must be addressed.

As coauthor of the recently released book “What Happened in Ohio: A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the 2004 Election” (The New Press), it was striking to see that much of what unfolded on Tuesday across the county had direct precedents in the election that gave George W. Bush a second term. The same voter suppression tactics and voting machine problems that occurred in Ohio in 2004 plagued state after state on Tuesday, despite efforts by the election protection movement to bring them to the nation’s attention.

The story of Ohio in 2004 broke down into two main categories: massive voter suppression and widespread vote count problems, some of which we believe produced fraudulent results. As in 2004, the midterm elections experienced: voter purges (this time done with new electronic poll books), voter intimidation (this time letters threatening jail if voters showed the wrong I.D.), long lines causing people to leave and not vote (because machines didn’t start up or were pulled from use, and/or delays due to voters not being on precinct lists), the high use of provisional ballots (which were not counted Tuesday and many of which will be disqualified for technicalities), vote hopping (where one candidate is picked but the machine records a vote for his/her opponent). All of these trends happened in multiple states, according to the 2006 election incident reports.

What voters experienced on Tuesday was not conspiracy theory. But the voter suppression and early signs of vote count problems aren’t the full Election Day story. The rest of the story is the electronic vote count, which is still hidden and not verifiable. Voting integrity experts, such as Warren Stewart from VoteTrustUSA.org, said on Tuesday night that too many congressional results were simply not verifiable — even if Democrats were reportedly winning.

This is not to say that Democrats didn’t turn out in droves, didn’t tell exit pollsters that a majority of Americans wanted Republicans removed from power, and didn’t win big. But do we really know how votes were and weren’t counted on Tuesday night? No. Can we say the systems that failed so miserably in the day performed flawlessly on Tuesday night? No. Is this a difficult question to ask because most election protection activists are liberals — and have been waiting for six years for the Bush administration to be stopped? Yes.

But doesn’t America deserve a voting system that can be trusted no matter who is in power?

By Steven Rosenfeld for AlterNet

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:

• MELTDOWN ’06: USA Today Reports ‘Voting machine problems bedevil multiple states’
• MELTDOWN ’06: Missouri Election Integrity Org Says More Reports of Touch-Screen Vote Flipping…
• MELTDOWN ’06: Myriad Problems Reported to Local News Outlet in Chicago… 
• MELTDOWN ’06: Diebold Voting Machines Failing to Start Up in Utah, Voters Being Turned Away…
• MELTDOWN ’06: AP – ‘Polling places turn to paper ballots after glitches’
• MELTDOWN ’06: ‘Voting Nightmare’ Reported by Denver Post
• MELTDOWN ’06: Orange County CA Candidate Says Machines Down, No Paper Ballots Available…

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

(Catch Greg Palast on Election Night on the new Mike Malloy Show on www.kphx.com )

If ep365 is NOT in your area,

• GO TO YOUR POLLING PLACE TO MAKE SURE IT OPENS ON TIME! Call 866-OUR-VOTE if it doesn’t!
  
• GO TO YOUR POLLING PLACE TO MAKE SURE THE LAST VOTER IN LINE WHEN THE POLLS CLOSE GETS TO CAST A BALLOT!
  
• If your state requires ID to vote, check the state BoE website or your Dem state party for valid ID requirements and look for the VOTER BILL OF RIGHTS! Print some up and take them with you to share with voters!
  
• FILM OR TAKE STILL PICS OF ANY PROBLEMS and PHONE THEM IN 866-OUR-VOTE!
  
• OVERWHELM THE SYSTEM WITH DEM VOTES!
  

Each and every one of us should be at a polling place on Tuesday.

NO EXCUSES!

(FYI, be completely NON-PARTISAN while representing ep365 and talking to voters. Leave your opinions at the car door, take off those buttons, pins and lapel stickers and HELP VOTERS get to cast a legal REGULAR ballot!)

Posted by BillORightsMan on Democratic Underground

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 

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 

Sat Sep 23, 2006 at 03:57:39 PM PDT

Senior Citizen Abuse Alert!

Voting Seniors are fixin’ to have the rug pulled straight out from under them come election time.

Congress is set to decide new requirements of citizens before you can go cast your ballot.

These requirements could very well cost you money, time and a lot of effort. Citizens will have to produce documents that many of us do not have on hand

HR 4844, the Voter ID Act, if it passes in the Senate – will disenfranchise millions of senior citizen

voters in our country. Most seniors will not have the documentation needed to PROVE that they are citizens.

Tom Paine Magazine calls HR 4844 the Voter Fraud Fraud. Lots of detail about why this legislation is so bad.

The House passed the bill Wednesday afternoon. Now it moves to the Senate. If the senate betrays seniors and passes it, it will go into effect in 2008.

But We have to stop it NOW.

• NC Voter’s diary :: ::

The American Association of Retired People has actively opposed  voter identification legislation in several states wrote in a letter submitted into the record to congress:

“On behalf of older Americans who have largely shaped the values of our democracy, we urge great care to ensure that the basic right to vote is not trampled in an effort to

address unproven allegations of voting issues.”

Sadly, many people believe that the National Voter ID Act would be a good thing for our country , because they have not read the “fine print”.

Once you find out what will be required of you in order for you to have “permission” to vote, you will be stunned:

‘What HR 4844 does is require “government-issued, current and valid photo identification for which the individual was required to provide proof of United States citizenship as a condition for the issuance of the identification” — this is quoting from the text of the bill.  

Drivers licenses do not fit this definition because proof of citizenship is not required to obtain a driver’s

license (there are three states that DO require proof of citizenship but the majority do not).

The only existing document that fits this definition is a passport.  

In order to get a passport you need to obtain your state issued birth certification (not a hospital version).

There are fees connected to getting your birth certificate. These add up.

Married women might need to provide copies of their marriage license to document their name change

(another cost and more hassle).’~ Kathy Jackson, Oregon Voters Rights Coalition.

All this just to be given a ballot in order to vote.  Not to register to vote but to cast a ballot.

Many of us citizens will be affected *- You and your senior citizen neighbors will have to spend your time and money to get your birth certificate or a passport –  in order to obtain the govt issued id. Even if the government ID itself is free, the documents proving you are a citizen are not.

Ask your neighbors if they have proof of citizenship.

*In my home state of North Carolina, getting a birth certificate can be an expensive hassle:

IF you need your birth certificate  

within 5-7 business days, it will cost you $30.00 for the certificate and $25.45 required to have it sent to you by the required UPS Air.

If you don’t mind waiting 6-8 weeks for your birth certificate, then you can mail your request for a birth certificate from Raleigh,

from the vital records dept for $15.00.

This may not sound like much to you, but add that in the long wait that most people don’t expect, and you might not get to vote.  And if you don’t have a birth certificate, you will really have a problem. Most senior citizens have transportation and money issues already.

The Congress isn’t telling the public everything – read the fine print – the devil is in the details.

My elderly next door neighbor, a regular voter, and a republican – will not be able to cast her vote in 2008.

Sadly, HR 4844 will have a devastating affect on qualified and legal voters.

posted on Daily Kos by NC Voter