|
MAY 2008
HOW TO CAST A BALLOT IN INDIANA NOW THAT
THE SUPREME COURT HAS REINTRODUCED VOTER SEGREGATION
The
chads on those ballots in Florida hung for a reason. As seven former employees
of Sequoia Voting Systems, the company which produced FL's paper
ballots in 2000 attest, they were forced by company superiors
to use inferior paper for those ballots, only the ones going
to Florida, and were further ordered to misalign the chads on
those paper ballots, but only for those going to Dem stronghold,
Palm Beach County. - Brad Blog
APRIL 2008
HOW TO CAST A BALLOT IN INDIANA
NOW THAT THE SUPREME COURT HAS REINTRODUCED VOTER SEGREGATION
BRAD
BLOG For those wondering what a
legally registered voter needs to do to successfully cast a ballot
in Indiana so that it might be counted, in the event the voter
doesn't currently own a state-issued photo ID (no, military ID
is not acceptable) we thought we'd offer a handy quick guide:
Note: It doesn't matter if you've voted
in every single election for the last 40 or 50 years at the same
polling place. . . You'll still need to do the following if you
don't happen to have an IN drivers license:
How to cast a ballot in Indiana, if you
don't currently have a state-issued ID:
- Find your birth certificate or passport.
If you don't have either, you might be able to apply to the state
to get a copy of your birth certificate, if you happened to have
been born there, for just $12. A passport may cost you $100 .
. .
- Get yourself to a Bureau of Motor Vehicles.
Don't let the fact that you don't drive, or have a car, or have
access to public transportation, as in many counties in Indiana,
stop you from getting to the BMV before Election Day.
- Do the above every four years, without
fail, or risk not being able to vote like everyone else at the
polls in Indiana on Election Day.
If you fail in any step above, don't have
the money to afford the necessary documents, or have a religious
objection to having your photo taken, do not to worry. Indiana
has you covered. . .
- When you get to the polls, and are told
you can't vote like everyone else, because you have no state-issued
ID, you'll get to vote on a provisional ballot (hopefully, at
least that's the law).
- Don't forget to sign the affidavit on
the ballot, stating that you are who you say you are, before
dropping it into the box, so officials can match your polling
place Election Day signature with your voter registration form
signature.
- Before 10 days have elapsed after you've
voted, you must now figure out how to get a ride to the county
seat, however far that may be from where you live. Get to the
courthouse there, and then sign yet another affidavit, similar
to the one you signed on Election Day at the polling place on
your provisional ballot, attesting again to the fact that you
are you. And then maybe, just maybe, if that signature is also
judged to match your registration, then your vote might be counted.
. .
As Scalia and friends noted in their decision
yesterday, "the burden at issue is minimal" So what
could those losers on the Supreme Court have been thinking, just
42 years ago, when they struck down a simple $1.50 poll-tax on
the grounds that it might keep some voters from being able to
cast their legal vote? Silly them.
STATELINE The Supreme
Court's ruling upheld an Indiana law requiring all voters to
present photo ID. Indiana is one of three states that require
photo IDs, but other states make voters produce other kinds of
identification, which can include bills, bank statements or paychecks:
Every first-time voter: Kansas Pennsylvania
First-time voters who registered by mail:
California Idaho Illinois Iowa Maine Maryland Massachusetts Minnesota
Mississippi Nebraska Nevada New Hampshire New Jersey New York
North Carolina Oklahoma Oregon Rhode Island Utah Vermont West
Virginia Wisconsin Wyoming
Every voter: Alabama Alaska Arizona Arkansas
Colorado Connecticut Delaware Kentucky Missouri Montana New Mexico
North Dakota Ohio South Carolina Tennessee Texas Virginia Washington
Every voter must show a photo ID: Florida
Georgia Indiana
Every voter is asked to show a photo ID:
Hawaii Louisiana Michigan South Dakota
The court's 6-3 decision leaves the door
open for future legal challenges, if proof is presented that
voters couldn't cast their ballots because of the new rules-
evidence that the court said was missing from the Indiana case.
But the court didn't specify how many people must be affected
for it to consider striking down the law.
"It's going to be an uphill battle
for anybody who would want to (challenge the Indiana law) just
because the state interests are so strong" in holding fraud-free
elections, said Indiana Solicitor General Tom Fisher. Fisher
defended the law at oral arguments before the high court. . .
Under the Indiana law, registered voters
must present a government-issued photo ID - such as a driver's
license - to take part in the elections. Voters without proper
identification can cast provisional ballots, but those count
only if those voters show a photo ID at a county election office
within 10 days.
Republicans muscled the law through the
Indiana General Assembly without a single Democratic vote when
the GOP still controlled both chambers.
BRITISH TV EXPLAINS OUR ELECTORAL
SYSTEM
GREAT MOMENTS IN POLITICAL HYPOCRACY
Texas legislator,
wants to require voters to have photo IDs is photographed casting
multiple votes. One legislator was even recorded casting three
votes after the morning he died unexpectedly.
MARCH 2008
MEET THE GUY WHO'LL BE MAKING
SURE THE PENNSYLVANIA VOTING MACHINES WORK RIGHT
FEBRUARY 2008
SANTA FE BECOMES 13TH CITY OR
COUNTRY TO APPROVE INSTANT RUNOFF VOTING
JANUARY 2008
NY TIMES FINALLY
NOTICES ITS OWN STORY
THE NY TIMES Magazine has finally run a
major story on the problems with computerized voting. As Brad
Blog reports, "The massive Clive Thompson article, titled
'The Bugs in the Machines,' is quite chilling. 'After the 2000
election,' it opens, 'counties around the country rushed to buy
new computerized voting machines. But it turns out that these
machines may cause problems worse than hanging chads. Is America
ready for another contested election?' One key passage: 'The
earliest critiques of digital voting booths came from the fringe
--- disgruntled citizens and scared-senseless computer geeks
--- but the fears have now risen to the highest levels of government.'"
Which sounds good except for one thing:
the NY Times ran a story raising many of these issues over 20
years ago. On July 29 1985, David Burnham's story began:
"The computer program that was used
to count more than one-third of the votes cast in the Presidential
election last year is very vulnerable to manipulation and fraud,
according to expert witnesses in court actions challenging local
and Congressional elections in three states. The allegations
that vote tallies calculated with the widely used computer system
may have been secretly altered have raised concern among election
officials and computer experts. That is because of the rapidly
increasing use of such systems, the lack of Federal or state
standards that mandate specific safeguards and the widespread
lack of computer skills among most local voting authorities.
One expert says that "about 10 percent" of the devices
fail in each election."
Twenty years ago, Ronnie Dugger addressed
many of these issues in a New Yorker article. And here is what
we wrote the same year:
PROGRESSIVE REVIEW, 1988 - More than half
the ballots cast on Election Day were highly vulnerable to fraud
and error according to two reports recently released by the Urban
Policy Research Institute and Computer Professionals for Social
Responsibility. These ballots were counted by computerized systems
that, according to UPRI, can be affected by "various kinds
of threats, error and manipulation." A single person can
alter the outcome of any computerized election by tinkering with
the computers, vote-counting software or machine readable ballots.
The UPRI report blames the vulnerability
on inadequate procedural safeguards and on the vote-tallying
systems themselves. The systems often prove to be too complex
for local election officials to administer and can conceal evidence
of tampering. In addition, they lack audit trails which would
permit reconstruction of questionable election results. There
have been law suits in four states, each of which involving vote-counting
systems from the same vendor, whose products dominate the market.
IBM dropped out of the election computer market after a 1970
election in Los Angeles using punch-card ballots was challenged
with allegations of fraud.
Today, most election systems, according
to the CPSR report, are purchased from small firms, some with
just a few employees. CPSR points out that "elections computer
programs are not subject to design or source code inspections
by independent auditors outside the vendor, as banking software
is." Even if elections officials had access to the source
codes, "few would be able to obtain the resources to determine
its quality."
In fact, CSPR report authors Bob Wilcox
and Enk Nilsson suggest that the sloppy way in which some computer
programs are created (and in some cases subsequently discarded)
makes it difficult for even professionals "to determine
if the program is designed correctly." The problem is not
theoretical. In 1980, a programming error during the president
primary count led California election computers in one county
to give 15,000 votes belonging to Jimmy Carter and Ted Kennedy
to Lyndon Larouche and Jerry Brown. In Gwinnet County, Georgia,
the results of a close race were reversed after discovery of
a computer hardware error. In Moline, Illinois, a faulty timing
belt slipped intermittently on one card reader, leading to a
miscount in which a candidate actually took office and then had
to give it up. And a National Bureau of Standards report lists
computer difficulties in 26 recent elections.
The possibilities for accidental or deliberate
mischief are legion:
- Punch card ballots can be invalidated
by adding an extra punch or two.
- Bogus ballots can be added or removed.
- Punched out dots can fall onto the next
ballot in the stack, covering a hole and erasing-a vote.
- Orientation marks on ballots, that tell
the computer how to read the ballot, can be misprinted or mispunched.
- Supposedly secret passwords can be leaked,
allowing unlawful entry to the system.
- "Trapdoors" can be surreptitiously
opened within the system, causing miscounts and then closing
themselves with no record that they ever existed.
- "Time bombs" allow a computer
to act in a certain way at a certain time, say election day,
again with no record, but in this case the practitioner doesn't
even have to be present.
- "Trojan horses" do their mischief
by hiding inside another program, perhaps one that prints up
election results as bar charts. According to UPRI, "Once
election officials open the gates by using the bar chart program,
the Trojan horse can let out its software soldiers and manipulate
the vote-counting procedure, first turning off the computer's
record-keeping system or audit trail.
Two Princeton computer scientists reviewed
the most common computer vote-tallying system and found the software
so poorly designed that it was virtually impossible to guarantee
its functions. Another computer scientist called the system "a
bucket of worms" with over confusing, badly written instructions,
all of which must perfectly for the election results to be properly
tallied and reported. CPSR has come up with a program for improving
election accuracy and security. Its recommendations include:
- Independent review of software
- Separation of functions and powers within
the election system, so that, for example, ballot creation, elections,
and election analysis would be done by different people with
different software
- Making sure that citizens and not computer
experts run elections.
- Checking ballots for validity before
they leave a precinct.
- Reducing or eliminating human interaction
with computers on election day.
- A complete record of all elections with
an adequate audit trail.
NEW YORKER ARTICLE
http://www.newsgarden.org/columns/dugger.shtml
NEW YORK TIMES ARTICLE
http://www.newsgarden.org/columns/burnham1.shtml
DECEMBER 2007
ELECTORAL COLLEGE: THE ULTIMATE ELECTION
RIG
CURIOUS as to how much the Electoral College
distorts American presidential vote choices, we analyzed electoral
votes against the actual voting population in 2004. California
had 68% of the electoral votes it deserved; New York had 62%
of its fair share.
OHIO FINDS ALL VOTING SYSTEMS USED TO ELECT BUSH
CAN BE HACKED
NY TIMES - All five voting systems used
in Ohio, a state whose electoral votes narrowly swung two elections
toward President Bush, have critical flaws that could undermine
the integrity of the 2008 general election, a report commissioned
by the state's top elections official has found. "It was
worse than I anticipated," the official, Secretary of State
Jennifer Brunner, said of the report. "I had hoped that
perhaps one system would test superior to the others."
At polling stations, teams working on the
study were able to pick locks to access memory cards and use
hand-held devices to plug false vote counts into machines. At
boards of election, they were able to introduce malignant software
into servers.
Ms. Brunner proposed replacing all of the
state's voting machines, including the touch-screen ones used
in more than 50 of Ohio's 88 counties. She wants all counties
to use optical scan machines that read and electronically record
paper ballots that are filled in manually by voters.
She called for legislation and financing
to be in place by April so the new machines can be used in the
presidential election next November. She said she could not estimate
the cost of the changes.
Florida, another swing state with a history
of voting problems, is also scrapping touch-screen machines and
switching to optical scan ones for the election. Such systems
have gained favor because experts say they are more reliable
than others and, unlike most touch screens, they provide a paper
trail for recounts.
NOVEMBER 2007
TWO CITIES REPORT DRAMATIC DROP IN VOTER
TURN-OUT
BEYOND CHRON - San Francisco has seen a
9% drop this year in the number of registered voters, according
to the S.F. Chronicle. Some of that decline can be attributed
to the Department of Elections finally cleaning up its lists
of those eligible to part take in our ritual choosing of the
lesser of two evils. Another reason cited is the new policy of
banning oversized political signs from City property such as
light poles and the "historic" areas including Mission
and 16th, a usual hub of electoral activity. Who needs democracy
when you can have pretty street poles?
The more obvious reason for the lack of
interest in this election is that voters in San Francisco don't
see much reason to go rushing off to do their civic duty. They're
bored to tears. Who can blame them?
http://www.beyondchron.org/articles/Yawn_it_s_Election_Day_in_San_Francisco_5079.html
BOSTON GLOBE - Boston's
voter turnout plummeted to its lowest level in more than two
decades yesterday, especially in the city's predominantly nonwhite
neighborhoods, a tide of apathy that swept the City Council's
only Latino member, Felix Arroyo, out of office. . . Only 13.6
percent of registered voters cast ballots yesterday, less than
half of the average turnout in similar elections since 1985,
in which council seats were up for grabs but there was no mayoral
election. Turnout in those elections ranged from 23 percent to
32 percent.
Reversing a trend of increasing voting
by minority groups set over the last five years, turnout was
especially low in nonwhite communities and disproportionately
strong in traditionally white, Irish enclaves of South Boston,
West Roxbury, and Dorchester. The shift propelled West Roxbury
lawyer John Connolly onto the council, replacing Arroyo.
Community leaders and voting advocacy groups
blamed the low turnout on a number of factors. A cold, gray drizzle
blanketed much of Eastern Massachusetts for most of the day.
And for the first time, there was no preliminary election this
year to take the temperature of the electorate and inspire voters
to rally behind vulnerable candidates. More broadly, it marks
a further decline in Boston's storied culture of local political
involvement, in which ward-level politics has been a crucial
part of the community fabric. . .
Some observers say there has been an apathy
among Boston residents that has been growing for years, the result
of a transient population, younger demographics, and more diverse
residents who are less likely to vote. . .
AUGUST 2007
OHIO'S LEMON VOTING MACHINES ALLOW VOTER
CHOICES TO BE TRACED
DECLAN MCCULLAGH, CNET - Ohio's method
of conducting elections with electronic voting machines appears
to have created a true privacy nightmare for state residents:
revealing who voted for which candidates. Two Ohio activists
have discovered that e-voting machines made by Election Systems
and Software and used across the country produce time-stamped
paper trails that permit the reconstruction of an election's
results--including allowing voter names to be matched to their
actual votes.
Making a secret ballot less secret, of
course, could permit vote selling and allow interest groups or
family members to exert undue pressure on Ohio residents to vote
a certain way. It's an especially pointed concern in Ohio, a
traditional swing state in presidential elections that awarded
George Bush a narrow victory over John Kerry three years ago.
Ohio law permits anyone to walk into a
county election office and obtain two crucial documents: a list
of voters in the order they voted, and a time-stamped list of
the actual votes. "We simply take the two pieces of paper
together, merge them, and then we have which voter voted and
in which way," said James Moyer, a longtime privacy activist
and poll worker who lives in Columbus, Ohio.
http://news.com.com/E-voting+predicament+Not-so-secret+ballots/2100-1014_3-6203323.html
ELECTION OFFICIALS COZY WITH LEMON VOTING
MACHINE SELLERS
STEVEN HARMON, CONTRA COSTA TIMES - When Secretary of State Debra Bowen decertified
touch-screen voting systems earlier this month, county election
officials and voting machine manufacturers denounced the decision
with such a singular voice that it has alarmed some voter-rights
groups. Specifically, they are again questioning whether elections
officials' primary concern is really the voters or the vendors
with whom election officials have developed a cozy relationship
and have come to depend on to make their jobs easier.
Critics insist that election officials
have become blinded in their attachment to the touch-screen systems
-- in part because they love the quick, seemingly clean results,
but also out of loyalty to their vendors, who not only provide
them vital technical support and expertise on their complex voting
systems but have also sponsored conferences and even social activities
such as boat trips for the clerks. . .
Election officials have come to embrace
touch-screen systems, said David Dill, a Stanford University
computer security expert, because they provide a veneer of perfection.
. . Election officials scoff at such charges, saying their first
loyalty is to voters and getting accurate results. . .
Still, there is little dispute that voting
machine vendors have lobbied hard to gain strong allies in the
battle over e-voting's future. Vendors have lavished attention
on election officials by sponsoring conferences, seminars, boat
parties and dinner events over the years, including events sponsored
by the Election Center, a national association of election officials,
which recently held its annual conference in New Orleans.
Vendors have wooed former secretaries of
state, election clerks and their staff to work for them, creating
a revolving door for election officials who can cash in on their
expertise and access, signing on with voting machine vendors
as consultants, communications experts and sales representatives.
CALIFORNIA STRICTLY LIMITS ELECTRONIC
VOTING MACHINES AND PUTS MAJOR SECURITY WATCH ON THEM
[The Times plays down the import of this
story, but basically the California Secretary of State found
that these machines are not to be trusted]
NY TIMES - Expressing
concern that several brands of electronic voting machines used
in California were vulnerable to tampering, Secretary of State
Debra Bowen late Friday ordered new security protections be added
and limited the use of two types of machines that were to be
used in next year's elections in several Southern California
counties. Bowen also withdrew state approval of the InkaVote
Plus machines used in Los Angeles County, saying that the machines'
maker, Election Systems and Software, had failed to submit its
equipment to her office in time to analyze its vulnerability
to hacking. . .
Bowen ordered that some machines made by
Diebold Election Systems and Sequoia Voting Systems be limited
to one per polling place to limit the chances that they could
be tampered with. The Sequoia machines are used in Riverside,
San Bernardino and Ventura Counties.
Bowen said the presence of the machines,
though limited, would be helpful for disabled voters, though
any voter could use the machines. Weir, however, said she was
creating a "separate but unequal" voting system.
The security requirements Bowen imposed
include: reinstalling the software before the Feb. 5. election
to ensure it has not already been tampered with; placing special
seals at vulnerable parts of the machines to reveal tampering;
securing each machines at the close of each day of early voting;
assigning a specific election monitor to safeguard each machine;
and conducting a complete manual count of all votes cast.
BRAD BLOG - The [review] had found that
all electronic voting systems certified in California were easily
accessible to hacking. A single machine, the testers discovered,
could be easily tampered with by an election insider, voting
machine company employee, or other individual in such a way that
an entire election could be effected without detection. . .
KEY 2004 OHIO BALLOTS AND RECORDS HAVE
DISAPPEARED
STEVEN ROSENFELD, ALTERNET - In 56 of Ohio's
88 counties, ballots and election records from 2004 have been
"accidentally" destroyed, despite a federal order to
preserve them -- it was crucial evidence which would have revealed
whether the election was stolen. . .
Compared to Ohio's Democratic urban core,
turnout in the Republican districts was higher than the 2000
election. Moreover, in a handful of counties there were vote
count anomalies that made post-election observers question whether
Bush's vote was padded. The most notable example is more than
10,000 voters from several Bible belt counties who voted for
Bush and voted in favor of gay marriage, if the results are true.
In a dozen rural counties, virtually unknown Democrats at the
bottom of the ballot received more votes that Kerry, an oddity
in a presidential year.
http://www.alternet.org/story/58328/?page=3
HACKERS ABLE TO TAMPER WITH ALL ELECTRONIC
VOTING MACHINES TESTED
JOHN WILDERMUTH, SF CHRONICLE - State-sanctioned
teams of computer hackers were able to break through the security
of virtually every model of California's voting machines and
change results or take control of some of the systems' electronic
functions, according to a University of California study.
The researchers "were able to bypass
physical and software security in every machine they tested,"
said Secretary of State Debra Bowen, who authorized the "top
to bottom review" of every voting system certified by the
state.
Neither Bowen nor the investigators were
willing to say exactly how vulnerable California elections are
to computer hackers, especially because the team of computer
experts from the UC system had top-of-the-line security information
plus more time and better access to the voting machines than
would-be vote thieves likely would have. . .
The review included voting equipment from
every company approved for use in the state, including Sequoia,
whose systems are used in Alameda, Napa and Santa Clara counties;
Hart InterCivic, used in San Mateo and Sonoma Counties; and Diebold,
used in Marin County. . .
Bowen said in a telephone news conference
Friday that the report is only one piece of information she will
use to decide which voting systems are secure enough to use in
next February's presidential primary election. If she is going
to decertify any of the machines, she must do it by Friday, six
months before the Feb. 5 vote.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/07/28/VOTING.TMP&feed=rss.news
JULY 2007
LETTER LINKS BUSH JUSTICE DEPARTMENT
TO VOTE CAGING SCHEME
GREG GORDON, MCCLATCHY - Four days before
the 2004 election, the Justice Department's civil rights chief
sent an unusual letter to a federal judge in Ohio who was weighing
whether to let Republicans challenge the credentials of 23,000
mostly African-American voters. The case was triggered by allegations
that Republicans had sent a mass mailing to mostly Democratic-leaning
minorities and used undeliverable letters to compile a list of
voters potentially vulnerable to eligibility challenges.
In his letter to U.S. District Judge Susan
Dlott of Cincinnati, Assistant Attorney General Alex Acosta argued
that it would "undermine" the enforcement of state
and federal election laws if citizens could not challenge voters'
credentials.
Former Justice Department civil rights
officials and election watchdog groups charge that his letter
sided with Republicans engaging in an illegal, racially motivated
tactic known as "vote-caging" in a state that would
be pivotal in delivering President Bush a second term in the
White House. . .
Acosta, now the U.S. attorney in Miami,
said in a statement that his letter was aimed at advising the
court that a new Ohio law allowing challenges was "permissible,"
so long as no challenge was based on race. He said it also was
intended to make clear that anyone whose eligibility was questioned
had a right to file a provisional ballot.
Justice Department spokeswoman Cynthia
Magnuson said that the Civil Rights Division "does not coordinate
actions with any political party" and that any such suggestion
would be "entirely unfounded."
But Robert Kengle, former deputy chief
of the department's Voting Rights Section who served under Acosta,
said the letter amounted to "cheerleading for the Republican
defendants."
"It was doubly outrageous," he
said, "because the allegation in the litigation was that
these were overwhelmingly African-American voters that were on
the challenge list."
Joseph Rich, a former chief of the department's
Voting Rights Section, called the Ohio scheme "vote caging.".
. . Rich said that challenges of caged voters have been stopped
when brought to light before an election. The question is, he
said, whether caging and subsequent challenges have occurred
"and somebody didn't bring it to light."
The new Ohio law permitted challenges in
2004 but required political parties to list targeted voters in
advance of the election. The Ohio Republican Party notified election
authorities in the fall of 2004 that it planned to challenge
more than 35,000 voters at the polls, a figure it later trimmed
to 23,000.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/17303.html
MAY 2007
GOODLING ADMITTED TO MAJOR BUSH VOTING
FRAUD. . . AND COMMITTEE DIDN'T EVEN CATCH IT
BRAD BLOG - From Monica Goodling's opening
statement to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee:
"Despite my and others' best efforts,
[Deputy Attorney General, Paul McNulty]'s public testimony was
incomplete or inaccurate in a number of respects. As explained
in more detail in my written remarks, I believe that the Deputy
was not fully candid about his knowledge of White House involvement
in the replacement decision, failed to disclose that he had some
knowledge of the White House's interest in selecting Tim Griffin
as Interim U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas,
inaccurately described the Department's internal assessment of
the Parsky Commission, and failed to disclose that he had some
knowledge of allegations that Tim Griffin had been involved in
vote 'caging' during his work on the President's 2004 campaign."
[Caging is] the practice of sending registered
mail to minority voters, asking for a reply, and if one doesn't
come back, the voter's right to vote is challenged either at
the polls, or attempts are made to remove them from the voter
rolls - usually without their knowledge. Allegations have been
made that this was done, based on race, in 2004, when registered
letters were sent to the home addresses of African-Americans
in Ohio, Florida and elsewhere. Most insidiously, letters were
said to have been sent to U.S. troops who were away, serving
in Iraq or Afghanistan, and thus did not (and could not) answer
the registered mail. Their registrations were then reportedly
challenged.
The RNC agreed to cease the practice in
a 1986 consent decree in a court case brought after they had
"tried to have 31,000 voters, most of them black, removed
from the rolls in Louisiana when a party mailer was returned,
" according to the Washington Post. "The consent decrees
that resulted prohibited the party from engaging in anti-fraud
initiatives that target minorities or conduct mail campaigns
to 'compile voter challenge lists.'"
WIKIPEDIA - Voters targeted by caging are
often the most vulnerable: those who are unfamiliar with their
rights under the law, and those who cannot spare the time, effort,
and expense of proving that their registration is valid. Ultimately,
caging works by dissuading a voter from casting a ballot, or
by ensuring that they cast a provisional ballot, which is less
likely to be counted.
With one type of caging, a political party
sends registered mail to addresses of registered voters. If the
mail is returned as undeliverable - because, for example, the
voter refuses to sign for it, the voter isn't present for delivery,
or the voter is homeless - the party uses that fact to challenge
the registration, arguing that because the voter could not be
reached at the address, the registration is fraudulent. It is
this use of direct mail caging techniques to target voters which
probably resulted in the application of the name to the political
tactic.
On the day of the election, when the voter
arrives at the poll and requests a ballot, an operative of the
party challenges the validity of their registration. . .
Examples of political caging
From the Washington Post: "In 1981,
the Republican National Committee sent letters to predominantly
black neighborhoods in New Jersey, and when 45,000 letters were
returned as undeliverable, the committee compiled a challenge
list to remove those voters from the rolls. The RNC sent off-duty
law enforcement officials to the polls and hung posters in heavily
black neighborhoods warning that violating election laws is a
crime. . . In 1986, the RNC tried to have 31,000 voters, most
of them black, removed from the rolls in Louisiana when a party
mailer was returned. The consent decrees that resulted prohibited
the party from engaging in anti-fraud initiatives that target
minorities or conduct mail campaigns to 'compile voter challenge
lists.'"
In October 2004, the BBC Newsnight program
reported on an alleged so-called "caging list" maintained
by the George W. Bush campaign that suggested that they may be
planning possibly illegal disruption of African American voting
in Jacksonville, Florida.
The BBC reports that it has obtained a
document from George W. Bush's Florida campaign headquarters,
inadvertently e-mailed to the parody website GeorgeWBush.org,
containing a list of 1,886 names and addresses of voters in largely
African-American and Democratic areas of Jacksonville. Democratic
Party officials allege that the document is a "caging list"
that the Bush campaign intends to use to issue mass challenges
to African-American voters, in violation of federal law.
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=4591
GREG PALAST, BRAD BLOG - Goodling testified
that Gonzales' Chief of Staff, Kyle Sampson, perjured himself,
lying to the committee in earlier testimony. The lie: Sampson
denied Monica had told him about Tim Griffin's "involvement
in 'caging' voters" in 2004. The perplexed committee members
hadn't a clue --- and asked no substantive questions about it
thereafter. Karl Rove is still smiling. If the members had gotten
the clue, and asked the right questions, they would have found
"the keys to the kingdom," they thought they were looking
for. They dangled right in front of their perplexed faces. .
.
Our BBC team broke the story at the top
of the nightly news everywhere on the planet - except the USA
- only because America's news networks simply refused to cover
this evidence of the electoral coup d'etat that chose our president
in 2004. . .
The Bush-Cheney operatives sent hundreds
of thousands of letters marked "Do not forward" to
voters' homes. Letters returned ("caged") were used
as evidence to block these voters' right to cast a ballot on
grounds they were registered at phony addresses. Who were the
evil fakers? Homeless men, students on vacation and --- you got
to love this --- American soldiers. Oh yeah: most of them are
Black voters. Why weren't these African-American voters home
when the Republican letters arrived? The homeless men were on
park benches, the students were on vacation --- and the soldiers
were overseas. Go to Baghdad, lose your vote. Mission Accomplished.
How do I know? I have the caging lists.
I have them because they are attached to the emails Rove insists
can't be found. I have the emails. 500 of them --- sent to our
team at BBC after the Rove-bots accidentally sent them to a web
domain owned by our friend John Wooden.
Here's what you need to know --- and the
Committee would have discovered, if only they'd asked:
1. 'Caging' voters is a crime, a go-to-jail
felony.
2. Griffin wasn't "involved"
in the caging, Ms. Goodling. Griffin, Rove's right-hand man (right-hand
claw), was directing the illegal purge and challenge campaign.
How do I know? It's in the email I got.
3. On December 7, 2006, the ragin', cagin'
Griffin was named, on Rove's personal demand, US Attorney for
Arkansas. Perpetrator became prosecutor.
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=4594
APRIL 2007
USA TODAY COMES OUT FOR INSTANT RUNOFF
VOTING
USA TODAY EDITORIAL - Every year, in scores
of state and local elections, no candidate wins a majority. That
results in either costly runoffs or "winners" who in
fact have been rejected by as many as two-thirds of the voters
in a multi-candidate field. . . There is, however, a worthwhile
solution that can guarantee the majority really does rule. It's
called instant-runoff voting, and over the past five years it
has been adopted by communities as large as Minneapolis and San
Francisco and as small as Ferndale, Mich., and Takoma Park, Md.
Now, several more states and cities are experimenting with the
idea or considering it. Sarasota, Fla., will vote on it in November.
North Carolina has a pilot program for 20 municipalities to try
instant-runoff voting in local elections and to use it for certain
statewide elections.
In an instant-runoff election, instead
of just placing an "X" beside the name of one candidate,
voters have the option of ranking the candidates in order of
preference: 1, 2, 3, etc. If no one gets 50% of the first-choice
votes, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated from
the count and the second-choice votes on those ballots are distributed
among the remaining names. The process continues until one candidate
with true majority support emerges.
Among the advantages of this system:
- Costly runoffs, in which voter turnout
is often anemic, are avoided.
- Third-party or "spoiler" candidates
finishing toward the bottom of the field are less likely to destroy
a mainstream candidate's chances.
- Winners can claim a greater mandate from
the voters.
- Campaigns can be more civil because candidates
looking for second-choice as well as first-choice votes don't
want to alienate a rival's supporters.
In most places, once the idea has been
seriously advanced and explained, it has gained wide support.
Some wary public officials warn of the cost - $1 million or more
in big jurisdictions - of reprogramming voting machines or buying
new ones to accept preferential votes. But San Francisco, for
example, quickly recovered what it spent for that purpose by
not having to hold a separate runoff election in 2004. If the
nation really believes in "majority rule," instant-runoff
voting is one way to get closer to it.
http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2007/04/post_60.html
MARCH 2007
ROBERT GATES TIED TO VOTING SPYWARE
COMPANY
SAN JUAN PUBLIC ACCESS MEDIA, NOV 1 2006
- Local Green Party members filed a lawsuit in San Juan County
Superior Court challenging the legality of ballots tracked with
personal ID bar codes. San Juan County was the first county in
the country to implement a ballot tracking system using a bar
code on each individual's ballot to uniquely identify the voter.
. .
County citizens are rejecting their personal
ballot bar codes in multiple letters to the editor, by blacking
them out, cutting them off, and perhaps not voting at all. Turnout
has plummeted. The local paper's feature editorial has condemned
the system. One of the county's two Auditor candidates is calling
for its abandonment.
Allan Rosato and Tim White of the Elections
Working Group of the Green Party of San Juan County explained
their action in a statement released today:
"We're seeking a Superior Court injunction
stopping the use of Vote Here Inc.'s uncertified 'Mail-in Ballot
Tracker' because it violates not only the Secretary of State's
own Washington Administrative Code, but five Washington State
laws explicitly prohibiting any distinguishing marks of any kind
on any ballot. A key provision of our State Constitution 'secure[s]
to every elector absolute secrecy in preparing and depositing
his ballot.' We contend that what remains of ballot secrecy is
contingent, not absolute. We want to vote secret ballots. Period."
BEV HARRIS, BLACK BOX VOTING, NOV 8 2006
- [Robert] Gates was on the board of directors of Vote Here,
a strange little company that was the biggest elections industry
lobbyist for the Help America Vote Act. Vote Here spent more
money than ES&S, Diebold, and Sequoia combined to help ram
HAVA through. And HAVA, of course, was a bill sponsored by by
convicted Abramoff pal Bob Ney and K-street lobbyist buddy Steny
Hoyer. HAVA put electronic voting on steroids. . .
Vote Here never sold any voting machines
that I can find, but apparently did set up some deals to embed
its cryptography into some voting systems. We found memos in
the Diebold trash about Vote Here's crypto-crap, and Maryland
Director of Elections Linda Lamone shows up in Vote Here-related
letters. Sequoia Voting Systems signed an agreement with Vote
Here, but it's not clear to me whether they ever did anything
about it. Robert Gates stepped away from Vote Here shortly before
he showed up in Chapter 8 of my book, Black Box Voting, in a
short bit about the Vote Here company history.
http://www.mindspring.com/~sjmedia/default.htm
CHAPTER 8
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/bbv_chapter-8.pdf
LYNN LANDES, OP ED NEWS - Computer scientist
Avi Rubin, whose Johns Hopkins University team found serious
flaws in Diebold Election Systems software abruptly resigned
from VoteH ere, another election software company. In a related
story, on August 6th Maryland Governor Robert L. Ehrlich Jr(R)
gave a contract to Science Applications International Corporation
to review the Diebold Election System's software in preparation
for elections in Maryland. . .
Vote Here is being sued by its former engineer,
Dan Spillane, for wrongfully firing him in retaliation to his
repeated warnings of potential defects in voting software applications
and in the certification process.
SAIC is a behemoth military defense contractor
with a shadowy, if not tarnished, reputation, while former SAIC
executives also have ties to Vote Here. . .
Former President, Chief Operating Officer,
and Vice Chairman of SAIC is Admiral Bill Owens, who is now chairman
of the board for Vote Here. Owens also served as Vice Chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and was a senior military assistant
to Secretaries of Defense Frank Carlucci and Dick Cheney. Carlucci's
company is Carlyle Group, while Vice President Dick Cheney's
former employer is Halliburton.
Another former SAIC board member, also
on the board of Vote Here, is ex-CIA director Robert Gates, a
veteran of the Iran/Contra scandal.
Vote Here is already benefiting from the
Diebold debacle, as it will be partnering with Sequoia Voting
Systems, "to provide a new level of electronic ballot verification
to customers of the AVC Edge touch screen voting system,"
according to the Vote Here website.
SAIC, which is supposed to vet Diebold's
elections software, is itself in the elections business.
On a webpage of Diversified Dynamics (recently
purchased by Northrop Grumman), a 1998 legal notice states, "Diversified
Dynamics has brought the election process to the technological
level of the new millennium by designing the world's most advanced
electronic vote recording and election management system. We
were supported in this effort by the engineering and software
capabilities of Science Applications International Corporation,
a world leader in systems development and integration."
All of the above companies are military
defense contractors as well as information technology firms,
whose clients include state governments and federal agencies.
. .
"The federal government, its main
customer, often doesn't want the public to know what the company
is doing and, as one of the nation's largest employee-owned corporations,
it escapes investor scrutiny," writes AP correspondent Elliot
Spagat, in a July 26, 2003 article.
http://www.opednews.com/landes_voting_machine_fiasco.htm
IF ELECTRONIC VOTING MACHINES WERE A
CAR, YOU WOULDN'T BE ALLOWED TO DRIVE ONE
THERE's a bill - HR-811 - purporting to
reform the numerous problems that have arisen with electronic
touch screen voting devices - called DREs - which sounds good
until you consider one thing: the touch screen devices don't
work properly and if they were a car, you wouldn't be allowed
to drive one.
This has been known to at least some since
the mid-1980s but the voting machine lobby successfully conned
Congress, states and localities into buying into their proprietary
toys. Now Congress is being roped into continued use of these
malfunctioning devices.
The problem with HR 811 is that it's not
the government's job to find a way to make them work. The answer
is to stop using them, as John Gideon points out in Brad Blog:
|||||
Some HR-811 proponents state
that while DREs may be bad we have them now and we need to fix
what we have. My problem with this thinking is that we are talking
about elections; not a line of computers. Think about those things
you know about for a minute. If your university purchased a specialized
computer that failed as much as DREs do; would your university
keep it and try to fix it for the future or would you send it
back and go somewhere else? If you used an online legal library
that was missing references; would you keep using that library
or pay the money to change to another one? I know that when I
was doing nuclear refueling on Naval ships if I had a tool that
failed constantly, use of that tool would be stopped immediately
and something else would be designed for use.
The big issue is that the special
computer would never have gone on the market; the reference library
would never have gone online; and the tool would never have been
sold to the Navy. Industry does not work that way. Why is it
that our elections are not as important as our work?
Why is it that it's alright to
allow a technology that has constantly failed to continue to
be used? And why is it that we can continue to use it while trying
to fix the problems? How many votes are to be lost, flipped,
or not counted while we continue to allow the use of the machines
that are responsible for the loss, flipping and not counting?
||||
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=4298#more-4298
FEBRUARY 2007
STUDY FINDS UNDER-VOTE DROPS WHEN ELECTRONIC
MACHINES ARE AVOIDED
BRAD BLOG - Details now out from New Mexico
reveal that under-vote rates dropped precipitously in both Native
American and Hispanic areas after the state moved from direct
recording electronic touch-screen voting systems in 2004 to paper-based
optical-scan systems in 2006. In Native American areas, under-vote
rates plummeted some 85%. In Hispanic communities, the rate dropped
by 6% according to the precinct data. . .
New Mexico banned the use of DREs across the state after their
disastrous experience with Sequoia touch-screen voting machines
during the 2004 Presidential Election. They now require a paper
ballot for every vote cast statewide. As he signed the bill which
banned DREs into law in early 2006, New Mexico's Gov. Bill Richardson
wrote a letter to Election Officials in all 50 states, warning
that while "some believe that computer touch screen machines
are the future of electoral systems. . . the technology simply
fails to pass the test of reliability."
"One person, one vote is in jeopardy
if we do not act boldly and immediately," Richardson implored,
while decrying the failures of DREs in his state and supporting
paper ballots. "When a vote is cast, a vote should be counted,"
he wrote.
HOW PRISONS AFFECT VOTE TOTALS
MARIE GOTTSCHALK, LA TIMES - More than
2 million people, or nearly one out of every 100 adults, is sitting
in a jail or prison in the United States - an incarceration rate
unprecedented in U.S. history. The total number of prisoners
is not in dispute. But how to tabulate them is emerging as perhaps
the most vexing issue of the 2010 census.
The U.S. Census Bureau counts prisoners
as residents of the towns and counties where they are incarcerated,
even though most inmates have no ties to those communities and
almost always return to their home neighborhoods upon release.
. .
In California and 47 other states, imprisoned
felons are barred from voting. Yet these disenfranchised prisoners
are included in the population tallies used to draw legislative
and congressional districts. This practice dilutes the votes
of urban areas such as Los Angeles. Nearly one-third of the 172,000
inmates in California's state prisons come from Los Angeles County,
but only about 3% are incarcerated in the county. . .
A provocative analysis by the Prison Policy
Initiative estimates that if prisoners held in upstate New York
were counted in their home neighborhoods, at least four state
Senate seats - all Republican - would be in jeopardy after redistricting.
Last May, a federal appeals court suggested that counting the
thousands of black and Latino prisoners from New York City as
upstate residents may be a violation of the federal Voting Rights
Act.
BALLOT ACTIVIST COPIES DIEBOLD KEY USING
PHOTO FROM COMPANY'S ONLINE STORE
BRAD BLOG - It was revealed in the course
of last summer's landmark virus hack of a Diebold touch-screen
voting system at Princeton University that, incredibly, the company
uses the same key to open every machine. It's also an easy key
to buy at any office supply store since it's used for filing
cabinets and hotel mini-bars. That is, if you're not a poll worker
who already has one from the last time you worked on an election.
The Princeton Diebold virus hack found
that a single person with 60 seconds of unsupervised access to
the system who either picked the lock (easy in 10 seconds) or
had a key, could slip a vote-swapping virus onto a single machine
which could then undetectably affect every other machine in the
county to steal an entire election.
But the folks at Princeton who discovered
the hack (after our own organization, Velvet Revolution, gave
them the Diebold touch-screen machine on which to perform their
tests) had resisted showing exactly what the key looked like
in order to hold on to some semblance of security for Diebold's
Disposable Touch-Screen Voting Systems.
But guess what? Diebold didn't bother to
even have that much common sense.
This idiotic company has had a photograph
of the stupid key sitting on their own website's online store.
Of course, they'll only sell such keys
to "Diebold account holders" apparently --- or so they
claim --- but that's hardly a problem. J. Alex Halderman, one
of the folks who worked on the Princeton hack, but who had tried
to keep the design of the key a secret for obvious reasons, revealed
that a friend of his had found the photo of the key on Diebold's
website and discovered that it was all he needed to create a
working copy.
Halderman writes: "The shape of a
key is like a password - it only provides security if you keep
it secret from the bad guys. . . Could an attacker create a working
key from the photograph? Ross [Kinard of Sploitcast] decided
to find out. Here's what he did:
"'I bought three blank keys from Ace.
Then a drill vise and three cabinet locks that used a different
type of key from Lowes. I hoped that the spacing and depths on
the cabinet locks' keys would be similar to those on the voting
machine key. With some files I had I then made three keys to
look like the key in the picture."
"Ross sent me his three homemade keys,
and, amazingly, two of them can open the locks on the Diebold
machine we used in our study."
Kinard's homemade key - created only from
the photo at Diebold's online store - is seen opening the machine
at Princeton in the video on the left. Unbelievable.
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=4066
JANUARY 2007
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN PAPER TRAILS
AND PAPER BALLOTS
[From a letter to Congress from
election integrity activists]
Paper trails and paper records
are not sufficient to safeguard elections and restore confidence
among the electorate. Unless there is a paper ballot for every
vote cast, three fundamental principles of democratic elections
are violated:
1. Observable tallies. It is
impossible for citizens to observe the counting of electronic
ballots and audit the results.
2. Equal access. Requiring voters
to cast votes on computers discriminates against those who are
not familiar with the technology.
3. Accurate results. It is impossible
to ensure that the reported results are accurate. In fact, a
voter-verifiable paper audit trail cannot be depended on to provide
the certainty lacking in electronic tallies. Clear evidence from
several recent elections reveals instances in which:
- The electronic screen record
did not reflect the voter's intent.
- The electronic count did not
match the paper trail produced by the e-voting machine.
- The summary review screen did
not match the paper trail produced by the e-voting machine.
- Voters did not know to verify
the paper trail or were prevented from doing so by improper design,
incorrect setup, or malfunction of the printer.
- Computer systems introduced
unnecessary complexity into the entire election process and therefore
increased the likelihood of errors by voters, poll workers, and
election officials.
- Computerized voting relinquished
control of the final outcome to the technical skills of those
who programed the software.
While it is not easy to reconcile
the money already spent on new DRE systems, it would be worse
to continue using election equipment that is not accomplishing
its critical task. If this were a public safety matter, no one
would question the ban on the continued use of a dangerous product,
even if it had been funded by billions of public dollars. Why
should we act any differently when it comes to protecting the
safety of our electoral process?
http://www.velvetrevolution.us/Campaigns/PaperBallots/
COST OF HACKABLE, UNRELIABLE, INACCURATE
ELECTRONIC VOTE MACHINES MAY BE WHAT DOES THEM IN
BRAD BLOG - If you needed any
more evidence to counter the argument that it would be "too
expensive" to dump all the shitty, unreliable, inaccurate,
hackable, disenfranchising touch-screen voting systems in favor
of paper ballots, just take a look at Utah. They're the state
which pushed out heroic 23-year Emery County Election Clerk Bruce
Funk because he had the temerity to allow independent computer
security experts to test the Diebold touch-screen systems the
state was forcing him to use. (The experts found massive security
flaws described as "the most serious" ever discovered).
Well, now Utah has finally discovered
that their switch from punch-cards to shitty, unreliable, inaccurate,
hackable, disenfranchising Diebold touch-screen systems has doubled
the cost of their elections. And then some. Get a load of this
from the Salt-Lake Tribune...
|||| "I'm not sure any of
us realized how much it is going to cost to own and operate this
system," said Michael Cragun, elections director for the
Lieutenant Governor's Office.
Those costs are so prohibitive
that many Utahns in next year's local elections will revert to
a voting style used for generations: checking a box on a paper
ballot. ... City leaders are worried, having heard rumors they
may have to triple their election budget if they go with the
touch-screen machines. . .
"We are not sure everyone
understood what happened when they flicked that first domino
over," Cragun said. ... Salt Lake County Clerk Sherrie Swensen
says she had to double the pay for poll workers because of the
necessary training. She now spends $12,000 per month storing
the bulky machines. And all of the memory cards, batteries and
other essential machine accessories cost her office an extra
$138,000 this year.
These costs will continue to
accrue as Swensen and other county clerks say they need more
machines for the 2008 presidential election. ||||
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=3929
INSTANT RUNOFF VOTING SPREADING
NANCY VOGEL, LA TIMES - The cities
of Davis, Calif.; Oakland and Minneapolis, as well as Pierce
County, Wash.; have passed ballot measures that will lead to
"instant runoff" or "proportional representation"
voting in city and county elections. There was no organized opposition
to the measures.
Their success has energized election
reform advocates, who say the United States should join most
other democracies and pick politicians in a way that doesn't
shut out the 49% of voters who may have favored someone other
than the majority winner. . .
For decades, Cambridge, Mass.,
has been the only American city to use the system. But in November,
voters in Davis and Minneapolis approved proportional voting
in city elections. . .
"It produces more of a mix
of Democrats and Republicans that represent more of what we call
purple California than red and blue California," said Steven
Hill, political reform director for the nonprofit, nonpartisan
New America Foundation. . .
In a November poll of 600 California
voters, the foundation found that 52% said instant runoff voting
sounded like a good idea. Half of those surveyed favored proportional
voting. Nearly 70% said they feel like they often must vote for
"the lesser of two evils."
Almost every democracy outside
of Britain, Canada and the United States uses some version of
proportional voting, including Australia, Germany, Japan, New
Zealand and South Africa. The new voting systems in Afghanistan
and Iraq are proportional too.
In the United States, two dozen
cities used the system in the early 1900s. All but Cambridge
had abandoned it by the 1960s, and Illinois voters stopped using
it to elect state lawmakers after a 1980 initiative . . .
According to a history written
by Douglas Amy, a Mount Holyoke College politics professor, some
cities jettisoned proportional voting along with other corruption-busting
Progressive Era reforms such as replacing mayors.
New York City, where a Communist
was elected to the City Council in the 1940s, abandoned the method
during the Cold War era after Democrats decried it as a "political
importation from the Kremlin."
Cincinnati rejected the system
in 1957 after a campaign in which opponents asked whether the
city wanted a "Negro Mayor." Proportional voting had
allowed African Americans to win seats on the City Council for
the first time in the city's history. . .
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-voting25dec25,1,4207139,full.story
[No small amount of the credit
for this new interest in ranked and proportional voting goes
to the work of the Center for Voting & Democracy, the first
meeting of which, incidentally, took place in your editor's living
room]
http:/fairvote.org
LAB THAT TESTED VOTING MACHINES TEMPORARILY
BLACKLISTED BECAUSE OF SHODDY WORK
CHRISTOPHER DREW, NY TIMES -
A laboratory that has tested most of the nation's electronic
voting systems has been temporarily barred from approving new
machines after federal officials found that it was not following
its quality-control procedures and could not document that it
was conducting all the required tests. The company, Ciber Inc.
of Greenwood Village, Colo., has also come under fire from analysts
hired by New York State over its plans to test new voting machines
for the state. New York could eventually spend $200 million to
replace its aging lever devices.
Experts on voting systems say
the Ciber problems underscore longstanding worries about lax
inspections in the secretive world of voting-machine testing.
The action by the federal Election Assistance Commission seems
certain to fan growing concerns about the reliability and security
of the devices.
The commission acted last summer,
but the problem was not disclosed then. Officials at the commission
and Ciber confirmed the action in recent interviews.
Ciber, the largest tester of
the nation's voting machine software, says it is fixing its problems
and expects to gain certification soon.
Experts say the deficiencies
of the laboratory suggest that crucial features like the vote-counting
software and security against hacking may not have been thoroughly
tested on many machines now in use.
"What's scary is that we've
been using systems in elections that Ciber had certified, and
this calls into question those systems that they tested,"
said Aviel D. Rubin, a computer science professor at Johns Hopkins.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/04/washington/04voting.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
[Unmentioned in the Times story
was Ciber's strong GOP connections]
ROCKY MOUNTAIN NEWS, 2004 - At
Greenwood Village-based Ciber, employees and some spouses have
donated more than $72,000 to GOP candidates and groups during
the 2001-2002 and 2003-2004 election cycles, according to the
Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan watchdog group.
http://corrente.blogspot.com/2004/08/election-fraud-2004-voting-machine.html
AP, DEC 21 - The chairman of
information technology consultant Ciber Inc. sold 25,000 shares
of common stock, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission
filing Wednesday. In a Form 4 filed with the SEC, Bobby G. Stevenson
reported he sold the shares on Wednesday for about $6.71 apiece.
http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D8M5DPH80.htm
AP, 2004 - Despite concerns over
whether the so-called touch screen machines can be trusted, the
testing companies won't say publicly if they have encountered
shoddy workmanship. . . In Huntsville, the window blinds were
closed when a reporter visited the office suite where Ciber Inc.
employees test voting machine software. A woman who unlocked
the door said no one inside could answer questions about testing.
DECEMBER 2006
34 ELECTION REFORM GROUPS JOIN FIGHT
FOR PAPER BALLOTS & NOT JUST A 'PAPER TRAIL'
34 NON-PARTISAN ELECTION REFORM
organizations have launched a campaign today urging Congress
to enact legislation requiring a paper ballot for every vote
cast. They expect this grassroots campaign to have broad public
support and generate thousands of emails to the incoming Congress.
Many of the organizations have previously supported voter-verified
paper audit trails, but now, like other citizens across the country,
they recognize that electronic voting machines have been a national
mistake. "The e-voting machines are a threat to democracy.
Putting a VVPAT on them is nothing more than a band-aid. It's
like requiring a seat belt in a Ford Pinto. What good does it
do when the Pinto explodes?" said Brad Friedman, who co-founded
one of the organizations participating in the campaign. The letter
states: "In light of lessons learned during the 2006 primary
and general elections - with myriad contests resulting in uncertainty
and thousands of voters in state after state turned away from
the polls unable to cast a vote on DRE systems which failed throughout
the day -- we now hold that a paper ballot, whether counted by
optical-scan system or hand, is the minimum requirement for any
Election Reform legislation in which voters may have confidence.
Such a requirement is needed to help ensure Americans that every
legally registered voter can vote, that every vote is recorded
precisely as the voter intends, and that every vote is counted
and, if necessary, re-counted accurately. "This year's elections
have made crystal clear that electronic voting machines caused
massive disruptions, undermined the results of crucial elections,
and forced thousands of voters to leave the polls without being
able to exercise their franchise."
LETTER
http://www.velvetrevolution.us/Campaigns/PaperBallots
BALLOT FAILURE UPDATE
PROGRESS REPORT - More than 18,000
people in Sarasota, FL (District 13), lost their votes in the
recent midterm elections. Congressional candidate Vern Buchanan,
whom the Florida Elections Canvassing Commission declared the
winner by just 369 votes, has dismissed the missing ballots,
arguing that we should emphasize "the 238,000 people that
did vote in this race."
Both Democrats and Republicans
lost their votes in the midterm elections. The Florida election
was, unfortunately, just one example of problems nationwide with
electronic voting machines that have no verifiable paper trail.
The electronic voting machines
in Sarasota did not register a vote in the Jennings-Buchanan
race for 13 percent of the voters. Since the machines were not
required to provide a paper trail, there is no way to recover
the vanished votes. Nevertheless, the FECC, made up of Gov. Jeb
Bush (R) and two other elected officials, declared Buchanan the
winner. While several reports have pointed to poor ballot design
as a possible reason for the missing votes, there is little doubt
that malfunctioning electronic voting machines with no verifiable
paper trails were also responsible. According to a Herald-Tribune
survey of voters who had trouble casting ballots on the ES&S
Ivotronic machines, 36 percent were unable to find the congressional
race on their screens and 62 percent said "their votes for
either candidate did not initially register on the ballot summary
page."
There is no way to reliably reconstruct
what happened in the midterm elections without examining the
Ivotronic equipment. A circuit judge will hold a hearing Dec.
19 to determine whether ES&S "will have to let others
examine the 'source code' computer software for possible glitches."
But ES&S is guarding its equipment, arguing that the source
codes "contain trade secrets." As Kendall Coffey, an
attorney for Jennings, notes, "This isn't Pepsi-Cola trying
to get ahold of Coca Cola's trade secrets. This is a candidate
and a public and a nation that wants to know what went wrong.
FL-13 wasn't the only district
with voting problems in this year's midterm elections. The non-profit
watchdog organization Common Cause received "five times
as many complaints about mechanical problems with voting machines
to their voter hot-line number in this election as in 2004."
Programming errors and inexperience with electronic voting machines
delayed voters in Indiana and Ohio, "leaving some with little
choice but to use paper ballots instead." Almost 40 percent
of U.S. voters now cast ballots on electronic voting machines.
Use of these voting machines is on the rise, thanks in large
part "to $3.8 billion in federal subsidies from the Help
America Vote Act of 2002, which was supposed to help ensure the
integrity of elections by upgrading voting technology."
But as John Bonifaz of the National Voting Rights Institute notes,
"Now, we're faced with this predicament: Millions of federal
dollars have been spent on a product that appears to be seriously
flawed."
The National Institute of Standards
and Technology recently issued a report concluding that paperless
electronic voting machines "cannot be made secure."
The Election Assistance Commission, set up to improve elections
after 2000 presidential controversy, reviewed NIST's report and
"affirmed the need for paper trails or other independent
verification going forward," but unfortunately "recommended
giving a pass to localities already using flawed machines."
Twenty-eight states currently "have laws that require electronic
voting machines to produce a paper trail, or voters to cast ballots
on paper ballots, which are typically counted by optical scanning
machines. And 13 states mandate periodic audits of the machines."
34 ELECTION REFORM GROUPS JOIN FIGHT
FOR PAPER BALLOTS & NOT JUST A 'PAPER TRAIL'
34 NON-PARTISAN ELECTION REFORM
organizations have launched a campaign today urging Congress
to enact legislation requiring a paper ballot for every vote
cast. They expect this grassroots campaign to have broad public
support and generate thousands of emails to the incoming Congress.
Many of the organizations have
previously supported voter-verified paper audit trails, but now,
like other citizens across the country, they recognize that electronic
voting machines have been a national mistake.
"The e-voting machines are
a threat to democracy. Putting a VVPAT on them is nothing more
than a band-aid. It's like requiring a seat belt in a Ford Pinto.
What good does it do when the Pinto explodes?" said Brad
Friedman, who co-founded one of the organizations participating
in the campaign.
The letter states: "In light
of lessons learned during the 2006 primary and general elections
- with myriad contests resulting in uncertainty and thousands
of voters in state after state turned away from the polls unable
to cast a vote on DRE systems which failed throughout the day
-- we now hold that a paper ballot, whether counted by optical-scan
system or hand, is the minimum requirement for any Election Reform
legislation in which voters may have confidence. Such a requirement
is needed to help ensure Americans that every legally registered
voter can vote, that every vote is recorded precisely as the
voter intends, and that every vote is counted and, if necessary,
re-counted accurately.
"This year's elections have
made crystal clear that electronic voting machines caused massive
disruptions, undermined the results of crucial elections, and
forced thousands of voters to leave the polls without being able
to exercise their franchise."
LETTER
http://www.velvetrevolution.us/Campaigns/PaperBallots
TWO DECADES OF VOTE COUNT NEGLIGENCE
IN THE 1980s, two journalists
- David Burnham of the NY Times and Ronnie Dugger writing in
the New Yorker - laid out the fundamentals of the problems the
nation would face with computerized voting. Although politicians,
election officials and media treat this as a new crisis, Burnham
in 1985 and Dugger in 1985 gave them more than adequate warning.
Why were these serious warnings so universally ignored?
The full articles are on the
web. Here are just a few excerpts:
DAVID BURNHAM, NY TIMES, JULY
29, 1985 The computer program that was used to count more than
one-third of the votes cast in the Presidential election last
year is very vulnerable to manipulation and fraud, according
to expert witnesses in court actions challenging local and Congressional
elections in three states. . .
"There is a massive potential for problems," said Gary
L. Greenhalgh, director of the International Center on Election
Law and Administration, a consulting group in Washington. He
added that the problem with computer-assisted voting systems
was that they "centralized the opportunity for fraud.".
. .
John H. Kemp, president of Computer Election Systems, said in
a telephone interview that he absolutely denied the company was
involved in fraudulent schemes. County officials involved in
the cases have also categorically denied participation in fraud.
But Mr. Kemp also said that any computer system could be tampered
with. "It is totally economically unfeasible to have a fraud-proof
system," he said. Such a system, he suggested, might cost
$1 billion.
Mr. Kemp said that while there were some differences in the programs
used by various jurisdictions, the company's fraud-prevention
controls had remained "essentially unchanged" in recent
years. He added that the company's six or seven programmers "always
are looking for ways to prevent fraud.". . .
Eva Waskell, a Reston, Va., writer
on computer and scientific matters who was among the first to
become aware of the court cases pending against the company,
said she was astonished because it appeared that "even when
local officials learned of the problems, little apparent effort
was made to correct them." . . .
The allegations that the Computer Election system was open to
manipulation were supported by two other experienced computer
consultants who independently examined material obtained in the
pending court cases for The New York Times.
http://www.newsgarden.org/columns/burnham1.shtml
RONNIE DUGGER, NEW YORKER 1988
- It appears that since 1980 errors and accidents have proliferated
in computer-counted elections. Since 1984, the State of Illinois
has tested local computerized systems by running many thousands
of machine-punched mock ballots through them, rather than the
few tens of test ballots that local election officials customarily
use. As of the most recent tests this year, errors in the basic
counting instructions in the computer programs had been found
in almost a fifth of the examinations. These "tabulation-program
errors" probably would not have been caught in the local
jurisdictions. "I don't understand why nobody cares,"
Michael L. Harty, who was until recently the director of voting
systems and standards for Illinois, told me last December in
Springfield. "At one point, we had tabulation errors in
twenty-eight per cent of the systems tested, and nobody cared.".
. .
The election-equipment companies,
which thus both sell and program the computers that tabulate
public elections, have long contended, in and out of court, that
they own the source codes and must keep them secret from everyone,
including the local officials who conduct elections.
Thus most of the local officials
who preside over computerized elections do not actually know
how their systems are counting the votes, and when they officially
certify that the election results are correct they do not and
cannot really know them to be so.
Computer operators do not leave fingerprints inside a computer,
the events that occur inside it cannot be seen, and its records,
and printouts can be fixed to give no hint of whichever of its
operations an operator wants to keep secret. . .
Whether or not elections have
ever been stolen by computer before, some citizens and some officials
are asking if it could happen in the future. Could a local or
state office or a seat in the United States House of Representatives
be stolen by computer? Might the outcome of a close race for
a United States Senate seat be determined by computer fraud in
large local jurisdictions? Since, under the state-by-state, winner-take-all
rules of the electoral college, a close Presidential election
can be decided by relatively few votes in two or three big states,
could electronic illusionists steal the Presidency by fixing
the vote-counting computers in just four or five major metropolitan
areas? Could people breaking into or properly positioned within
a computerized-vote counting company, acting for political reasons
or personal gain, steal House or Senate seats, or even the White
House itself?
Randall H. Erben, the assistant
secretary of state in Texas, who served as special counsel on
ballot integrity to President Ronald Reagan's campaign in 1984
and, in 1986, headed a similar group for Governor Bill Clements,
of Texas, told me in Austin, "I have no question that somebody
who's smart enough with a computer could probably rig it to mistabulate.
Whether that has happened yet I don't know. It's going to be
virtually undetectable if it's done correctly, and that's what
concerns me about it." Willis Ware, a Rand Corporation computer
specialist, warned those attending a 1987 conference on the security
of computer-tabulated elections, "There is probably a Chernobyl
or a Three Mile Island waiting to happen in some election, just
as a Richter 8 earthquake is waiting to happen in California."
The chief counsel of the Republican National Committee, Mark
Braden, told me that he has yet to see a proved case of computer-based
election fraud, but added, "People who work for us who know
about computers claim that you could do it."
Some officials concerned with
elections think about the unthinkable in their field; namely,
the stealing of a Presidential election by computer fraud in
the vote-counting in metropolitan areas of key states. Steve
White, the chief assistant attorney general of California, said
to me last spring in Sacramento, "It could be done relatively
easily by somebody who didn't necessarily have to be all that
sophisticated. Given the importance of the national election,
sooner or later it will be attempted. There is a real reluctance
to concede the gravity of the problem.". . .
Computers can be ordered to transfer
votes from one candidate to another, to add votes to a candidate's
total, to determine an outcome in accordance with a specified
percentage spread. All the computer experts I have spoken with
agreed that no computer program can be made completely secure
against fraud. . .
http://www.newsgarden.org/columns/dugger.shtml
BALLOT FAILURE UPDATE
PROGRESS REPORT - More than 18,000
people in Sarasota, FL (District 13), lost their votes in the
recent midterm elections. Congressional candidate Vern Buchanan,
whom the Florida Elections Canvassing Commission declared the
winner by just 369 votes, has dismissed the missing ballots,
arguing that we should emphasize "the 238,000 people that
did vote in this race."
Both Democrats and Republicans
lost their votes in the midterm elections. The Florida election
was, unfortunately, just one example of problems nationwide with
electronic voting machines that have no verifiable paper trail.
The electronic voting machines
in Sarasota did not register a vote in the Jennings-Buchanan
race for 13 percent of the voters. Since the machines were not
required to provide a paper trail, there is no way to recover
the vanished votes. Nevertheless, the FECC, made up of Gov. Jeb
Bush (R) and two other elected officials, declared Buchanan the
winner. While several reports have pointed to poor ballot design
as a possible reason for the missing votes, there is little doubt
that malfunctioning electronic voting machines with no verifiable
paper trails were also responsible. According to a Herald-Tribune
survey of voters who had trouble casting ballots on the ES&S
Ivotronic machines, 36 percent were unable to find the congressional
race on their screens and 62 percent said "their votes for
either candidate did not initially register on the ballot summary
page."
There is no way to reliably reconstruct
what happened in the midterm elections without examining the
Ivotronic equipment. A circuit judge will hold a hearing Dec.
19 to determine whether ES&S "will have to let others
examine the 'source code' computer software for possible glitches."
But ES&S is guarding its equipment, arguing that the source
codes "contain trade secrets." As Kendall Coffey, an
attorney for Jennings, notes, "This isn't Pepsi-Cola trying
to get ahold of Coca Cola's trade secrets. This is a candidate
and a public and a nation that wants to know what went wrong.
FL-13 wasn't the only district
with voting problems in this year's midterm elections. The non-profit
watchdog organization Common Cause received "five times
as many complaints about mechanical problems with voting machines
to their voter hot-line number in this election as in 2004."
Programming errors and inexperience with electronic voting machines
delayed voters in Indiana and Ohio, "leaving some with little
choice but to use paper ballots instead." Almost 40 percent
of U.S. voters now cast ballots on electronic voting machines.
Use of these voting machines is on the rise, thanks in large
part "to $3.8 billion in federal subsidies from the Help
America Vote Act of 2002, which was supposed to help ensure the
integrity of elections by upgrading voting technology."
But as John Bonifaz of the National Voting Rights Institute notes,
"Now, we're faced with this predicament: Millions of federal
dollars have been spent on a product that appears to be seriously
flawed."
The National Institute of Standards
and Technology recently issued a report concluding that paperless
electronic voting machines "cannot be made secure."
The Election Assistance Commission, set up to improve elections
after 2000 presidential controversy, reviewed NIST's report and
"affirmed the need for paper trails or other independent
verification going forward," but unfortunately "recommended
giving a pass to localities already using flawed machines."
Twenty-eight states currently "have laws that require electronic
voting machines to produce a paper trail, or voters to cast ballots
on paper ballots, which are typically counted by optical scanning
machines. And 13 states mandate periodic audits of the machines."
NOVEMBER 2006
GOVERNMENT AGENCY ABOUT TO URGE END
TO TOUCH SCREEN VOTING
MICHAEL HICKINS, INTERNET NEWS
- A federal agency is set to recommend significant changes to
specifications for electronic-voting machines next week. . .
The National Institute of Standards and Technology is recommending
that the 2007 version of the Voluntary Voting Systems Guidelines
decertify direct record electronic machines.
DREs are currently used by more
than 30 percent of jurisdictions across the U.S. and are the
exclusive voting technology in Delaware, Georgia, Louisiana,
Maryland and South Carolina.
According to an NIST paper to
be discussed at a meeting of election regulators at NIST headquarters
in Gaithersburg, Md., on Dec. 4 and 5, DRE vote totals cannot
be audited because the machines are not software independent.
In other words, there is no means of verifying vote tallies other
than by relying on the software that tabulated the results to
begin with. . . The NIST paper also noted that, "potentially,
a single programmer could 'rig' a major election." It recommends
"requiring SI [software independent] voting systems in VVSG
2007.". . . The lack of software independence has reared
its ugly head in Sarasota's Congressional race, where 18,000
fewer votes were cast than in other races on the same ballot.
A recount was futile in that election because Sarasota uses a
DRE-type machine.
http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/3646231
BRAD BLOG - This is a tremendously
important development. To be clear, the National Institute of
Standards and Technology is the group that oversees the formulation
of the so-called federal "voting systems standards."
Those are the standards, such as there are any, which are in
effect today at the federal level to determine federal certification
of voting systems. . . This report will likely have an enormous
impact in shaping whatever may happen next concerning any upcoming
Election reform or legislation in DC.
But wait, it gets even better.
. . NIST agrees that paper trails don't cut it:
"The NIST is also going
to recommend changes to the design of machines equipped with
paper rolls that provide audit trails. Currently, the paper rolls
produce records that are illegible or otherwise unusable, and
NIST is recommending that paper rolls should not be used in new
voting systems.
[These paper rolls are not the
same as actual paper ballots used in optical screen voting. As
Brad Blog explains, "Paper trails, such as they are used
with DRE/Touch-Screen systems, do not work. Voters don't verify
them, elections officials don't count them, they are not accurate,
they can be gamed, they jam the printers which leads to voters
being turned away without being able to vote."]
BRAD BLOG - Yesterday Sarasota
County, FL, began their state-run test audits of the paperless
ES&S touch-screen systems used in Florida's 13th District
House race where 18,000 votes disappeared, resulting in a 369
vote margin between Christine Jennings (D) and Vern Buchanan
(R) to fill the seat vacated by former Secretary of State of
Katherine Harris.
The first day of testing revealed
miscounting errors on all four of the machines used during the
test, according to the Sarasota Herald-Tribune and at least two
citizen observers who blogged their account of the day's testing.
. .
The results differed from the
votes in "scripted" ballots that state testers had
punched into them. Ironically, the errors ended up giving Jennings
a higher vote total than she should have had according to the
prepared voting scripts.
At least three votes recorded
as under-votes in the election changed to Jennings votes in today's
"audit." That's comes out to an approximate 7% shift
in a race decided by less than two-tenths of one percent.
http://www.bradblog.com/
MONTANA COUNTS IT VOTES RIGHT
ED KEMMICK, BILLINGS GAZETTE,
MT Steve Corrick, an election-reform advocate in Missoula, has
a simple formula for ensuring the most reliable election results:
"Trust paper, and then count the paper."
That, in essence, is also what
is required under Montana law. A bill enacted by the 2005 Legislature
requires all voting technology in the state to use paper ballots
that also can be counted by hand.
That's why the most recent election
- when the eyes of the nation were trained on a handful of all-night
tabulations in Montana, with the balance of the U.S. Senate at
stake - didn't turn into a Florida-style debacle. It may have
been a long night, but nobody questioned the results the next
morning.
It is also why the balance of
the Montana House of Representatives will be decided Tuesday
in Yellowstone County, where a tie vote in a Laurel House race
will be subjected to a hand recount of nearly 4,500 ballots.
Some states use electronic voting devices that involve a touch
screen. With those, there is no paper trail, no way of verifying
results or conducting a recount. In Montana, 16 sparsely populated
counties still hand-count ballots, but even in counties where
optical scanners are used to tally votes, the ballots, with their
penciled-in ovals, can be examined by hand, as in the recount
planned for Tuesday.
Having those paper ballots to
fall back on is a distinction that makes Montana the envy of
election activists in many states.
Warren Stewart, a Californian
who is the policy director for Vote Trust USA, said there is
no replacement for being able to examine individual paper ballots
manually filled out by voters.
"By and large, the system
you have in place in Montana is the system we advocate most strongly
for," he said.
John Gideon of Seattle, executive
director of Voters Unite, said paper ballots are "the gold
standard.". . .
Rep. Brady Wiseman, D-Bozeman,
who introduced the law requiring paper ballots in the 2005 session
and who was elected to a second term on Nov. 7, said the next
reform needed is a law mandating an audit of election results.
The audit would involve hand-counting a large sample of paper
ballots from each precinct in counties where vote-counting machines
are used, then running those votes through the machines again
to measure their accuracy. . .
Wiseman said a private company
looking to buy machines to perform a function as important as
counting votes would insist on a "huge number of acceptance
tests" before closing the deal, and election officials should
insist on no less. "The missing link in our election technology
at this point is random audits on vote-counting machines,"
Wiseman said. . .
Sara Busey of Missoula, the Help
America Vote Act representative for the Montana League of Women
Voters, said the requirement for an audit-recount will be the
league's top priority for election reform in the upcoming legislative
session. She said 26 states have some kind of mandatory paper
trail for votes, and 15 of those require random audits. . . .
http://www.billingsgazette.net/articles/2006/11/26/news/state/27-votemachines_z.txt
BRAD BLOG - Ron Rivest visited
Georgia on Nov. 7 and has recently reported on what he saw as
he visited with the head of the state's elections and some polls
in different counties. He was told by Kathy Rogers, the state
elections boss, that the state did illegally use uncertified
software in 2002. Rivest also found that the state seems to have
decided it's OK to violate federal law as they turn voters with
questionable registrations away from the polls without offering
them a provisional ballot. . .
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=3856#more-3856
BRAD BLOG - The Alaska Division
of Elections is violating the public records law and should immediately
release copies of the electronic records of the 2006 election
results so they can be examined before the election is certified,
Alaska Democratic Party Chair Jake Metcalfe said today. . . On
Nov. 7, Anchorage Superior Court Judge Stephanie Joannides ordered
the Division of Elections to preserve backup copies of the state's
2006 electronic computer database and subsequent tallies of the
election results. The Division of Elections had refused to make
backup copies of the Diebold computer GEMS database in response
to a request from the Alaska Democratic Party, which then sought
an emergency court order requiring that copies be preserved of
these election records. The Judge agreed with the Democratic
Party and issued a temporary restraining order . . .
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=3855#more-3855
FOUR MORE CITIES GO FOR INSTANT RUN-OFF
VOTING
NEW AMERICA FOUNDATION - Instant
Runoff Voting, continued to gain favor in California and elsewhere
as four cities strongly approved November 7 ballot measures supporting
the idea. In California, where San Francisco became the state's
first Instant Runoff Voting city in 2004, voters in the cities
of Oakland and Davis approved the idea, which would allow voters
to rank their first, second, and third choices for office. Oakland
overwhelmingly supported the measure by 68% of the returns, meaning
voters will use Instant Runoff Voting for all local offices in
November 2008. The Davis measure was an advisory recommendation.
Elsewhere, voters in Minneapolis
passed their ballot measure with 65% support. And in Pierce County,
Washington, voters supported the move to IRV for their partisan
county elections with vote.
http://www.newamerica.net/programs/political_ |