|
Edited on Mon Jul-17-06 07:59 PM by tiptoe
"If the gubernatorial race in 2006 is as close as 2002, it would only take four errors per precinct to change the outcome of the election. Maryland cannot risk the election disaster that is impending. Maryland was lucky the presidential election in Maryland was not close; otherwise we would be embroiled in scandal to this day..." -- Linda Schade, director of TrueVoteMD.org. Emerging Scandal on MD Voting Machine Performance March 9, 2005. "In November 2002, popular Georgia Democratic Senator Max Cleland led by 5 percentage points prior to the election – the first ever conducted entirely on touch-screen voting machines. But then a mysterious swing of 12 percent on election day led to his defeat." slide 8: ELECTION FRAUD 2004 "We will hold the House (of Representatives) and the Senate," Bush said in the first formal, solo news conference he has held outside of Washington. "I'm looking forward to these elections. I think you'll be surprised..." July 7, 2006 (Pretty upbeat for the leader with a falling approval rating of 36%.) from Malfunction And Malfeasance - A Report On The Electronic Voting Machine Debacle by Common Cause:p18, CHART A Status of State Voting Systems
p19, CHART B State-By-State Voter Risk Assessment
p20, CHART C Mid-and High-Risk States That Allow No-Fault Absentee Voting
A state is considered HIGH RISK if the DREs are in use, but they do not produce a paper record at all. In these states, votes will simply be lost if machines malfunction or votes are compromised due to programming errors or malicious code. p17 HIGH RISK States:Arkansas <YES> Delaware District of Colombia Florida <YES> -- 2006? 5/25/06: Nelson (D) 56% Harris (R) 26% Georgia <YES> ( Max Cleland "surprise" 12% reversal, 2002, in this HIGH RISK state) Iowa <YES> Indiana Kansas <YES> Kentucky Louisiana Maryland <YES> -- 2006? 4/18/06: Cardin (D) 45% Steele (R) 35% New Jersey <YES> -- 2006? 6/15/06: Menendez (D) 43% Kean (R) 36%. Pennsylvania -- 2006? 6/15/06: Santorum (R) 40% Casey (D) 49% South Carolina Tennessee -- 2006? 6/13/06: Corker (R) 46% Ford (D) 42% Texas Virginia -- 2006? 6/17/06: Allen (R) 51% Webb (D) 41% Common Cause recommendations: ibid. p21-22: "In those states marked “yes” in the chart [C] above, Common Cause recommends voting by absentee ballot, if voters’ only other option in their precinct is a paperless DRE." However...NOTE re Maryland absentee ballot practice in 2004: (emphases mine) 10/26/2004 | Ballot secrecy violation | MD | Absentee ballots have an identifier on the outside envelope, indicating the party of the voter. Election watchers say the party tags invite fraud because a ballot handler who disagrees with a voter's party choice could simply throw out his or her ballot. Maryland State Board of Elections officials maintain there is no cause for concern, but they have also said they might (!!!) discontinue the practice in future elections. Story Archive("Maryland elections' chief Linda Lamone...said she trusts state workers, and does not believe that anyone would try to affect the election by illegally discarding ballots...") Brennan Center for Justice Security Recommendations: THE MACHINERY OF DEMOCRACY: PROTECTING ELECTIONS IN AN ELECTRONIC WORLD -- Executive Summary, pp 3,14 -- Full Report, p3,87SECURITY RECOMMENDATIONS
There is a substantial likelihood that the election procedures and countermeasures currently in place in the vast majority of states would not detect a cleverly designed Software Attack Program. The regimens for Parallel Testing and Automatic Routine Audits proposed in the Security Report are important tools for defending voting systems from many types of attack, including Software Attack Programs. For the reasons discussed, infra at pp. 6–7, we also believe that these measures would reduce the likelihood that votes would be lost as a result of human error.
Most jurisdictions have not implemented these security measures. Of the 26 states that require a voter-verified paper record, only 12 states require automatic audits of those records after every election, and only two of these states – California and Washington – conduct Parallel Testing. <190> Moreover, even those states that have implemented these countermeasures have not developed the best practices and protocols that are necessary to ensure their effectiveness in preventing or revealing attacks or failures in the voting systems. There is a substantial likelihood that the election procedures and countermeasures currently in place in the vast majority of states would not detect a cleverly designed Software Attack Program.
Recommendation #1...
Recommendation #2...For paperless DRE voting machines, Parallel Testing is probably the best way to detect most software-based attacks, as well as subtle software bugs that may not be discovered during inspection and other testing...
Recommendation #3...
VotersUnite.org compilation of Election 2004 problems reported in the media by State
Date | Problem Type | State | Description
=================================================================
3/8/2005 | Machine malfunction | MD | All Maryland voting machines have been on ''lockdown'' since November 2, 2004 due to statewide machine failures including 12% of machines in Montgomery County, some of which appear to have lost votes in significant numbers.
According to the IT Report to the Montgomery County Election Board, dated December 13, 2004, screen freezes, which occurred on 106 voting units were "the most serious of errors" because many "froze when the voter pressed the Cast Ballot button." As a result "election judges are unable to provide substantial confirmation that the vote was in fact counted." Story Archive
==================================================================
11/23/2004 | Machine malfunction | MD | TrueVoteMD's trained election observers 201 machine malfunction in the 108 precincts they observed, which represent 6% of the state's precincts. Among the problems were 42 instances of machine crashes, 30 screen malfunctions, 17 instances when votes were switched on the screen, 37 problems with the ballot encoder, and 16 incidents in which the ballot was incorrect or incomplete. Story Archive
==================================================================
11/4/2004 | Machine malfunction | MD | Data transmission failures occurred in 14 precincts. Story
==================================================================...
From Was the 2004 Election Stolen? by RFK, Jr. June 1, 2006
... After carefully examining the evidence, I've become convinced that the president's party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004. Across the country, Republican election officials and party stalwarts employed a wide range of illegal and unethical tactics to fix the election. A review of the available data reveals that in Ohio alone, at least 357,000 voters, the overwhelming majority of them Democratic, were prevented from casting ballots or did not have their votes counted in 2004(12) -- more than enough to shift the results of an election decided by 118,601 votes.(13) (See Ohio's Missing Votes) In what may be the single most astounding fact from the election, one in every four Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast ballots.(14) And that doesn?t even take into account the troubling evidence of outright fraud, which indicates that upwards of 80,000 votes for Kerry were counted instead for Bush. That alone is a swing of more than 160,000 votes -- enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.(15) ... Republican officials...created long lines by failing to distribute enough voting machines to inner-city precincts. After the Florida disaster in 2000, such problems with machines were supposed to be a thing of the past. Under the Help America Vote Act, Ohio received more than $30 million in federal funds to replace its faulty punch-card machines with more reliable systems.(137) But on Election Day, that money was sitting in the bank. Why? Because Ken Blackwell had applied for an extension until 2006, insisting that there was no point in buying electronic machines that would later have to be retrofitted under Ohio law to generate paper ballots.(138) ''No one has ever accused our secretary of state of lacking in ability,'' says Rep. Kucinich. ''He's a rather bright fellow, and he's involved in the most minute details of his office. There's no doubt that he knew the effect of not having enough voting machines in some areas.'' ... Voters who managed to make it past the array of hurdles erected by Republican officials found themselves confronted by voting machines that didn't work. Only 800,000 out of the 5.6 million votes in Ohio were cast on electronic voting machines, but they were plagued with errors.(164) In heavily Democratic areas around Youngstown, where nearly 100 voters reported entering ''Kerry'' on the touch screen and watching ''Bush'' light up, at least twenty machines had to be recalibrated in the middle of the voting process for chronically flipping Kerry votes to Bush.(165) (Similar ''vote hopping'' from Kerry to Bush was reported by voters and election officials in other states.)( 166) Elsewhere, voters complained in sworn affidavits that they touched Kerry's name on the screen and it lit up, but that the light had gone out by the time they finished their ballot; the Kerry vote faded away.(167) In the state's most notorious incident, an electronic machine at a fundamentalist church in the town of Gahanna recorded a total of 4,258 votes for Bush and 260 votes for Kerry.(168) In that precinct, however, there were only 800 registered voters, of whom 638 showed up.(169) (The error, which was later blamed on a glitchy memory card, was corrected before the certified vote count.)... (FIRST RFK JR. VOTING MACHINE WHISTLEBLOWER LAWSUIT NOW FILED IN FEDERAL COURT! NEW DETAILS! BLOGGED BY Brad on 7/12/2006)
(Mike Papantonio on the Mike Malloy Show (mp3))
From How to Keep Democrats From Blowing the November Election by Bernard Weiner (emphasis mine)
HOW TO HIJACK AN ELECTION
As many have noted, the Bush campaign was aided enormously in this thievery because their campaign co-chairs in key states were also the Secretaries of State — that is, the officials in charge of conducting elections and certifying the vote results: Katherine Harris in Florida in 2000 (with brother Gov. Jeb Bush overseeing her work), and, in 2004, Kenneth Blackwell in Ohio, Terry Lind in Michigan, Matt Blunt in Missouri, Glenda Hood in Florida, et al.
It has been widely documented that nefarious techniques were employed in key states to aid Bush’s "victory," such as: removing hundreds of thousands of likely Democratic voters from the voting rolls; rejiggering the precincts so that when those voters went to their usual polling place, they were told they had to go vote elsewhere and when they got to the new place, they had to vote by Provisional Ballots (in Ohio, thousands of those ballots apparently are still uncounted!); making sure the voting machines in heavily Democratic wards were out of commission or malfunctioning or too few in number for the crowds who wanted to vote, thus forcing working-class citizens to stand in line for many hours, with the result that many gave up and went back to their jobs; thousands of unstamped ballots that were moved around to various precincts; locked warehouses in which various electoral irregularities were carried out; dirty tricks to keep likely Democratic voters from showing up (supplying them with the wrong voting date, telling them that anybody with unpaid parking tickets would be arrested at the polls, that sort of thing); not always catching that e-votes for Kerry automatically, either deliberately or because of technical malfunctions, were being switched into the Bush column, etc. etc.
With several hundred thousand voters kept from casting their ballots in Ohio, for example, the ultimate conclusion is that Kerry would have won that key state, and other close states, had the election been conducted honestly, absent the dirty tricks and fraud. But, of course, before any serious recounting could take place, Kerry, despite his promise to fight, quickly threw in the towel, as had Al Gore four years earlier, which haste and timidity permitted Bush&Co. to continue on their corrupt, incompetent, deadly ways.
These were shameful, cowardly Dem retreats by the candidates in the face of fire. Only now are Gore and Kerry starting to behave and speak out the way they should have during their campaigns, at least about the environment and civil liberties and the war in Iraq, leading one to believe that those two are readying themselves for another go in 2008...
========
E-Vote Security - Timeline,Reports,Tech Studies
NJ: A BIG danger <in NJ> is election fraud...in a "HIGH RISK" state (All DRE, no VVPB)
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
