More on Snohomish Co. WA - Seattle Weekly News

[Amaryllis]

Seattle Weekly News

The Minus Touch
A study of touch-screen voting in Snohomish County suggests that machines favored Dino Rossi. But there's no way to prove it.

by Rick Anderson

Even if you have followed every strange twist and U-turn of the 2004–05 Washington gubernatorial election, would it surprise you to hear that more than 100,000 votes were never recounted? These are the electronic votes from the two counties, Snohomish and Yakima, that have computerized touch-screen voting in Washington. The computers do not include a mechanism to recount and compare votes for error. More than 2.7 million paper votes statewide were recounted by optical-reader machine and by hand, ultimately giving Democrat Christine Gregoire a hairbreadth 129-vote victory. But the 106,000 touch-screen ballots—constituting almost 4 percent of the state vote—were simply re-totaled without review and added in. A new study questions the validity of many of those touch-screen votes, suggesting that Gregoire should have beaten Republican Dino Rossi in the initial tally of ballots on Election Day. Rossi was on top at that point by 261 votes, before a final hand recount gave the election to Gregoire.

Officials, including the Republicans who are suing for a new election, don't seem too bothered by the unvetted touch-screen votes, despite promises to explore all the breakdowns of the state's ballot botch. Snohomish County elections manager Carolyn Diepenbrock, for one, says the election process was as honest and accurate as her county could make it. Last fall, she says, Democratic and Republican party representatives randomly selected some of the Sequoia-brand touch-screen machines to be used to test the precision of electronic voting. And on Nov. 2, the system worked, insists Diepenbrock. "Altogether, we deployed 956 machines, I think, out of the 1,000 we own. On the dozens of machines that were preselected by the parties, we ran parallel monitoring tests all Election Day. The sampling showed every vote was being recorded."

The nagging question: Were they recorded accurately? Diepenbrock and other officials in the state's third-largest county, run by Democrats, think so. About one-third of Snohomish County's voters—90,000 or so—used the computerized machines, and another 16,000 voted electronically in Yakima County. At least 28 Snohomish touch screens had "calibration issues," officials concede. That includes electronically shifting votes to a candidate other than the one selected by the touch-screen voter. Some screens also appeared with votes already selected by the computer. Similar problems cropped up in earlier elections in the county, which has employed touch screens for three years. But, "No votes were impacted by those errors," maintains Diepenbrock, because voters alerted poll workers to the glitches and the errant votes were corrected.

That's the opposite of findings by Paul Lehto and Jeffrey Hoffman, who have just completed a study of the Snohomish vote. They contend the outcome of the Nov. 2 election was affected by electronic irregularities. Their 29-page report found that problems of switched votes or machines freezing up occurred at more than 50 polling places. Under their scenario, Gregoire likely beat Rossi in Snohomish County or, at worst, lost by a much narrower margin—meaning she likely lost enough votes to account for Rossi's 261-vote statewide lead shortly after Election Day. Two-thirds of Snohomish County voted with paper absentee and provisional ballots, favoring Gregoire over Rossi by 97,044 to 95,228. The remaining one-third, voting electronically Nov. 2, favored Rossi—and by a much greater margin: 50,400 to 42,135. Though they can't prove it, Lehto and Hoffman think many Democratic votes were switched to the GOP. They believe it was "a mathematical impossibility that Gregoire's 1,800-vote lead on absentee paper ballots was completely overcome by an 8,000-vote Rossi landslide on Election Day on the Sequoia touch screens, ultimately leaving Republican Rossi with a 6,000-vote margin in traditionally Democratic Snohomish County."

More: http://www.seattleweekly.com/features/0504/050126_news_snohomish.php

[GetTheRightVote]

1. More sample of a stolen election in 2004

:kick:

[berniew1]

2. But actually its easily proven- just not taken seriously apparently

The ES&S touchscreens are documented to have been programmed to default to Bush from Kerry in many precincts in many counties of about 10 states. This is a matter of record. And computers don't do anything like this consistently without being programmed to do so.
So actually its clear that fraud happened, and there are very few possibilities of who was responsible. An investigation could clarify this easily if there was the will to carry it out. The problem is that no one apparently has the integrity and courage to do whats normally done in obvious cases of fraud and illegal actions. It seems that certain parties are above the law lately in the U.S. So what does that make the U.S., a banana republic?

[suffragette]

3. lawsuit being filed

In thread, http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x310220
it looks there may be a lawsuit being filed against the use of the Sequoia machines in WA.
Anyone heard any more about this? If so, this would be good news.