DNC RELEASES STUDY OF 2004 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION IN OHIO

[paineinthearse]

Received by email.

DNC RELEASES STUDY OF 2004 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION IN OHIO

Washington - The Democratic National Committee's Voting Rights Institute will present DNC Chairman Howard Dean their report on the conduct of the 2004 presidential election in Ohio.

Copies of the report will be available at the press conference tomorrow and at www.democrats.org.

Who: DNC Chairman Howard Dean
DNC Voting Rights Institute Chair Donna Brazile
Julie Andreef, Ohio regional field director and practicing attorney focusing on election law
Cornell Belcher, president of Brilliant Corners Research and Strategies
Walter Mebane, Jr., Professor of Government at Cornell University
Dan Wallach, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Rice University.

When: Wednesday, June 22, 2005; 11:00 a.m.

Where: DNC Headquarters, 430 South Capitol St., SE, Washington, DC
Wasserman Family Conference Room

==============================

CSPAN2 is scheduled to cover this:

Democratic Agenda
Democratic National Committee
Washington, District of Columbia (United States)
ID: 187286 - 06/21/2005 - 0:30 - $29.95

Durbin, Richard J., U.S. Senator, D-IL
Dean, Howard, Chair (2005- ), Democratic National Committee

Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean speaks about the Democratic Party agenda at the "Paint the Nation Blue" fundraiser.

...nothing even close on CSPAN. :shrug:

Please contact CSPAN and suggest this be at least taped, if not broadcast live.

Suggest Events: Submit a public event that you think C-SPAN should cover - [e-mail]

[Botany]

1. Please come out smoking

I live in Ohio .....

[johnaries]

2. Tommorrow? 11:00 am? Why has this not been KICKED?

:kick:

[Jim Sagle]

3. Don't know. I'm recommending it as well.

[Carolab]

4. Contacted C-Span. Thanks for the heads up. n/t

[GettysbergII]

5. At the Rainbow Push Conference in Chicago on June 12th, I heard Dean said

that a Democratic Report on the bullshit that went on in the 2004 election would be released within 10 days. Today is the tenth day. Dean so far has been a man of his word. I'm really hoping this report got legs.

[GettysbergII]

6. Dan Wallach sure seems to be a good man to have on the panel

https://lists.dulug.duke.edu/pipermail/dulug/2003-October/014468.html

Title:
The Risks of Electronic Voting

Speaker:
Dan Wallach
Rice University

Abstract:
Recent election problems have sparked great interest in managing the
election process through the use of electronic voting systems. While
computer scientists, for the most part, have been warning of the perils
of such action, vendors have forged ahead with their products, claiming
increased security and reliability. Many municipalities have adopted
electronic systems, and the number of deployed systems is rising. For
these new computerized voting systems, neither source code nor the
results of any third-party certification analyses have been available
for the general population to study, because vendors claim that secrecy
is a necessary requirement to keep their systems secure. Recently,
however, the source code purporting to be the software for a voting
system from a major manufacturer appeared on the Internet. This
manufacturer's systems were used in Georgia's state-wide elections in
2002, and the company recently announced that the state of Maryland
awarded them an order for about $55 million to deliver touch-screen
voting systems.

This unique opportunity for independent scientific analysis of voting
system source code demonstrates the fallacy of the closed-source
argument for such a critical system. Our analysis shows that this voting
system is far below even the most minimal security standards applicable
in other contexts. We highlight several issues including unauthorized
privilege escalation, incorrect use of cryptography, vulnerabilities to
network threats, and poor software development processes. For example,
common voters, without any insider privileges, can cast unlimited votes
without being detected by any mechanisms within the voting terminal.
Furthermore, we show that even the most serious of our outsider attacks
could have been discovered without the source code. In the face of such
attacks, the usual worries about insider threats are not the only
concerns; outsiders can do the damage. That said, we demonstrate that
the insider threat is also quite considerable. We conclude that, as a
society, we must carefully consider the risks inherent in electronic
voting, as it places our very democracy at risk.

Short bio:

Dan Wallach is Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Rice
University in Houston, Texas. His research involves computer security
and the issues of building secure and robust software systems for the
Internet. Wallach's pioneering efforts led to the development and
standardization of the "stack inspection" security model, now used by
Sun, Microsoft, and many other systems. Wallach has also studied
security issues that occur in distributed and peer-to-peer systems,
focusing on techniques that can increase the robustness of these systems
against malicious nodes that do not necessarily follow protocols correctly.

--

[GettysbergII]

7. Mebane, Jr. is a member of National Research Commission on Elections and

Voting which is part the Social Science Research Council(SSRC). The SSCR is too closely associated with the Council on Foreign Relations for my liking.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/1/17/211138/455

However, Walter Mebane, Jr. has certainly done enough work in the area of voting irregularities to be a genuine asset if he's not on a leash. Some work of his:

http://macht.arts.cornell.edu/

Mebane, Walter R., Jr. 2003. ``The Wrong Man is President! Overvotes in the 2000 Presidential Election in Florida (pdf); (postscript)'' Appears in Perspectives on Politics, September 2004.

Mebane, Walter R., Jr., and Jasjeet S. Sekhon. 2003. ``Robust Estimation and Outlier Detection for Overdispersed Multinomial Models of Count Data (pdf); (postscript)'' Appears in the American Journal of Political Science, April 2004.

Wand, Jonathan N., Kenneth W. Shotts, Jasjeet S. Sekhon, Walter R. Mebane, Jr., Michael C. Herron, Henry E. Brady. 2001. ``The Butterfly Did It: The Aberrant Vote for Buchanan in Palm Beach County, Florida''. Appears in the American Political Science Review, December 2001.

Here's a couple letters he wrote regarding the 2004 Florida Elections that takes the side against allegations of vote fraud

Letter Sent to the Editor of Common Dreams Regarding ``Evidence Mounts That The Vote May Have Been Hacked,'' by Thom Hartmann Walter R. Mebane, Jr., November 8, 2004.

Letter Sent to Kathy Dopp (organizer of ustogether.org) Regarding the Responses to my Letter that were Posted at ustogether.org Walter R. Mebane, Jr., November 12, 2004.

[GettysbergII]

8. Cornell Belcher and Donna Brazile on the African American vote in 2004

A Civic Participation Reawakening - African American Voters in 2004

http://hotterthanjuly.com/Community/Features/Civicreawake.pdf
http://www.blackcommentator.com/18_commentary_2.html

In the 2004 election, George W. Bush garnered a smaller share of the African American vote (11 percent) than did Bob Dole (12 percent) in 1996, and even Ronald Reagan (12 percent) in 1980.
That fact appears to be intentionally lost in much of the post-election spin regarding the Black vote. There has been a lot of wishful, absurdly inaccurate spin going on regarding African American voters in the 2004 election, some going as far as to say Bush’s “improved” performance in the African American community is a part of the President’s overall mandate.

So let us be clear from the standpoint of the data – Republicans and their brand of moral politics failed to make inroads into the African American community in 2004 as African American voters strongly and unequivocally rejected George Bush at the polls. Indeed, African Americans were one of the few Democratic base groups to hold fast to the Party in the face of a strong so-called moral tide for Bush. An overwhelming 89 percent majority of African American voters voted against Bush in 2004 (an astonishing fact considering that 60 percent of African American voters in key battleground states consider themselves “born again” Christians and Republicans messaged heavily around abortion and gay marriage in the Black community). Going into the election, African American voters strongly disapproved of Bush’s job performance, particularly around jobs and economic issues (71 percent poor job improving the economy), and voted accordingly.

The strong and broad desire by African Americans to remove George Bush from office was the central driving force behind a remarkable and unprecedented turnout of African American voters (a luxury Democrats will not have for the midterm elections): African Americans actually grew as an overall percentage of all voters in 2004, from 10 percent
of the electorate in 2000 to 11 percent (and perhaps as much as 12 percent) in 2004. Those who trumpet inroads by Bush into the African American community ignore history and show a strong prejudice against basic arithmetic.

[GettysbergII]

9. Belcher poll done for Dean

DNC Is Told Where to Move Into Bush Bloc

By Dan Balz

Sunday, April 24, 2005; Page A05

Howard Dean's Democratic National Committee has been studying the electorate, and the party's problem with voters of faith is both worse and better than he feared.

The former Vermont governor, in one of his first actions as DNC chairman, commissioned pollster Cornell Belcher to survey voters in eight states: Ohio, Iowa, Wisconsin, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, New Mexico and Nevada. Bush won all of them except Wisconsin.

What Belcher found that worries the Democrats is that a significant percentage -- 47 percent of voters and 51 percent of white women in the eight states -- said their voting decisions are influenced as much or more by their religious faith as by traditional political issues. Not surprisingly, they went heavily for Bush over Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), with 66 percent backing the president.

But Belcher's survey also persuaded Dean and other DNC officials that these voters may not be beyond their reach. "These so-called values or faith voters are some of the most economically anxious voters in the electorate," Belcher said. "They're tremendously cross-pressured between their pocketbook concerns and their moral values concerns."

Dean believes that provides an opening for Democrats, but only if Democratic candidates learn to speak a different language. "Democrats wonder why people vote against their own economic interest," he said. "The answer is that Democrats don't connect with people's fears about how to raise their children in a difficult social environment."

The former presidential candidate said issues such as same-sex marriage and abortion are not the major obstacles facing Democrats, but the impression that Democrats convey to these voters is that their answer to those fears is more government. "The message people hear is, 'Oh, we'll raise your children for you.' That's the wrong message," Dean said.

Dean called the survey "the best poll I'd seen in 10 years," and said he hopes to road-test a message designed to reach enough voters in competitive red states to turn the tide. "If it works," he said, "the other folks in Washington will pick it up very quickly."

After the telephone interview, an aide to Dean called to say he wanted to make clear this was not a maverick enterprise on the chairman's part to create a new message, noting that he had spoken with Democratic congressional leaders and that all were working together on it.

[GettysbergII]

10. Democratic National Committee Announces Ohio Election Review Team

The DNC Voting Rights Institute members are also all members of the Ohio Election Review Team

http://www.gwu.edu/~action/2004/eday/dnc030305pr.html
Washington, D.C. – The Democratic National Committee (DNC) announced the members of its Ohio Election Task Force. This group of seasoned professionals in the electoral and technology fields are taking an in-depth look into the issues of voter registration problems, long lines at the polls, the issuance and counting of provisional ballots and voting equipment irregularities that voters faced during the 2004 presidential election in Ohio. The team has been hard at work since January, conducting surveys and reviewing election data from all across the state. The task force will submit its report to the DNC with suggestions for moving forward.

“I am confident that Voting Rights Institute (VRI) Chair Donna Brazile and her team of experts will properly investigate what went wrong in the Ohio election process,” said DNC Chairman Governor Howard Dean. “This investigation will ensure that every vote will be counted and everyone who is eligible to vote will be able to secure that right.”

“This team is hard at work, analyzing voting irregularities,” said VRI Chair Brazile. “We are putting the efforts and resources into this project because it is vital that we find out what went wrong, how we can fix it, and restore the faith of the American people in our voting system.”

Julie Andreeff - Julie Andreeff, a graduate of American University's Washington College of Law, is a practicing attorney and lobbyist. Andreeff was an associate at Powell Goldstein Frazer & Murphy where she specialized in election law. Andreeff left Powell Goldstein to become part of the team during the Iowa caucuses which helped John Kerry win a come from behind victory. She then traveled to three other primary states and served as political director in those states until Kerry secured the nomination. During the General election, Andreef returned to Iowa to serve as political director and left mid-cycle to go to the battle ground state of Ohio where she was a regional field director for the campaign. As part of her role in Ohio, she built and managed the largest voter protection and education team in presidential history - in Cuyahoga County. Andreeff recruited and trained 1500 poll watchers to serve as a front line for voters to answer any questions and ensure their right to vote. She helped direct the largest Get-out-the-Vote effort in Cuyahoga County contributing to a record turn out of voters for Democrats in Ohio presidential history.

Cornell Belcher– Cornell Belcher is the founder and President of Brilliant Corners Research and Strategies and functions as the principal strategist on all of the firm’s projects. Belcher is experienced at campaign politics and has over a decade of expertise in quantitative and qualitative research, message development and product and behavioral insight. Belcher has built Brilliant Corners into an established brand that organizations and companies seek out for its unique perspective and creative approach.

Walter R. Mebane, Jr., PhD - Walter R. Mebane Jr. is Professor of Government at Cornell University. He has published numerous research articles concerning topics in American politics, especially elections, and political methodology, including statistics and mathematical modeling. He wrote a series of articles that examined the discrepancies between voters' intentions and the outcome of the 2000 presidential election, focusing on Florida. He has developed statistical methods useful for identifying anomalies in election results. Currently he is continuing work on a project that examines how information, partisan messages and rational voter choices all relate to the dynamics of election campaigns and the institutional structure of American government. He is a member of the Council of the Midwest Political Science Association and served on the Social Science Research Council's National Research Commission on Elections and Voting.

Dan Wallach, PhD - Dan Wallach is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Rice University in Houston, Texas. He earned his bachelor's at the University of California, Berkeley and his PhD at Princeton University. His research involves computer security and the issues of building secure and robust software systems for the Internet. Wallach began his security career in 1995 when he and his colleagues found serious flaws in the security of Java applets; an attacker could use your web browser to hijack your entire computer. Wallach has also studied security issues that occur in distributed and peer-to-peer systems. Wallach, along with colleagues at Johns Hopkins, co-authored a groundbreaking study that reported significant flaws in Diebold's AccuVote-TS electronic voting system. He has testified about voting security issues before government bodies in the U.S., Mexico, and the European Union.

[sellitman]

11. This will get buried behind the Obits.

I betcha!

[mod mom]

12. Top of the GREATEST Page with 33 votes:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x3915770

[B.Jeany]

13. from Rapid Response

in Tallahassee
A locally produced NPR radio show, Perspectives, aired an entire show on Thursday with Leon County Supervisor of Elections Ion Sancho, focusing on election integrity and the recent tests he conducted with Black Box Voting. Sancho is a dedicated public servant who has not been cowed by the Florida Secretary of State's office (either under Katherine Harris or Glenda Hood) in insuring that our elections are accurate and accessible. 
Listen to the show here: www.fsu.edu/~wfsu_fm/programs/local_f.html