Election Reform, Fraud, & Related News TUESDAY, 11/15/05

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KAINE WINS BIG:

Deeds, A.G. Candidate, fighting for every vote in ultra close finale.

Warner and Kaine say “fight for every vote”

Never forget the pursuit of Truth.

Only the deluded & complicit accept election
results on blind faith.

Election Reform, Fraud, & Related News TUESDAY, 11/15/05

All members welcome and encouraged to participate.

Please post Election Reform, Fraud, & Related News on this thread.

If you can:

1. Post stories and announcements you find on the web.

2. Post stories using the "Election Fraud and Reform News Sources" listed here:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x371233

3. Re-post stories and announcements you find on DU, providing a link to the original thread with thanks to the Original Poster, too.

4. Start a discussion thread by re-posting a story you see on this thread.

If you want to know how post "News Banners" or other images, go here:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=203&topic_id=371233#371391



All previous daily threads are available here:
http://www.independentmediasource.com/DU_archives/du_2004erd_el_ref_fr_thr_calenders.htm

Please

"Recommend"

for the Greatest Page (it's the link just below).

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1. VA: Fighting for EVERY VOTE—DEEDS (Dem) Plans to be A.G.

This is all I’ve been looking for…Democrats who say they’ll fight for every vote and who actually DO IT. Warner said it election night when the Deeds race was close and they’re all saying it. Deeds says get ready for long recount.

Deeds, McDonnell proceed with plans to assume AG office

http://www.wvec.com/sharedcontent/APStories/stories/D8DSJTJ80.html

11/15/2005

By BOB LEWIS / Associated Press

Both candidates in the contested attorney general's election proceeded with plans Monday to take office even as the margin separating them was less than .03 of a percentage point.

Only 446 votes out of nearly 2 million cast put Republican Robert F. McDonnell ahead of Democrat R. Creigh Deeds after a locality-by-locality canvass of the returns Monday, the tightest outcome at least in modern Virginia history.

So close a finish guarantees a laborious, perhaps litigious ballot box-by-ballot box, voting machine-by-voting machine statewide recount after the State Board of Elections certifies the results Nov. 28. The recount would continue into mid-December.

Deeds announced the appointment Monday of a transition team as well as a separate group that will oversee his legal interests during a recount. Aides to McDonnell, meanwhile, said he would move his team Wednesday into the attorney general-designate's official transition office.

Gov. Mark R. Warner on Monday decided to provide McDonnell and Deeds state office space so each can concurrently assemble his own team until a recount settles the issue or one side concedes. Both will operate from suites in the Ninth Street Office Building near Capitol Square, said the governor's press secretary, Kevin Hall.

<snip>

What's more, Framme noted, many Virginians last week voted on computerized election machines for the first time, creating recount challenges the state has never before faced.

Framme said there has never been this kind of statewide recount in Virginia with these types of voting machines, "so what was done in 1989 is going to change."

Wilder prevailed that year over Republican Marshall Coleman by a margin of just under 7,000 votes out of about 1.8 million cast, a much larger spread than this year's race.

Until last week, the slimmest modern statewide margin was in 1966 when Bill Spong prevailed in a Democratic U.S. Senate primary over Sen. A. Willis Robertson by 611 votes out of less than 800,000 cast, said University of Virginia political science professor Larry J. Sabato. In that era of unchallenged Democratic dominance

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2. LA: State Officials Delay NOLA Vote

I can’t even begin to fathom the politics of this move. Let’s keep an eye on itl
Remember this: BUSH GAVE LA 26 MILLION FOR NEW VOTING MACHINES AND TOOK AWAY $24 MILLION FOR LEVEE MAINTENANCE. Votes there must be pretty important to the Bush folks.

State Official Says Delay New Orleans Vote

http://wireservice.wired.com/wired/story.asp?section=Breaking&storyId=1116663&tw=wn_wire_story


Monday, November 14, 2005 10:12 p.m. ET
By MELINDA DESLATTE Associated Press Writer

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) -- A top state official recommended Monday that elections scheduled for February in New Orleans be delayed because of Hurricane Katrina, which displaced thousands of residents and demolished polling places.

Elections Commissioner Angie LaPlace told a legislative committee that she believes the Feb. 4 mayoral primary _ which would also include city council races and referendums _ should be postponed.

"It would be too problematic. We're not ready," LaPlace said.

LaPlace did not specify how long the primary should be delayed or say how her recommendation might affect the March 4 general election in which Mayor Ray Nagin has indicated he will seek a second term.

She has made the recommendation to Secretary of State Al Ater. If Ater agrees with her, the governor would have to decide whether to delay the election.

Ater will not decide the matter until later this month, but the secretary of state generally follows the election commissioner's recommendation, Ater spokeswoman Jennifer Marusak said.

<snip>

The city would need to bring in temporary buildings and hire dozens of new elections workers, as well as track and contact voters spread around the country, elections officials have said.

Also Monday, the state House and Senate approved a state takeover of most New Orleans public schools, voting to pass slightly different versions of a bill proposed by Gov. Kathleen Blanco.

Louisiana education officials can already take over failing public schools. Blanco's proposal would give the state even greater power to do that in New Orleans.

Teachers unions had objected to the measure because it would nullify an existing contract at affected schools.

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3. NY: Wrong Office on Touch Screen for DEM Costs Her Election – Challenge

Well, if the national party won’t do it, the locals will. Now it’s New York local Democrats going after “the machines.” They’re going to look inside. This is great. Why can’t we do that everywhere.

Democrats question integrity of Victor supervisor race

http://www.wroctv.com/news/story.asp?id=20664&r=l

11/14/2005 5:00 PM
(Ty Chandler, WROC-TV)

Six days after the election and Victor voters still don't know who will lead the town as supervisor. A mere fourteen vote lead separates Republican Leslie Bamman and Democrat Heather Zollo.

That small margin wasn't helped by a faulty machine that listed Zollo as a candidate for clerk instead of supervisor. Party officials say forty-five people voted on that machine before it was taken out of service.

"We think it was a fairly quick transition," said Ontario County Republican Chairman Jay Dutcher. "I believe it was no more than forty-five minutes," he went on.

However Democrats tell a different story. Party leader Gary Robinson said voters began to complain about the error around 6:30 am, but the machine wasn't taken offline until 8:30. "They should not have allowed forty-five people to vote on a machine that had an apparent problem," said Robinson.

The second machine didn't fair much better. Robinson believes it wasn't reset and may not have accurate votes.

Both machines have been impounded and will be inspected by voting machine experts for tampering. Robinson says both machines were inspected twice before voting began. "Given the fact both inspections took place, it's a real mystery as to how one name moved from one spot to another and have lever not working on a machine."

[Bill Bored]

10. Why can't we do this everywhere?

Because it was a LEVER MACHINE, that's why!
And that's why the problem occurred on one machine instead of 1,000 machines too!

But thanks for the post!

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4. GERMANY: Covering Ohio’s Bogus Election 2005

Nice, now Europe knows what DU knows, Blackwell and Co. can’t run a clean election. Nice little site.

Election Irregularities Return to Ohio

]
http://www.shortnews.com/shownews.cfm?id=51242

11/14/2005 10:13 PM ID: 51242
Still a center of controversy in the 2004 Presidential election, Ohio is once again the source of election irregularities. Just one of five ballot initiatives returned results near the predicted results in last Tuesday's election.


The local newspaper was within 1 point on a budget initiative, however, all of the voting reform initiatives showed incredible swings to be defeated. Issue 3, which would have blocked corporate donations to candidates, swung more than 30 points.


This election saw a larger roll-out of Diebold electronic voting machines than 2004, with near 50% of the counties using them. The GAO recently reported that Diebold machines were easily hacked and votes could easily be switched or skimmed.

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5. Editor & Publisher Covers Koehler’s Election Fraud Column…hmmm…

Well, E&P is very influential. It’s now covering Koehler’s column and Koehler is covering election fraud. What was it I predicted—35% Bush approve and the election fraud story comes out. Hold me to it.

Koehler Column Discusses 2004 Election Problems

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/departments/syndicates/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001478961

By Dave Astor

Published: November 14, 2005 10:50 AM ET

NEW YORK Tribune Media Services columnist Robert Koehler has once again become a rare mainstream-media voice discussing major problems with the 2004 election.

In his current column, Koehler writes: "Some news is so big it won't fit into a headline. For example: WIDESPREAD VOTER DISENFRANCHISEMENT IN 2004. Sorry. It may be true, but it's a no-go on the front pages and TV news programs of America."


He adds that the election had "widespread malfunctioning of electronic voting machines that continually worked to the benefit of George Bush over John Kerry; Jim Crow-style spurious challenges of African-American and other likely Democratic voters; preposterously long lines in inner-city neighborhoods while unused machines sat in warehouses; mysteriously inaccurate exit polls that picked Kerry until Bush suddenly emerged victorious; dirty tricks galore; more than 100,000 uncounted provisional ballots in the bitterly contested state of Ohio alone; and now, a just-released General Accounting Office report on electronic voting in 2004, which found evidence of lost and miscounted votes, sloppy security, and other problems."

Koehler also wrote about a scene at a recent Kerry fund-raiser. Mark Crispin Miller -- author of "Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election and Why They'll Steal the Next One Too (Unless We Stop Them)" -- gave Kerry a copy of the book and told him: "You were robbed, Senator!" According to Miller, Kerry replied: "I know!" But a Kerry aide later denied the senator said that.

"I recount this controversy," commented Koehler, "not to insert myself into the middle of a 'he said, he said' standoff with no possibility of independent corroboration either way, but because it captures the enormous frustration of voting-rights activists who believe a terrible wrong occurred on Nov. 2, 2004... ."

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6. OH: Press Misses Point...Dog Digs for Bone...and other shocking news.

The Ohio special election saw propositions for election reform favored by 20-30% of voters in pre-election polls lose by 20%. Doesn’t take a genius to sort that out. But Youngstown media is covering the lousing machines used. Room for improvement…read the article, it’s amazing. Why can’t they cover the story about the election poll-results disparity. This one’s a no-brainer.

Room to improve remains

http://www.vindy.com/content/local_regional/296073130028775.php

Published: Sunday, November 13, 2005

By ED RUNYAN

VINDICATOR TRUMBULL STAFF

WARREN — The extent of technological and logistical changes with the new touch-screen voting system caught up with Trumbull County Board of Elections staffers on general election night.

Those in charge are pleased with the overall result from the Diebold AccuVote-TSX System, and so is the Ohio secretary of state's office. But county elections director Kelly S. Pallante and deputy director Rokey W. Suleman II said some fine-tuning will occur before the next election.

"Some things were not apparent until we went through them," Pallante said late last week.

Memory cards

One of the bigger surprises election night was that so many poll workers didn't get their voting machines turned off correctly, which slowed elections staffers in their job of taking the information from the memory card contained in each machine, Pallante said.

Between 22 and 29 of the cards were not immediately usable when they came back to the elections board from various points throughout the county, Pallante said, and had to be reinserted into a voting machine and closed out properly before they were usable. These cards hold all the votes from that machine for the whole day.

That process took about five to seven minutes per card. Because those cards were all corrected at the same point at the end of the night, they held up complete results by about an hour, Pallante said.

<snip>

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7. RELIABLE SOURCES: VoteTrustUSA.Org—Warren Stewart

When you need an excellent resource, use this web site. Steward is an active election investigator (involved in the New Mexico case) and a long time advocate for election integrity.

VoteTrust.USA.Org—Warren Stewart

http://www.votetrustusa.org/

Today We Have Two Choices: Fix the System, or Don't Bother to Vote
New from VoteTrustBlog

By Guy Sturino, Guest Contributor
November 12, 2005

This article by Guy Sturino appeared in The American Chronicle on Oct. 22, 2005. It is reposted here with permission of the author.

You are a good citizen. You find out all you can about the important political issues. You research candidates. You put signs in your yard and stickers on your car to encourage others to see your side. You contribute time and money to political campaigns. You brave weather and long lines to be sure that you cast your ballot on election day. You have performed an important, probably the most important, civic duty. All is well with the world.

Or, is it? The reality is, with the advent of electronic voting machines without a voter verified paper trail, you don’t know today how your vote was counted in the last election.

Before you cry foul, or insist that this can’t be true, or worse yet – that this is no more than the raving of a sore looser liberal, I encourage you to investigate the reports from two organizations, the General Accountability Office (GAO), and The National Election Data Archive (NEDA), a nonprofit organization of statisticians and mathematicians devoted to the accuracy of U.S. vote counts.

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8. NM: Undervotes in New Mexico

Excellent!!!

Warren Stewart: Did You Erase Your Own Vote?

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0510/S00329.htm


By Warren Stewart, Director of Legislative Issues and Policy, www.VoteTrustUSA.org

Monday, 31 October 2005, 1:00 pm
Opinion: Warren Stewart
Did You Erase Your Own Vote?

By Warren Stewart, Director of Legislative Issues and Policy, www.VoteTrustUSA.org

In 2004, New Mexico once again led the nation in Presidential undervote rate. Undervotes are ballots cast without a vote for President, and New Mexico had 21, 084 of them – 2.78% of the total ballots cast last November or one out of every 36 voters. New Mexico Secretary of State Rebecca Vigil-Giron seems surprisingly untroubled by undervotes, commenting after the election that she doesn't "spend a lot of time on undervote issues, I'm just speculating that some voters are just not concerned with the presidential race." <1>

I never found this very convincing. However, the recent testimony from the head of Automated Election Services (AES), the company that provides election services to most of the counties in New Mexico, may offer a more persuasive explanation.

The analysis <2> of the certified results of the New Mexico election that I undertook with Ellen Theisen of VotersUnite.org revealed that more than 80% of New Mexico’s undervotes were recorded (or, more accurately, not recorded) on Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machines with the main culprits being the Sequoia Advantage and the Danaher Shouptronic - both “push button” electronic machines.

Particularly alarming were cases like Taos County, where optically scanned paper ballots were used in early and absentee voting, and DREs were used on Election Day. In early and absentee voting in Taos County, the presidential undervote rate was well below 1%, while on Election Day the undervote rate soared to almost 10%! Or San Miguel County, Precinct 14 where every single person who voted early (on paper) voted for one presidential candidate or another while 27% of their neighbors who voted electronically on Election Day apparently didn’t vote for any of them.

In a recent deposition, Terry Rainey, CEO of AES explained that “if you go to a DRE machine and you walk in, the first thing you're presented with is a list of political parties, and if I …say, yes, I'm a Democrat, and I push the button for Democrat, then that activates vote choices for all the Democratic candidates.” Fair enough, most states in the country allow for “straight party voting”.

[texpatriot2004]

13. No way did people in 2004 NOT care about the presidential

vote. In fact, this is contrary to our historical voting data. It is common knowledge that voters in the US care more about presidential elections than local ones. BTW Houston TX had the undervote problem too; and the correlation b/w undervotes and straight party voting.

<snip>

New Mexico Secretary of State Rebecca Vigil-Giron seems surprisingly untroubled by undervotes, commenting after the election that she doesn't "spend a lot of time on undervote issues, I'm just speculating that some voters are just not concerned with the presidential race." <1>

I never found this very convincing. However, the recent testimony from the head of Automated Election Services (AES), the company that provides election services to most of the counties in New Mexico, may offer a more persuasive explanation.

The analysis <2> of the certified results of the New Mexico election that I undertook with Ellen Theisen of VotersUnite.org revealed that more than 80% of New Mexico’s undervotes were recorded (or, more accurately, not recorded) on Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machines with the main culprits being the Sequoia Advantage and the Danaher Shouptronic - both “push button” electronic machines.

Particularly alarming were cases like Taos County, where optically scanned paper ballots were used in early and absentee voting, and DREs were used on Election Day. In early and absentee voting in Taos County, the presidential undervote rate was well below 1%, while on Election Day the undervote rate soared to almost 10%! Or San Miguel County, Precinct 14 where every single person who voted early (on paper) voted for one presidential candidate or another while 27% of their neighbors who voted electronically on Election Day apparently didn’t vote for any of them.

<snip>

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9. Thank you DUer vickiss!!!

THANK YOU vickiss FOR COVERAGE ON THIS
THREAD ON 11/08/05, VIRGINIA ELECTION DAY

:yourock:

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[Wilms]

11. NC: Company seeks clarity on voting machine rules (proprietary software)

Monday, November 14, 2005

Company seeks clarity on voting machine rules

By Mark Binker, Staff Writer

RALEIGH — Attorneys for a voting machine manufacturer have asked a state court to narrow a key provision in the rules governing those bidding on the chance to sell equipment to local elections boards .

“The concern was that we were being asked to provide something that was impossible to provide,” said Douglas Hanna, a lawyer at Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice working for manufacturer Diebold.

The company is trying to clarify the law rather than have a showdown with the state, Hanna said. But watchdogs who track problems related to voting machines say they are worried that if Diebold gets what it wants, the court will weaken North Carolina’s ability to dissect problems after an election mishap.

snip

Under those new rules, the state is seeking firms that produce machines meeting certain requirements — such as that computer scientists may examine them to make sure they work as expected.

The state will choose one or more companies from whom local elections boards can buy equipment. Under state rules, companies holding that contract must place “all software that is relevant to functionality, setup, configuration and operation of the voting system” in safekeeping so it may be examined should something go wrong. Diebold argues that the requirement is too broad.

According to Hanna, the company’s software runs using Microsoft’s Windows operating system . Diebold is worried state rules would require it to submit information related to Windows, something the company can’t legally do.

snip

Voting machine watchdogs are concerned that if Diebold is exempt from submitting the Windows code, it will set a dangerous precedent.

snip

If the state exempts third-party software from disclosure, voting machine vendors might be able to broker license agreements with other companies that allow them to exempt certain pieces of software from the safekeeping requirements, potentially hiding flaws from elections officials.

snip/more

http://www.news-record.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051114/NEWSREC0101/511140308/1001/NEWSREC0201

Discussion

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x401548

[Algorem]

12. OH-Lucas Co. election boss now says space crunch slowed vote count

http://www.toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051115/NEWS09/511150361/-1/NEWS

Article published Tuesday, November 15, 2005

Election boss now says space crunch slowed vote count
Kelly defends Lucas County plan

By JOSHUA BOAK
BLADE STAFF WRITER



...Before the election, the board did not gauge how long the ballot count would take, Ms. Kelly said. It was told that 12 machines would be optimal for the ballot count and consulted with Diebold about how long it would take to calculate results, Mr. Badik said.

"We were asking for an estimate," Mr. Badik said. "We never received one."

David Bear, a Diebold spokesman, said the company attempted to facilitate priorities determined by the board rather than dictate how the machines should be used.

"We followed the recommendation of the county, because, ultimately, they run the election," he said...


Contact Joshua Boak at:
[e-mail]
or 419-724-6728.


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