Election Reform, Fraud, & News Tuesday 12/05/06

[Melissa G]

Election Reform, Fraud, & News Monday 12/04/06


Flavio Sosa one of the founders of the Oaxaca People's Assembly, APPO, arrives at news conference in Mexico City, Mexico, Monday, Dec. 4, 2006. Police arrested Flavio Sosa, the emblematic leader of a six-month-long leftist protest movement that took over the southern city of Oaxaca and battled authorities, authorities reported on Monday. Sosa, whose heavyset, bearded presence become almost a symbol of the leftist People's Assembly of Oaxaca, was detained late Monday in Mexico City, federal police said, though they gave no immediate information on the circumstances of the arrest. (AP Photo/Eduardo Verdugo)




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.

Please recommend for the Greatest Page.

[Melissa G]

1. Leader of Oaxaca Protests Arrested

Leader of Oaxaca Protests Arrested



By MARK STEVENSON | Associated Press
December 5, 2006

MEXICO CITY (AP) - Mexican police arrested the symbolic leader of a six-month-long protest movement that took over southern Oaxaca city, hours after he gave a news conference saying he had come to the capital to start talks with the government.

Flavio Sosa, whose heavyset, bearded presence became an emblem of the leftist People's Assembly of Oaxaca, was arrested late Monday in Mexico City on charges of kidnapping, robbery, and causing damages and injuries, federal prosecutors said in a press statement. The allegations were apparently related to the barricades, vandalism and irregular detentions carried out by some protesters.

snip

On Monday before his arrest, Sosa told reporters he had come to Mexico City in an attempt to re-establish negotiations with the government and escape what he described as persecution in Oaxaca. A spokesman for the people's assembly, Florentino Lopez, told the government news agency Notimex that talks would continue with the government despite Sosa's arrest, but it was unclear who would represent the protesters.

Just a few hours before he was detained, Sosa held a news conference in which he said he left Oaxaca to avoid the "fierce persecution of the police and Ulises Ruiz' hit men," referring to Oaxaca Gov. Ulises Ruiz, whose resignation the protesters had demanded.
http://www.casperstartribune.net/articles/2006/12/05/ap/international/d8lqhkt00.txt

[Melissa G]

2. Films track troubles in Mexico

Films track troubles in Mexico
By CLAUDIA MELƒNDEZ SALINAS
Herald Salinas Bureau
A CSU-Monterey Bay professor who spent the summer in Mexico City has produced a 35-minute documentary film about the chaotic political situation in Mexico.

snip

In "No te rajes" (Don't back down), Manning narrates what happened during the weeks following the election, when thousands of people from all over the country camped on the city's main thoroughfares to demand a full recount of the ballots.

snip
Oaxaca, one of the poorest states in the country, has been in the eye of one of the most intense political storms the country has seen in decades, since a coalition of dozens of community organizations, commonly known as APPO, occupied the colonial city's Zocalo this summer to demand the resignation of the state governor, Ulises Ruiz.

snip
"The mainstream press (labels the protesters) as anarchist hoodlums, but they have a huge basis of support in the state," Manning said. "It's a mass popular movement for social justice. The teachers are out there and see the poverty, the misery. The children can't concentrate, have to go back to work. It's no accident that the teachers became the catalyst of the social movement."

http://www.montereyherald.com/mld/montereyherald/news/local/16167019.htm

[Melissa G]

3. Government rejects e-voting paper trail proposal

Thanks to WillYourVoteBCounted for the post and the DU discussion here...
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x461601

Government rejects e-voting paper trail proposal
Grant Gross


December 04, 2006 (IDG News Service) A U.S. government board looking
at ways to improve the security of electronic voting has rejected one
proposal that would have required election officials to use
paper-trail ballots or other audit technologies with the machines.

The Technical Guidelines Development Committee (TGDC), an advisory
board to the U.S. Elections Assistance Commission (EAC), on Monday
failed to pass a proposal to certify only those direct record
electronic (DRE) machines that use independent audit technology.
Before the 6-6 vote, TGDC members expressed concerns that a
requirement would create a costly mandate to local governments....

But Brittain Williams, representing the National Association of State
Election Directors, said the U.S. banking industry has largely figured
out how to conduct large-scale electronic transactions with few
mistakes. "You say all software is buggy," he said. "The question is,
can you test it to an acceptable list of security? The banking
industry ... moves billions of dollars around every day with this
buggy software without ever producing a single piece of paper."
http://computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=view...

[kpete]

11. grrrrrrrrr...about this Government rejects e-voting paper trail proposal

but K&R Melissa G for continuing the fight!

[Melissa G]

19. Thanks kpete! I'm kinda @%$%$#&^%*^%(!!! about it myself! n/t

[Melissa G]

4. Daily Herald: Request for recount in (Illinois) District 46 election

Thanks to AtLiberty for the post and the DU discussion here...
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x461625



Original message
Daily Herald: Request for recount in (Illinois) District 46 election
Btw, this is part of IL 6. Statisticians placed a fraud alert on IL 6.

Request for recount in District 46 election

By Michael Wamble and Robert Sanchez
Daily Herald Staff Writers
Posted Tuesday, December 05, 2006

Democrat Joe Vosicky requested a recount Monday in his losing bid to replace Lee Daniels in the Illinois General Assembly’s 46th House District.

Vosicky said problems with voting machine computer chips and other possible irregularities surrounding the Nov. 7 election led him to make the request.

Four weeks after the election, the margin between Vosicky and apparent Republican winner Dennis Reboletti, both of Elmhurst, is about 300 votes, with Vosicky at 13,183 and Reboletti at 13,482.

“In a district that is traditionally a Republican stronghold, the people went out of their way when they voted for me,” Vosicky said Monday. “In order to protect the integrity of the election and the people who voted for me, it is appropriate to ask for a discovery recount.”

*snip*

The reason for the recount request, Vosicky said, come from questions over how and if votes recorded on computer chips were counted.

On Nov. 8, the day after the vote, DuPage County Election Commission Executive Director Robert Saar said there was a technical malfunction in tallying results from five precincts. Also, some election judges did not turn in 19 memory cards to be linked into the county’s database. Those votes were later tallied.

Vosicky has asked for 21 out of the 87 precincts to be recounted by hand.

By law, up to 25 percent of the precincts in a particular race can be examined as part of a partial recount.

http://www.dailyherald.com/news/dupagestory.asp?id=256726&cc=d&tc=&t=

[Melissa G]

5. NJ Election Official Admits She Can't Prove All Votes Counted Properly

Bradblog December 5, 2006

NJ Election Official Admits She Can't Prove All Votes Counted Properly
PLUS: Sequoia's Spokehole Lies Again and Rush Holt Disappoints...
At a panel discussion this week at Rutgers University, an unusually frank admission was made by an Elections Official. Then, less surprisingly, a Voting Machine company spokesperson told a lie. And finally, Congressman Rush Holt (D-NJ) made a disappointing admission. All according to a report in New Jersey's Herald News.

New Jersey's Passaic County Clerk Karen Brown admitted --- out loud --- at the forum that she has no way to prove votes are counted accurately as reported by her Sequoia DRE touch-screen voting systems, since they employ proprietary software which she has no access to. Even after the election was certified, she expressed reservations:

"How do I prove that all of the votes have been counted properly? How do we determine whether the software is working properly?" Brown asked. "We have to rely on the vendor and their software."
We're happy to see another honest Election Official make herself heard and making a point we've been trying to make here for some time nonetheless. Such officials who tell the truth, out loud, are a far too-rare breed.

But there were problems in Brown's county. Amongst them, two voting districts where results where transferred electronically from the precinct to the clerk's office and the tallies failed to match the vote totals as reported by the machines.

snip
http://www.bradblog.com/

[Melissa G]

6. Chávez triumph brings emollient words from US

Chávez triumph brings emollient words from US
Posted: Tuesday, December 5, 2006

By Rory Carroll in Caracas
Tuesday December 5, 2006
The Guardian UK

"The Venezuelan president, Hugo Chávez, yesterday vowed to push ahead with his self-styled socialist revolution after being re-elected by a landslide.

Returns from 78% of polling stations gave the incumbent 61% of the vote from Sunday's poll, a thumping endorsement for another six-year term at the helm of the world's fifth-largest oil exporter.

His challenger, Manuel Rosales, a state governor, trailed at 38% and conceded defeat, disappointing opposition militants who wanted to use sporadic irregularities as evidence of fraud by someone they describe as a fledgling dictator."

"However, in a marked softening of Washington's tone, the US undersecretary of state for Latin America, Thomas Shannon, acknowledged Venezuela's democratic expression. Speaking to the Spanish news agency Efe on a visit to London, Mr Shannon called for a thaw. "We do not want a relationship of confrontation."
http://trinicenter.com/cgi-bin/selfnews/viewnews.cgi?newsid1165321687,10692,.shtml

[Melissa G]

7. Federal panel rejects extra checks on electronic voting machines

Federal panel rejects extra checks on electronic voting machines
UPDATE: 2:59 PM, Monday, December 4, 2006
By STEPHEN MANNING Associated Press Writer



GAITHERSBURG, Md. (AP) - A federal panel on Monday rejected a recommendation that states use only voting machines whose results could be independently verified.

A committee of the National Institute of Standards and Technology voted 6-6 not to adopt the recommendation by the agency's staff, who warned in a report released last week that the paperless electronic voting machines are vulnerable to errors and fraud and cannot be made secure. Eight votes are required to pass a measure.


However, members of a NIST advisory panel said requiring voting systems that use paper or have independent audit trails could further strain state election officials who already have their own testing and security measures in place.


snip

That could lead to a scenario where you have "got an election result that is wrong and you have no evidence to show that it's wrong," said Ronald Rivest, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.


http://www.cantonrep.com/index.php?Category=23&ID=322986&subCategoryID=0

[Melissa G]

8. Why didn't they vote? Why not ask?

Why didn't they vote? Why not ask?
By Tom Blackburn

Palm Beach Post Columnist

Monday, December 04, 2006

This is not Boolean algebra or Kantian metaphysics, folks. It's simple. If you want to know whether voters are skipping a race, ask them.

A line saying "None of these candidates" would have let 18,000 voters in Sarasota County tell election officials, candidates and the whole world that they were not voting in the race for Congress, if indeed they were choosing not to vote. It's their right. Instead, for lack of that line on the screen, election officials, party officials, touch-screen vendors and ordinary citizens are hypothesizing about whether they did it.

snip
There was a 15 percent undervote - voters who made no choice - in Sarasota County, but only 2.2 percent and 3.5 percent in other counties in the district, and only 2.5 percent on the Sarasota County absentee ballots cast on paper. Why the big discrepancy?

Maybe it's something in Sarasota's water. Maybe it's something in the computer. Maybe it was the "sinister force" Al Haig suggested to explain the erasure of 18 minutes on one of the Nixon tapes. It's what Donald Rumsfeld calls a known unknown. The truth is out there, but we don't know what it is.

http://www.palmbeachpost.com/opinion/content/opinion/epaper/2006/12/04/a14a_blackburncol_1204.html

[Melissa G]

9. Growing trend: national dollars to find, defeat circuit judges

Growing trend: national dollars to find, defeat circuit judges
By Tim Hoover

McClatchy Newspapers

(MCT)

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. - If you're irritated by a local judge's decision on an issue dear to your heart, a national group opposed to "judicial activism" has a blueprint to ease your angst.

Just bankroll a campaign against that judge or a fellow jurist right before voters cast their ballots. The target doesn't have a chance to rebut the allegations before the election, and bingo, the judge is bounced from the bench.

That's exactly what happened last month to Cole County (Mo.) Circuit Judge Tom Brown.

Brown, a Democrat seeking his third six-year term, lost to a Republican challenger Nov. 7 after a media blitz against him right before the election.

http://www.ledger-enquirer.com/mld/ledgerenquirer/news/nation/16168018.htm

[Melissa G]

10. 11 charges of election fraud filed

11 charges of election fraud filed
GOP ex-director accused of forgery
By Dionne Waugh
The Journal Gazette

Foy

The Allen County Prosecutor’s Office filed charges Monday against the former executive director of the Allen County Republican Party, accusing him of forging township candidates’ signatures.

Douglas T. Foy, 41, of the 6900 block of Ordway Drive, has been charged with 11 felony counts of falsely making a declaration of candidacy or part of a declaration of candidacy between June 29 and July 3, according to court documents filed Monday. If convicted, he faces six months to three years in prison on each charge.

According to court documents, an employee of the county Election Board noticed that 11 candidates’ signatures on the financial portion of the forms did not match the signatures on the consent portion. She also compared the signatures to the candidates’ voter registration signatures.

http://www.fortwayne.com/mld/journalgazette/16167460.htm

[rumpel]

12. on DU: Evidence of 2006 Election Fraud

thanks to Time for change

amidst a great post:

My personal experience as a poll watcher on Election Day

As a poll watcher working for Pollworkers for Democracy in Maryland, I encountered a Diebold machine that was missing the tamper proof seal that was supposed to cover access to the voter access cards. Having learned from my poll watcher training that such a finding could very well be an indication of one of several different methods of electronic election fraud, I asked the chief election judges to take the machine out of service. They subsequently called the Montgomery County Board of Elections to ask for advice, and they were told to continue to use the machine. I therefore called my contact person, who sent in lawyers to talk with the Board of Elections, but to no avail. He also informed me that two other identical incidents had been reported to him that day, all three involving machine # 4 at the respective precincts.

At the end of the day machine # 4 showed the highest percent of Republican votes for major statewide offices (Governor, Senate, and Comptroller) of all the machines used in my precinct.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=364&topic_id=2859666&mesg_id=2859666

[rumpel]

13. NY Times: Utah, Using Olive Branch, Tries to Add Seat in House

By KIRK JOHNSON
Published: December 5, 2006

SALT LAKE CITY, Dec. 4 — The State of Utah and the District of Columbia are perhaps the oddest imaginable political allies in a nation of polarized partisan loyalties, alike in few things other than bankable predictability: Washington Democratic, Utah Republican.

But they share outrage that each does not have more influence in Congress, and Utah took a big step toward a marriage of convenience Monday when legislators here approved a plan that would give the state a fourth Congressional seat before the next census and Washington its first voting representation ever.

The plan for the District and Utah, a state denied a fourth seat after the 2000 census because the government did not count thousands of residents who were away serving as missionaries for the Mormon Church, faces big hurdles.

Still, the gulf of political difference between the two is the very glue that offers both of them some hope Congress will give its required approval: one of the newly created seats would almost certainly be Democratic, the other Republican, with no net change in the balance of power.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/05/us/politics/05utah.html

[rumpel]

14. NY: Port Chester is challenging the Justice Department over voter rights

By LIZ SADLER
THE JOURNAL NEWS
(Original publication: December 5, 2006)


PORT CHESTER - The village is challenging the federal government's claim that its election system illegally disenfranchises Hispanic voters, possibly paving the way for an expensive legal battle.

The Board of Trustees voted unanimously last night to notify the Department of Justice that it does not believe the village's at-large election system violates Section 2 of the federal Voting Rights Act, as the Justice Department contends.

The board reached the decision after reviewing data the Justice Department provided the village.

"The federal government's data does not credibly support their allegations and contentions," Mayor Gerald Logan said before the vote. "I speak for the entire Board of Trustees when I say that we are shocked. The federal government has been working on their case for the past three years. I can only imagine the waste of taxpayer dollars."

Anthony Piscionere, a lawyer for the village, said he had already notified the Justice Department of the board's decision and "they've indicated they will get back to us." Piscionere said he could not speculate about whether a lawsuit was imminent.

"It's very hard to say at this point," he said. "What I'd like to see is some further dialogue."

Last night's decision came in response to an April 20 letter from the Justice Department to Village Attorney Anthony Cerreto that threatened to sue the village unless it switched to district voting. The letter called for a districting plan that includes a majority Hispanic ward and concluded that "voting patterns in Port Chester are polarized by ethnicity."

http://www.thejournalnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061205/NEWS02/612050362/1018/NEWS02

[rumpel]

15. NC: 4 noncitizens register to vote

The Charlotte Observer

Posted on Tue, Dec. 05, 2006

FEDERAL BACKGROUND CHECKS
Immigration agents add election records to database searches

JESSICA ROCHA
(Raleigh) News & Observer
Immigration agents checking voter registration records last month found at least four cases of noncitizens in North Carolina they say illegally registered to vote.

Three of the people have been arrested, and officials are looking for the fourth.

Agents recently added more public records -- including voter registration -- to the list of databases they routinely check during investigation. They only do this for people already flagged for investigation, including people suspected of being here illegally, as well as legal residents seeking citizenship.

So far, about 50 people in 31 North Carolina counties have been looked into this way.

"It goes to the integrity of the entire democratic system when we have aliens registering to vote," said Tom O'Connell, resident agent at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency's Cary office.

http://www.charlotte.com/mld/observer/news/local/16165865.htm

[rumpel]

16. BradBlog : NJ Election Official Admits She Can't Prove All Votes Counted Properly

BLOGGED BY Brad ON 12/5/2006 2:41AM

PLUS: Sequoia's Spokehole Lies Again and Rush Holt Disappoints...
At a panel discussion this week at Rutgers University, an unusually frank admission was made by an Elections Official. Then, less surprisingly, a Voting Machine company spokesperson told a lie. And finally, Congressman Rush Holt (D-NJ) made a disappointing admission. All according to a report in New Jersey's Herald News.

New Jersey's Passaic County Clerk Karen Brown admitted --- out loud --- at the forum that she has no way to prove votes are counted accurately as reported by her Sequoia DRE touch-screen voting systems, since they employ proprietary software which she has no access to. Even after the election was certified, she expressed reservations:

http://www.bradblog.com/?p=3877

[rumpel]

17. FL: Voting machines a tale of the tape

The Hearld

Posted on Tue, Dec. 05, 2006

STACEY EIDSON
Herald Staff Writer
SARASOTA COUNTY - The neverending contested election continues.

State auditors will meet in Sarasota County Supervisor of Elections' office today to continue reviewing videotape searching for the cause of discrepancies that occurred during last week's testing of the county's touch-screen voting machines.

The goal is to determine whether discrepancies in Friday's mock election were due to machine malfunction or human error by state election workers conducting the test, said Sterling Ivey, director of communications for the Florida Department of State.

"There were two discrepancies that occurred during Friday's test that were not in the 13th Congressional District race," said Ivey, referring to the disputed race between Republican Vern Buchanan and Democrat Christine Jennings. "Those discrepancies were in other races on the ballot, but the auditors will review the videotapes to determine the cause of the discrepancies."

David Drury, chief of the state bureau that certifies voting machines, has scheduled the review of the videotape to start around 8:30 a.m.

Once the audit team is finished reviewing the video of Friday's test, which was performed on machines used in the Nov. 7 election, Ivey said Drury will begin examining the voting machines' software.

http://www.bradenton.com/mld/bradenton/16165060.htm

[rumpel]

18. CA: NAACP CALLS FOR PROBE INTO POSSIBLE VOTER DISCRIMINATION

CBS, San Francisco
Bay City Newswire

12/04/06 8:20 PST
RICHMOND (BCN)

The Richmond branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has asked the Contra Costa County Elections Department and the state and federal departments of justice to investigate allegations that some minorities in west Contra Costa County faced serious obstacles to casting their votes in the Nov. 7 election.

Long lines and pencil shortages were not the only problems reported in Richmond and North Richmond communities during the recent election.

The Richmond NAACP stated in a letter written Friday that some "African-American voters may have been improperly turned away from the polls at Wilson Elementary School" in Richmond.

In addition, the NAACP has reported that several polling places that were once located in African-American communities were moved to majority white areas.

"People want to vote in their own community," President-elect for the Richmond branch of the NAACP Ken Nelson said today.

The elections department consolidated and changed polling places throughout the county for the Nov. 7 election, but some of those consolidations did not make sense to people in affected communities.

http://cbs5.com/localwire/localfsnews/bcn/2006/12/04/n/HeadlineNews/VOTER-COMPLAINTS/resources_bcn_html

[Melissa G]

20. You rock , Rumpel!!! Thanks for helping out today!

:yourock: