Election Reform, Fraud & News Wed-5/16/07-I Forgot It Was Wednesday Edition

[kpete]

Election Reform, Fraud & News Wed-5/16/07-I Forgot It Was Wednesday Edition

“Be Careful What You Say”

Published May 16th, 2007 in Articles
It’s a grim day for the Republic when John Ashcroft is the last line of defense of our liberties.

I didn’t know if I should barf or scream or set my hair on fire after watching former Deputy Attorney General James Comey describe how Bush’s Chief of Staff Andrew Card and his Tonto, Alberto Gonzales, tried to pry the Constitution from Ashcroft’s cold dying hand.

Imagine the scene: Attorney General Ashcroft in intensive care with the two White House enforcers attempting to get him to put his weakening John Hancock on a wiretap program so rancid with illegality even a right-wing pinhead on painkillers could tell it was a bullet hole in the Bill of Rights.
But now let’s get beyond the weird episode of ER-meets-Survivor. With Ashcroft resisting, the President did an end-run around the AG to authorize the whacky wiretap program.

Were they really worried about terrorists, the guys who terrorized Ashcroft?
The truth is, the power they sought was not for hunting al Qaeda; after all, wiretaps on Osama’s pen-pals have never been challenged.
The key here is the contract. The US Constitution prohibits the government spying on us. So they contracted it out. No-bid billions to ChoicePoint Inc. and other “data mining” outfits.

What won’t come out in the hearings is that this was just one tentacle of a program to create an American KGB, a system of mass snooping which, in the end, didn’t catch any bad guys — but will be very useful indeed in creating the purge lists that will ensure the re-election of the regime in 2008.
- Greg Palast


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[kpete]

1. The WinVote Shuffle: Vendors, Testers, Certifiers & the Creative Use of a Hammer

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The WinVote Shuffle: Vendors, Testers, Certifiers & the Creative Use of a Hammer

By Jim March and Bev Harris

A 52-year old carpenter from Arlington Virginia expressed frustration over losing his voting rights by taking a hammer to a voting machine. The WinVote machine succumbed to no less than an Estwing Supreme 22S, "the finest framing hammer known to mankind," according to Sabo. Arlington has been forcing its citizenry to vote on machines of questionable pedigree, which count votes in secret, prohibit citizen oversight and for added fun, feature wireless capability throughout Election Day.

This Sabo vs. WinVote episode has unraveled a veritable Conga line of finger-pointing vendors, testers and certifiers, all shuffling away from answering tough questions about how this machine came to be capturing votes on Election Day at all.

Sabo's act of outrage exposes the broken foundation of current electoral processes, and if history is any indicator, such incidents will get worse.

much more at:
http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/1954/47342.html

[kpete]

2. Florida Voters Coalition and Florida Council of the Blind Announce Strategic Alliance

Florida Voters Coalition and Florida Council of the Blind Announce Strategic Alliance
By Florida Voters Coalition
May 16, 2007
All Voters Deserve Paper Ballots - Voters With Disabilities Must Not Be Left Behind

The Florida Voters Coalition (FVC) and the Florida Council of the Blind (FCB) today announced a strategic alliance calling on Florida state and county officials to provide paper ballots for all voters in all elections. “This is an historic day,” said FVC Co-Founder, Dan McCrea, “when those demanding the security of paper ballots and those demanding HAVA compliant accessibility for voters with disabilities speak with one unified voice. Listen up, state and county officials. No voter should be left behind, especially in the name of equality. That is simply absurd. It’s time to scrap your DREs and replace them with non-tabulating ballot marking devices, providing all voters paper ballots – no exceptions.”

“No exception needed or wanted for voters with disabilities,” said Paul Edwards, former President of the American Council of the Blind, speaking for the Florida Council of the Blind, the state-wide chapter. “The very purpose of HAVA Section 301 was to provide an equal opportunity to voters with disabilities. ’Equal’ doesn’t only apply to the ability to cast a private and independent ballot – something precious to blind and other disabled voters - it also applies to the ability to cast a secure ballot. Only optical scan paper ballot systems are secure in Florida today. Florida’s newly passed legislation requires paper ballots for everyone then provides an exception for voters with disabilities. Until 2012, counties can choose to provide us paperless electronic DREs. Our message today is, NO THANK YOU. We don’t want them and should not be forced to use them. Paperless electronic DRE voting systems are fit for no one.”

“For years,” McCrea said, “proponents of paperless electronic DRE voting systems have claimed that their systems are the only solution for voters with disabilities. That’s just not true. Non-tabulating ballot marking devices provide superior touchscreen, audio, tactile, sip-and-puff, and other interface facilities to allow voters with disabilities to cast a private and independent vote, and they are HAVA compliant. But unlike failed DRE systems, they allow all voters to vote on one uniform, paper-ballot-based, secure voting system. Surely that is the intent of both federal and state law.”

more at:
http://www.votetrustusa.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2449&Itemid=113

[kpete]

3. Worm attacked voter database in notorious Florida district

Worm attacked voter database in notorious Florida district
Machine in hotly contested 13th Congressional district lain low by Slammer on first day of election


May 16, 2007 (Computerworld) -- The computer database infrastructure of Sarasota County, Fla., was attacked by a notorious Internet worm on the first day of early voting during the 2006 election, which featured the now-contested U.S. House race between Democrat Christine Jennings and Republican Vern Buchanan in Florida's 13th Congressional district.

In the early afternoon hours on Monday, Oct. 23, 2006, an Internet worm slammed into the county's database system, breaching its firewall and overwriting the system's administrative password. The havoc brought the county's network -- and the electronic voting system which relies on it -- to its knees as Internet access was all but lost at voting locations for two hours that afternoon. Voters in one of the nation's most hotly contested Congressional elections were unable to cast ballots during the outage, since officials were unable to verify registration data.

Remember Slammer?

An incident report filed by the county explains the intrusion and temporary havoc wrought by the virus.

According to the two-page report (download PDF), a server on Sarasota County's database system was attacked by "a variant of the SQL Slammer worm." Once infected, as the report details, the server "sent traffic to other database servers on the Internet, and the traffic generated by the infected server rendered the firewall unavailable."

more at:
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9019560

[kpete]

4. City may have to count votes by hand; Old machines break down, new ones to arrive late

City may have to count votes by hand; Old machines break down, new ones to arrive late

By Shawn Regan , Staff Writer
Eagle-Tribune

HAVERHILL - This may be the day of the iPod, GPS and wireless Internet, but when it comes to elections, Haverhill is in danger of stepping back in time.

City officials are rushing to buy and set up new voting machines in time for the Sept. 4 special election, where voters will pick two finalists for former Congressman Martin Meehan's seat. If Haverhill cannot get the new machines in time, the city will have to use 28-year-old vote-counting machines that have been breaking down - or even revert to the age-old method of counting ballots by hand, said City Clerk Margaret Toomey.

Counting ballots by hand would require election workers to tally votes through the night and probably into the following morning, she said. Haverhill typically has more than 10,000 people vote.

Using the old machines is risky because the city has limited resources to fix them if they break down on election day, as they have in the past, Toomey said.

more at:
http://www.eagletribune.com/punewshh/local_story_135093830

[kpete]

5. PA: Officials: Electronic voting may be more costly

Officials: Electronic voting may be more costly
BY SHAWN A. HESSINGER
TAMAQUA BUREAU CHIEF
[e-mail]

05/15/2007

However, supporters of more than 400 new touch screen machines from Diebold Election Systems, a Texas-based manufacturer, used first for primary and general elections in 2006 and scheduled to be used for today’s primaries, say those costs should even out in time.

“When we did our research for this, it wasn’t just for the cost of the machines,” said county Commissioner Robert S. Carl Jr., a Republican. “We also included recurring costs like printing of ballots and for these machines the cost was dramatically less.”

He said the cost for the Diebold machines was also considerably less than other electronic alternatives.

But critics of the new system, like Democratic minority Commissioner Mantura M. Gallagher, point to the more than $1.5 million in grant funding and the hiring of 18 roving poll workers who will move from polling place to polling place today troubleshooting.

more at:
http://www.republicanherald.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=18341411&BRD=2626&PAG=461&dept_id=532624&rfi=6

[kpete]

6. MA: City may have to count votes by hand; Old machines break down, new ones to arrive late

City may have to count votes by hand; Old machines break down, new ones to arrive late

By Shawn Regan , Staff Writer
Eagle-Tribune


HAVERHILL - This may be the day of the iPod, GPS and wireless Internet, but when it comes to elections, Haverhill is in danger of stepping back in time.

City officials are rushing to buy and set up new voting machines in time for the Sept. 4 special election, where voters will pick two finalists for former Congressman Martin Meehan's seat. If Haverhill cannot get the new machines in time, the city will have to use 28-year-old vote-counting machines that have been breaking down - or even revert to the age-old method of counting ballots by hand, said City Clerk Margaret Toomey.

Counting ballots by hand would require election workers to tally votes through the night and probably into the following morning, she said. Haverhill typically has more than 10,000 people vote.

Using the old machines is risky because the city has limited resources to fix them if they break down on election day, as they have in the past, Toomey said.

more at:
http://www.eagletribune.com/punewshh/local_story_135093830

[kpete]

7. CA: Voting machines to face biggest test yet

Voting machines to face biggest test yet
By Ian Hoffman, STAFF WRITER
Article Last Updated: 05/15/2007 03:15:27 AM PDT


The nation's largest suppliers of voting equipment have handed their machines over to California elections officials for what experts say is the toughest testing that the industry has yet experienced.
But several vendors and Los Angeles County, the largest voting jurisdiction in the country and technically a voting-equipment vendor itself because of its custom-made voting system, remained in talks Monday with state elections officials about the extent of the review, what would be done with its findings and more.

Those talks are likely to delay scrutiny of California's main voting systems by teams of computer scientists, security experts and voting policy analysts until at least the end of this week.

Secretary of State Debra Bowen promised such a "top-to-bottom review" of voting systems during her campaign for office. The review that she has ordered touches on reliability, accuracy and ballot privacy, among other values.

But local elections officials and voting-equipment suppliers have worried that the review's heavy emphasis on security would work against highly computerized touchscreen voting machines — which Bowen and her supporters lambasted on the campaign trail — as well as older systems such as Los Angeles County's that tally votes on a hulking mainframe computer.

more at:
http://origin.insidebayarea.com/dailyreview/localnews/ci_5899665

[kpete]

8. NV: Dean Heller – Governor of Nevada?

Dean Heller – Governor of Nevada?

Dean Heller has said he wants to be the next Governor of Nevada. See "Heller says he'll eventually run for governor."

Nevada Mojo Rising posts about Heller and the Sequoia and Diebold voting machines while he was Secretary of State of Nevada. He was touting "paper trails" statewide. "In reality, more than 50% of the Sequoia voting machines that resided in the Las Vegas region were 10 year old Sequoias that didn't have printer paper trails attached to them. Sequoia still owns the codes/software that counts the vote on more than 50% of the machines in this state with the exception of Washoe County who was bribed to give up their Diebolds with the Sequoia software." wrote Mojo.

more at:
http://nyenevada.blogspot.com/2007/05/dean-heller-governor-of-nevada.html

[FogerRox]

9. The Rove Margin

Definition: The Rove Margin Hotlist
by DanK Is Back
Wed May 16, 2007 at 07:04:07 PM EDT

I've been using the term "Rove margin" in a number of comments now, and one Kossak (Oxon) liked it so much he asked me to define in a diary (and a hat tip to you!).

Rove Margin (n.): A number such that, if a GOP candidate's likely votes are greater than it, but less than 50%, it is feasible to steal the remaining votes needed to win. A Rove Margin depends on the electorate's credulity, and therefore can only be approximated.

* DanK Is Back's diary :: ::
*

Like the Rove Margin, this diary is subjective. So far as I know, no one has ever admitted to using the concept behind the Rove Margin - not surprisingly, since it describes a federal felony. I'm offering a speculative explanation for what we've been seeing in the past 6 years, and especially as it's being uncovered now. Bear with me.

The usual rule in high-level politics is to run to the extreme in the primary and then run to the center in the general. This rule is based in part on the understanding that one needs a reasonably broad consensus in order to govern effectively.




http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/5/16/18834/9581

xposted here

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=203&topic_id=472628&mesg_id=472628

[kpete]

10. NYT EDITORIAL: The Unkept Promise on Voting

Editorial
The Unkept Promise on Voting
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Published: May 16, 2007
Congress has done a terrible job of regulating electronic voting: It allowed A.T.M.-style voting machines to proliferate without requiring them to produce a paper trail that can be audited to ensure that the results are accurate. That has meant wasted time and money for the states, confusion for voters, and questionable election results. Fortunately, the nation’s delinquent lawmakers have a chance to set things right — through a bill introduced by Representative Rush Holt, Democrat of New Jersey, that would finally impose a paper trail requirement. There are some details that need fine-tuning, but Congress should move quickly to pass it.

After the 2000 election debacle, Congress gave the states large grants to replace faulty voting machines, including the kind that produced hanging chads. But in too many cases, states and localities rushed to buy electronic voting machines that do not produce paper records. Voters have to trust the numbers they spit out on election night, but the numbers cannot be independently verified, and that is unacceptable.

Aside from intentional vote theft — which is not hard to do on paperless electronic voting machines — glitches are all too common in these machines. A disturbing one that keeps occurring is “vote flipping,” in which machines record a vote for one candidate as a vote for his or her opponent.

While Congress looked the other way, many states responded to popular demand and imposed their own paper trail requirements. More than half, including such large ones as California, New York and Ohio, have adopted this critical reform. But some still have not, which means that a presidential election could be decided by votes cast on paperless electronic voting machines.

more at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/16/opinion/16wed1.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

[kpete]

11. The Voter Fraud Fraud

Primary sources exposed and explained.
The Voter Fraud Fraud
Bonnie Goldstein

Posted Tuesday, May 15, 2007, at 10:46 PM ET

When allegations surfaced of voter fraud or voter suppression in key states in the 2004 presidential election, the federal Election Assistance Commission ordered a study to "determine the quantity and quality of vote fraud and voter intimidation on a national scale."

Two consultants, one Republican (Job Serebrov) and one Democrat (Tova Wang), were hired to draw up a preliminary overview based on interviews, news stories, applicable case law, government reports, position papers from advocacy groups, and academic studies. In their "predecisional" draft (excerpted below and on the following four pages) Serebrov and Wang reported that "the only interviewee who believe that polling place fraud is widespread" was Jason Torchinsky of the American Center for Voting Rights, a conservative organization that's been accused of fronting for the GOP. (It's Republicans who typically complain about voter fraud, because the allegations are usually directed at minority and low-income voters who tend to vote Democratic.) Most other interviewees, though not unanimous, showed "widespread ... agreement that there is little polling place fraud" (Page 4). Nonetheless, the draft report observed, the Justice Department's public integrity section is pursuing voter fraud cases energetically: "While the number of election fraud related complaints have not gone up since 2002 … the number of indictments the section is pursuing" against "alien voters, felon voters, and double voters" has risen substantially (Page 5).

Serebrov and Wang submitted their initial findings to be "vetted and edited" by an Election Assistance Commission working group. That's when the hackwork began.

The final report asserts, falsely, that "there is a great deal of debate on the pervasiveness of fraud in elections." Wang, the Democrat, has objected in writing that this and other revisions were made "without explanation or discussion." A gag order in the original contract forbids her to discuss the matter. Serebrov, the Republican, isn't happy either. The New York Times reported (subscription required) that he complained to a staffer for the Election Assistance Commission that neither consultant "was willing to conform results political expediency," and that Serebrov "could care less that the results are not what the more conservative members of my party wanted.''

http://www.slate.com/id/2166287/entry/0/

[kpete]

12. CA: SF Ballots May Have to be Hand Counted Come November

Wednesday, 16 May 2007 8:36AM

SF Ballots May Have to be Hand Counted Come November


SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS) -- San Francisco’s Department of Elections is preparing for the very likely possibility that votes will have to be hand counted this November, after learning the city’s voting machines do not meet new federal election standards.

Elections Director John Arntz said the department received a letter from the secretary of state informing them that voting machines needed to go through a new certification process for November. He added that there is no way the city’s machines will qualify under the new rules.

"We're going to have to get a very large space for a lot of people for many days to go through all the ballots in San Francisco and hand tally the election," said Arntz.

A hand count would cost the city an extra $1 million and delay the outcome of the election for days, if not weeks, according to Arntz.

http://www.kcbs.com/pages/465653.php?contentType=4&contentId=507690

[kpete]

13. All signs point to a continuing, concentrated GOP campaign to curtail voting rights

All signs point to a continuing, concentrated GOP campaign to curtail voting rights, to intimidate impoverished and elderly citizens, to suppress voter turnout in minority neighborhoods that would lean Democratic, to take control of who gets to vote. Hence the upswing in punitive state voter ID laws, attempts to restrict registration, purge voter rolls, and other legislation allegedly aimed at quashing illegal voting. And the U.S. attorney firings.

"We have, as you know, an enormous and growing problem with elections in certain parts of America today," Rove told the Republican National Lawyers Association last spring. "We are, in some parts of the country, I'm afraid to say, beginning to look like we have elections like those run in countries where the guys in charge are, you know, colonels in mirrored sunglasses."

Rove and his gang would do well to look at the reflection in those sunglasses to see who the real perpetrators of fraud are. Hey, Karl, is cheating the only way left to achieve your "permanent majority?"

more at:
http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/contributors/1013

[Melissa G]

14. Off to greatest with you! Vote This up folks!