The Pennsylvania Primary: Democracy of the Gods

[kster]

BLOGGED BY Brad Friedman ON 4/21/2008

Tuesday's Election Will be 'Unrecountable, Unverifiable, and Unauditable'...

On Tuesday night, you will be told who the winner of the Pennsylvania Primary is. You will accept it. You will have no choice. No matter who the winner really is. Or isn't.

This Tuesday's crucial contest will be primarily run on 100% faith-based, touch-screen e-voting machines across the state. There will be no way to determine after the election whether the computers have accurately recorded, or not, the intent of those voters who voted on them. As VerifiedVoting.org summarizes the crucial contest, it "will be essentially unrecountable, unverifiable, and unauditable."

Most of the votes, more than 85%, will be cast on touch-screen systems which do note provide so-called "Voter Verified Paper Audit Trails" (VVPATs), as their use has been found unconstitutional in the state, since its been determined, accurately, that ballot secrecy cannot be guaranteed when using such paper trail systems. Not that it matters.

With or without a so-called "paper trail" printer, all touch-screen voting machines are equally unverifiable and antithetical to American democracy. Period.

So, as with South Carolina's primary, so so long ago, and other states since, whatever the officials tell you at the end of the election, is what you, and we, will have to accept. Whether votes are counted accurately is completely out of anybody's hands at this point. It's strictly Democracy of the Gods...



http://www.bradblog.com/?p=5916

[Wilms]

1. Key Questions for Key States - Pennsylvania

Key Questions for Key States

by Nathan Cemenska
Date of publication: April 15, 2008

Pennsylvania’s April 22nd primary will be important to determining the Democratic nominee for President, and many analysts believe that Pennsylvania will be important to determining the result of the general election as well. While its 2004 and 2006 federal elections went fairly smoothly, Pennsylvania does suffer from some vulnerabilities that could make the result of the 2008 election less clear.

The state suffers from a history of absentee ballot fraud that could corrupt the result of a close election and lead to litigation. It also suffers from a lack of central control that allows local officials to follow inconsistent procedures, heightening the likelihood of disenfranchisement flowing from administrative error. Finally, Pennsylvania relies heavily on controversial touchscreen voting machines that have been attacked as unreliable.

But before discussing these issues in depth, it is appropriate to give the reader some background with the following nine-topic digest of the state’s election administration system.

snip

Inside
Institutional arrangements 2
Voter registration/statewide database 2
Challenges to voter eligibility 3
Provisional voting 4
Convenience Voting 4
Voting technology 5
Polling place procedures 5
Ballot Security 6
Post-election processes 7
Challenges and Scenarios 8
Challenge #1: Combating Absentee Ballot Fraud 8
Challenge #2: Achieving uniformity 11
Challenge #3: Conducting touchscreen elections without a paper trail. 14
Endnotes 17

snip

pdf: http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/electionlaw/docs/50Q_for_PA.pdf

[Kurovski]

2. K&R. (nt)

[Stevepol]

3. 85% faith-based vote counting, typical of the US electoral system.

Here's a run-down from Vote Trust

Pennsylvania's Primary: Paperless and Unverifiable
By Verified Voting Foundation
April 15, 2008
Pennsylvania's Presidential primary on April 22 will be essentially unrecountable, unverifiable, and unauditable - an irony, because state law requires manual audits of a statistical sample of ballots cast in elections.

Over 85% of Pennsylvania's voters live in counties in which paperless electronic voting is the only method of voting at the polling place. Absentee voting requires an excuse in Pennsylvania, and there is no early voting period, so the polling-place equipment will tabulate the vast majority of the votes in the primary. Pennsylvania's Secretary of State has judged that reel-to-reel paper trail printers compromise voter privacy, and none of Pennsylvania's direct-recording electronic (DRE) systems offer voter-verifiable paper records.

Here is a summary of the voting systems used in Pennsylvania:


According to the Secretary of State's most current voter registration statistics, Pennsylvania has 8,326,564 registered voters. 7,064,129 voters are registered in the 51 counties in which paperless electronic voting is the only method of voting at the polling places.
Of the 51 counties which use paperless machines, 25 use the paperless ES&S iVotronic touch screen machine as the principal voting system. These counties have over 2.6 million registered voters, comprising 32% of the registered voters in the state. After the state of Ohio's EVEREST voting system review was published, Edward Felten, head of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University, wrote that the iVotronic is "too risky to use in elections."
16 counties, with over 900,000 registered voters, use the Diebold/Premier TSx touch screen as the voting system. California Secretary of State Debra Bowen disallowed the TSx for use as a primary voting system for multiple and grave security vulnerabilities, as well as threats to voter privacy. See Secretary Bowen's withdrawal of approval here, and the full reports of the review teams.
6 counties, with over 2.3 million voters, use the push-button Shouptronic voting machine.

750,000 voters will use the Sequoia Advantage, which apparently miscounted party turnout New Jersey's February 5 primary. New Jersey county election officials called for an independent investigation of the machine discrepancy. 104,000 voters in York County use the Sequoia AVC Edge, also disallowed for use as a primary system in California.

82,000 voters in Blair County will use the Hart Intercivic eSlate as the primary system. The eSlate was also found vulnerable in the EVEREST (p. 228-230) and the California top-to-bottom review.
Just under 1.2 million voters live in counties in which optically scanned paper ballots are the primary voting system. 740,000 voters live in four counties which use blended systems, with DREs used for accessible voting systems. 420,000 voters live in the 12 counties that use optical scan systems with a ballot-marking device for accessibility.

Link:

http://www.votetrustusa.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2817&Itemid=113

[KaryninMiami]

4. keep this kicked please- it's very important!!!