Category Archives: Aftermath Election 2002

Be A Poll Worker In Your Town

One issue that seems to arise every election is a shortage of poll workers. Lack of poll workers seems to translate into lack of ballots being distributed and/or counted properly and, ultimately, voter disenfranchisement is the result.
After the 2002 Election, I was determined to be more involved in this year’s election by participating as a Poll Worker. I encourage you to do the same.
Also, if you speak another language besides English, you could be a big help as an interpreter.
I did a search on “poll workers san francisco” and found my local Department of Elections. The page gave me a phone number to call for more information. The recording at the number said that first-timers should come by City Hall in person in August. So that’s what I’ll do.

Online Policy Group vs. Diebold Case Heard Yesterday


Civil rights group fears effect of e-voting company’s threats

By Rachel Konrad for the Associated Press.

Cindy Cohn, legal director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, argued in federal court Monday that North Canton, Ohio-based Diebold Inc. should be barred from sending cease-and-desist letters to activists, who are publishing links to leaked documents about alleged security blunders at one of the nation’s biggest e-voting companies.
Judge Jeremy Fogel is expected to issue a ruling as early as this week.
Free speech advocates at San Francisco-based EFF compare the case to the groundbreaking Pentagon Papers lawsuit. The secret government study of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War was leaked to The New York Times, sparking a 1971 Supreme Court battle pitting the government against the media.
“I’m not making a judgment about which is more important, Vietnam policy or the future of voting in a democracy,” Cohn said after the hearing in federal court in San Jose. “But this is important to the public debate … and you can’t squelch it.”
Computer programmers, ISPs and students at least 20 universities, including the University of California, Berkeley, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, received cease-and-desist letters. Many removed links to Diebold documents, but some – including San Francisco-based ISP Online Policy Group – refused, and sued Diebold.
They say the leaked documents raise serious security questions about Diebold, which controls 50,000 touch-screen voting terminals nationwide. They argue they have a right to publish the data under the “fair use” exception of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
OPG, which hosts at least 1,000 Web sites of nonprofit groups and individuals on 120 computer servers, also argues that the volunteer organization cannot be responsible for every link of every client.

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Some Interesting Slashdot Threads On The Diebold Voting Machine Scandal


Diebold Audit Released, BlackBoxVoting.Org Shut Down

“The State of Maryland requested an audit of the Diebold electronic voting system by SAIC, after a report released by Johns Hopkins University and Rice Researchers (disclaimer: I’m one of Dr Rubin’s students) noted several security issues . A condensed, from 200 to 40 pages, and censored version of the report has been released online (PDF link). The report notes that ‘SAIC has identified several high-risk vulnerabilities that, if exploited, could have significant impact upon the AccuVote-TS voting system operation.'” However, Diebold says Maryland are moving forward with installation with “new security features” included, and elsewhere, Badgerman points out “Diebold has shut down blackboxvoting.org , apparently with copyright claims made to their ISP. But you can still go to the blackboxvoting.com site…”

From Tristero: On Democracy Now Bev Harris of BlackBoxVoting fame, disclosed (near the end of the transcript) that in the compromised 1.8Gigs off Diebold’s FTP site they uncovered “an actual election file containing actual votes on election day from San Luis Obispo County, California”. Problem is, the date stamp was 3:31pm – during voting hours! The Diebold system uses a wireless network card. Worse: “So that means if they can pull the information in, they can also send information back into those machines.
(Thanks, Tristero.)

Diebold CEO Declares That He’s “Committed To Helping Ohio Deliver Its Electoral Votes To The President Next Year”

Voting machine controversy
By Julie Carr Smyth for the Plain Dealer Bureau.

The head of a company vying to sell voting machines in Ohio told Republicans in a recent fund-raising letter that he is “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.”
The Aug. 14 letter from Walden O’Dell, chief executive of Diebold Inc. – who has become active in the re-election effort of President Bush – prompted Democrats this week to question the propriety of allowing O’Dell’s company to calculate votes in the 2004 presidential election.
O’Dell attended a strategy pow-wow with wealthy Bush benefactors – known as Rangers and Pioneers – at the president’s Crawford, Texas, ranch earlier this month. The next week, he penned invitations to a $1,000-a-plate fund-raiser to benefit the Ohio Republican Party’s federal campaign fund – partially benefiting Bush – at his mansion in the Columbus suburb of Upper Arlington.
The letter went out the day before Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, also a Republican, was set to qualify Diebold as one of three firms eligible to sell upgraded electronic voting machines to Ohio counties in time for the 2004 election.
Blackwell’s announcement is still in limbo because of a court challenge over the fairness of the selection process by a disqualified bidder, Sequoia Voting Systems.

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Awesome Animation On How Katherine Harris Rigged The Already-Faulty Voting Purge Lists In Florida From 8,000 to 58,000 Voters

…with a little help from Florida’s 1998 Voter Reform Law.
Here’s an awesome video/animation from Eric Blumrich w/music from Grand Theft Auto:
Grand Theft America
Time’s ticking away guys, we’ve got to do something or they’re just going to do it again in 2004.
This animation was based on findings in Greg Palast‘s report:

Theft Of The Presidency
.
There’s real video of it available too.
(Thanks, Jason)

Experts Explain The Trouble With Computer Voting: No Receipts, Nothing To Recount

It’s very important to keep our eye on the prize guys: a new democratically-elected President in 2004.
That may mean the end of computer voting in some areas — NOT its introduction into new jurisdictions.
Unless these machines are required to be open source, so that third parties could verify their numbers. I believe open source voting machines are the only way that computer voting can move forward towards producing any kind of reliable results. What do you guys think?
New Voting Systems Assailed — Computer Experts Cite Fraud Potential
By Dan Keating for the Washington Post.

Critics of such systems say that they are vulnerable to tampering, to human error and to computer malfunctions — and that they lack the most obvious protection, a separate, paper receipt that a voter can confirm after voting and that can be recounted if problems are suspected.
Officials who have worked with touch-screen systems say these concerns are unfounded and, in certain cases, somewhat paranoid.
David Dill, the Stanford University professor of computer science who launched the petition drive, said, “What people have learned repeatedly, the hard way, is that the prudent practice — if you want to escape with your data intact — is what other people would perceive as paranoia.”
Other computer scientists, including Rebecca Mercuri of Bryn Mawr College, say that problems are so likely that they are virtually guaranteed to occur — and already have.
Mercuri, who has studied voting security for more than a decade, points to a November 2000 election in South Brunswick, N.J., in which touch-screen equipment manufactured by Sequoia Voting Systems was used.
In a race in which voters could pick two candidates from a pair of Republicans and a pair of Democrats, one machine recorded a vote pattern that was out of sync with the pattern recorded elsewhere — no votes whatsoever for one Republican and one Democrat. Sequoia said at the time that no votes were lost — they were just never registered. Local officials said it didn’t matter whether the fault was the voters’ or the machine’s, the expected votes were gone.
In October, election officials in Raleigh, N.C., discovered that early voters had to try several times to record their votes on iVotronic touch screens from Election Systems and Software. Told of the problems, officials compared the number of voters to the number of votes counted and realized that 294 votes had apparently been lost.
When Georgia debuted 22,000 Diebold touch screens last fall, some people touched one candidate’s name on the screen and saw another candidate’s name appear as their choice. Voters who were paying attention had a chance to correct the error before finalizing their vote, but those who weren’t did not.
Chris Rigall, spokesman for the secretary of state’s office, said that the machines were quickly replaced, but that there was no way of knowing how many votes were incorrectly counted.
In September in Florida, Miami-Dade and Broward counties had a different kind of vote loss with ES&S touch-screen equipment: At the end of the day, precincts that reported hundreds of voters also listed virtually no votes counted. In that case, technicians were able to retrieve the votes from the machines.
“If the only way you know that it’s working incorrectly is when there’s four votes instead of 1,200 votes, then how do you know that if it’s 1,100 votes instead of 1,200 votes? You’ll never know,” said Mercuri.
Because humans are imperfect and computers are complicated, said Ben Bederson, a professor of computer science at the University of Maryland, mistakes will always be made. With no backup to test, the scientists say, mistakes will go undetected.
“I’m not concerned about elections that are a mess,” Dill said. “I’m concerned about elections that appear to go smoothly, and no one knows that it was all messed up inside the machine.”
…if customers want receipts, he said, his company will supply them. And Williams said receipts may have a place in the system. “The advantage of a hard piece of paper — one that a voter would hold in his hand and say, ‘That is who I voted for’ — that is psychological, and there certainly is value to that. We need public confidence in our elections,” he said.
Similarly, the official overseeing Maryland’s program would accept paper if it were available.
“I’ve been doing voting systems for 15 years,” Torre said. “I don’t care if they give voters a piece of paper or not. If they come out with a receipt, that’s fine. Maybe with the momentum out of California, we’ll have receipts before too long.”

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More On Senator Hagel’s “Nebraska Problem”

The Nebraska Problem
Let’s follow the trail:
–>Senator Hagel –>McCarthy Group –>ES & S Voting Machines
or perhaps
–>Senator Hagel’s $$$ and influence
–>McCarthy Group
–>ES & S Voting Machines
(That were then used to elect Senator Hagle.)
There’s a pretty clear cut conflict of interest here.
Does anyone care? What can we even do? (Dammit!)

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A Bit About Voter Fraud From The Founder Of Vote.org

U.S. vote fraud and some solutions
By Evan Ravitz, founder, Vote.org.

When I directed Boulder, Colorado’s Voting by Phone ballot initiative campaign in 1993 I learned many unnerving things about existing voting procedures. The problems revealed in Florida are just the beginning:
1. The Voter News Service (formerly News Election Service) -which supplies ALL election-eve numbers on national and Congressional races- is a private business of the TV networks, The New York Times, the Washington Post and the Associated Press. If you ask them how they count votes and predict outcomes they say that’s proprietary information! They have no web site or other public profile.
2. Most votes in America are counted by computer programs which are also proprietary secrets. Not even election officials are allowed to inspect these programs (the “source code”) to verify their accuracy. Election officials can test the programs (using “test decks”) but any clever programmer can write a program which passes tests but falsifies the election.
3. In most jurisdictions, identification for voting is on the honor system. Signatures, if taken, are not compared to your signature on file in most places unless you are “challenged” by election judges or poll watchers, a rare event. When this system started hundreds of years ago, the election judges or poll watchers knew most everyone in their precincts. In modern America, this is rarely true.
4. Mail or absentee ballots are often delivered to old addresses, and the USPS is not supposed to forward them. Whoever gets one could fill it out in the rightful voter’s name. This is discussed in the document “Florida Voter Fraud Issues” from the Florida Department Of Law Enforcement. In student and other high-turnover areas, this problem is rife.
5. In states with “early” voting, there is no system to prevent people from voting early at an elections office and then also voting at their precinct.

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Why Your Vote Won’t Matter

This was actually posted before the last election.

Why Your Vote Won’t Matter

By John Kaminski for Rense.com.

Your vote does not matter. It might not even be counted, assuming you’re allowed to vote to begin with. In fact, if you’re black, and the first four letters of your last name match the first four letters on that famously fabricated list of Florida felons, you definitely won’t be voting at all, because the state of Florida hasn’t bothered to fix its mistakes from the last election ” the same problems that allowed George W. Bush to slither into the White House like the rapine reptilian he is are still in force…
Did you know that Republicans used private planes from Enron Corp. and Halliburton Co., the firm headed by Dick Cheney that also practiced phony accounting fraud, to crisscross the state and block the counting of Florida votes? This time around in the Florida primary, misleading fliers were circulated again, saying that some people should vote on a day after Nov. 5. Similar fliers were circulated in Florida before the 2000 election, which some say confused some voters there. I bet they’d like to hire Arthur Andersen to audit Florida’s elections system…
Like the voting machines. Who provides them, and who operates them?
Most recently, a former Florida secretary of state profited by being a lobbyist for both the state’s counties and the company that sold some of them touch-screen voting machines used in last month’s botched primary election. Sandra Mortham, who served as the state’s top elections official from 1995 to 1999, is a lobbyist for both Election Systems & Software and the Florida Association of Counties, which exclusively endorsed the company’s touchscreen machines in return for a commission… Mortham received a commission from ES&S for every county that bought its touch-screen machines. The exact terms have not been disclosed… Mortham is of course a Republican who before a scandal brought her down was going to be Jeb Bush’s running mate in Florida.
And of course, there is the current problem in Nebraska. Look at the documents, see the loop: ES&S, according to the Nebraska Elections Division, is the ONLY vote-counting company certified to sell machines in Nebraska. ES&S counts 80 percent of the votes; the remaining 20 percent are hand counts.
ES&S is owned by the McCarthy Group; Michael McCarthy runs the McCarthy Group; Michael McCarthy is the Campaign Treasurer for Republican Senator Chuck Hagel; The FEC designates Michael McCarthy as a Primary Campaign Committee for Candidate Chuck Hagel; and Chuck Hagel’s financials list the McCarthy Group as an Asset, with his investment valued at $1-$5 million.
Hagel came to Omaha from Washington, where he worked with the first George Bush Administration. In news articles by the Omaha World-Herald, Hagel said he was coming to Omaha to become president and partner in the McCarthy Group and Chairman of American Information Systems.
In his congressional bio he is said to have come to Omaha “to prepare for running for office.” The first thing he did was run American Information Systems, a vote-counting company. Hagel was the first Republican in 24 years to win a Nebraska senatorial campaign. He continues to disclose an investment of $1-5 million in the McCarthy Group, but he does not identify the underlying assets (ES&S). His disclosure documents omit any mention of American Information Systems at all. John Gottschalk has been reported as a director for both the World-Herald Company Inc. (concentrating on the non-newspaper subsidiaries) and ES&S. He was also involved with Senator Hagel in the World USO, has relationships with James Baker; he is listed as a USO pal of George W. Bush. Hmm, there’s that certain odor again.

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