Scoop Coverage Indecision 2012: NZT - 11.30am - Stealing Ohio? Reasons to be Paranoid.

So for this election Scoop's political editor Gordon Campbell and I are live blogging the election at this link. The following update is from Gordon C. The Exit Poll data I have just seen with 73% White Vote turnout and good Black and Latino turnout looks good for Obama in theory.... Gordon is a very experienced watcher of US elections and this time it is interesting to see that he is far warmer to the impact of voter caging and electoral fraud.

On the edge of my seat.




http://gordoncampbell.scoop.co.nz/2012/11/07/blogging-us-election-day-2012/

Update: 11.30am

Stealing Ohio? Reasons to be Paranoid.

Vote suppression among poor, black and Latino voters and tampering with the voting machines is the dark side of Election Day, USA. The latest example? Last Friday, just one working day before the election, Ohio’s secretary of state Jon Husted (who is a Republican) announced a change to the voter ID rules, thereby placing the onus onto voters of identifying on their ballot the type of voter ID they used in casting a provisional ballot. This is despite the clear wording under Ohio state law that this onus rests with the poll workers on election day.As one veteran Ohio poll observer told the Cleveland Plain Dealer:

I think we would find provisional ballots are disporportionally more common in poorer precincts. For financially stable voters, which in Ohio is middle-class and suburban populations that are statistically more likely to vote Republican, complying to this directive is both far less likely to even come up, and as some are saying, no big deal to comply to. But in the urban precincts where I have observed over three federal elections, use of, and confusion about, the correct use of provisional ballots was very common; and the poll workers were not clear or informed about how to use them correctly. The net effect of this directive is to create additional barriers to vote for poor, urban citizens. In that regard, it is like the poll taxes of old, which were relatively insignificant to white voters, but punitive to poorer blacks.

Husted’s gambit will be challenged in an Ohio court tomorrow morning, the day after the election. So if the overall result is close, this will be the opening shot in the recount/litigation battle. Even more alarmingly, Husted has also been the central player in the decision to place 39 “experimental” (and as yet, unauthorized) software patches into the electronic voting machines in 39 counties across Ohio. This story is so disturbing it should be read in full.

http://www.salon.com/2012/11/05/ohio_republicans_sneak_risky_software_onto_voting_machines/

Sample extract:

…Questions about a last-minute secret software patch to be used across multiple counties in Ohio, one that now resides on vote tabulation systems and is said to produce easily modifiable text files to be uploaded to a very partisan secretary of state’s Election Night Reporting System, certainly have a familiar, and to some, a chilling ring just over 24 hours before the next presidential election could well be decided in the Buckeye State.

As the Free Press notes, “Government reports such as Ohio’s Everest study [PDF] [the landmark analysis of the state's electronic voting systems by world class academic and corporate computer science and security experts, commissioned by Husted's Democratic predecessor Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner] document that any single change to the system could corrupt the whole voting process.”

Late on Sunday, in a new update from Bello and Fitrakis at the Free Press, the pair describe that “The potential federal illegality of this software has been hidden from public scrutiny by the Secretary of State’s Election Counsel Brandi Seske.” They report that a Sept. 29 memo from Seske describes “de minimis changes” in the ES&S software that allowed for use of the software updates without state testing. “De minimis,” they explain, “is a legal term for minute.”

And yet, they go on to cite a memo from the U.S. Elections Assistance Commission, the body tasked with certifying electronic voting and tabulation systems at the federal level, dated February 8, 2012 entitled “Software and Firmware modifications are not de minimis changes.”

“Ohio election law provides for experimental equipment only in a limited number of precincts per county,” they report. “Installing uncertified and untested software on central tabulation equipment essentially affects every single precinct in a given county.”
“The method of execution chosen,” for this effort, notes March in his affidavit for the Fitrakis/Arnebeck injunction lawsuit, “is unspeakably stupid, excessively complex and insanely risky. In medical terms it is the equivalent of doing open heart surgery as part of a method of removing somebody’s hemorrhoids. Whoever came up with this idea is either the dumbest Information Technology ‘professional’ in the US or has criminal intent against the Ohio election process.”

Not what the Founding Fathers had in mind.

(Back in 20 minutes.)