BBV - Rep. Jan Schakowsky asks for help with ACTION ITEMS for Congress.

I had an excellent meeting with Jan Schakowsky today. She fully understands the scope of the problem, from Diebold's intentional hacking holes to the Diebold-ES&S connection to the R Doug/NASED/Shawn Southworth certification issue.

She's going back to DC tomorrow with 2 CD's, Eloriel's superb 50-page background report, the internal Diebold memos,and the "support" manual Jim March posted. She'll be meeting with Steny Hoyer, who has staff assigned to the voting machine issue tomorrow and will also talk with McDermott then. There's a good chance that we'll have to opportunity to brief Congress in the near future. (She asked if we'd be available to come to DC!)

Her chief of staff is getting me an appointment with Senator Durbin or a ranking member of his staff at Jan's request. Hopefully that will happen very soon.

Jan requested a list of action items. What do we want from Congress and what can the members do to move this along? I'm phrasing this as a two-parter because I'm hoping we can get help from some of the members in bringing the ACLU or other high-powered legal help in quickly, and members of Congress could help push that separately from investigative/legislative action.

BBV'ers ... please post excactly what steps you think Congress/our representatives need to take NOW. I'd like to turn this around to Schakowsky via email tomorrow and can get it to her via her chief of staff for her immediate attention.

Put on your thinking caps and start posting, please. What steps should they be taking. Hopefully, we'll be able to pull together a list of 8-10 steps/action items tonight.

Thanks!
hedda

Please post your suggestions either here or at http://www.blackboxvoting.org/blackboxvotingcgi/dcforum/dcboard.cgi?az=show_thread&om=71&forum=DCForumID15

most excellent news...

Get back up there!!! Kick...

This is the best news I've heard all day.

1. Get Rush Holt's bill out of committee and voted on.

2. Get a Senate version of Rush Holt's bill written and voted on.

3. Get federal government control of the "certifying" agencies. Take certification out of corporate hands and into the hands of competent computer scientists at our best colleges.

4. Get a law passed requiring an open source software project for all electronic voting equipment, led by computer scientists at our best colleges.

5. Add a declaration of "counting the votes" as a state responsibility to the Rush Holt legislation. Don't continue to allow corporate America to count the vote of it's citizens.

6. Change FEC standards from voluntary to a requirement.

See post #14...that's the committee where the Holt bill (H.R. 2239) is currently awaiting action. If we can get this out of committee, I bet we can pass it.

the Voter Verifid Paper Ballot and Robust Auditing Procedures?

Great, let's get it out there but let's also get the corrections/additions made so that the correct content can be voted on.

Yeaaay! Best news I've had in a long time.

and if we amend it, it goes back to committee.

It hasn't gone to the floor yet and we'll have to push very hard to get it there. Also, amendments can be offered on the floor in any case, so there's really no problem with refining the bill that I can see.

but my (poorly made) point was that if we start amending it BEFORE it gets to the floor, we give them an excuse to send it BACK to committee and bury the bill.

Our best bet is to get it out of committee by any means necessary and then offer amendments when it's on the floor.

I think we all know "the powers that be" will do anything they can to bury this bill in committee. And if it doesn't pass the House AND Senate, it will end up back in committee again.

There are many steps to go before this legislation is voted on, much less signed into law and at each one powerful lobbyists will be trying to bury it.

7. A requirement that any voting-machine hardware be made to an open standard.

8. A verification suite that can be run by anyone to test the integrity of each machine before it's locked down and voting starts.

9. A human-and-computer-readable, take-home copy of each vote, so that if there's any question people can be called back and their 'receipts' tallied.

And one of the biggest arguments is the votes shouldn't leave the polling place.

Voter-verified paper ballots, read and confirmed by the voter, and dropped in a ballot box by the voter or machine.

You can't call everyone back with their slip of paper to recount an election and the validation issues of the paper would go through the roof!

That is exactly the problem with VoteHere's so-called "solution."
Only that piece of paper has a code on it you have to match to a list somewhere.

Nope, ballots at the polling place and counted there, too, if need be. In fact, a certain percentage of paper ballot should always be hand counted to verify that the computer program isn't getting "creative."

their list of talking points about how the Repugs have tried to steal elections:
2000
Texas,
Colorado,
California,
Ohio

and ....control of the voting machines without paper trail backup

Did something already happen in Ohio?

For once, set an example when a voting company breaks the law:

Get an injunction to pull the plug on Diebold. Decertify it.

Publicly developed, fully available and open software and hardware. No proprietary products allowed.

Also, paper auditing/trail.

I think these the most important.

On edit: how could I forget...AWESOME!!!

It would be nice if congress, as the elected representatives of American citizens, appealed the Florida Federal Court decision making the computer code of vote counting systems a trade secret and thus unavailable for any inspection or verification by elected representatives or officials on behalf of voters. Take away that prop so election officials can inspect the source code, pass the Holt bill with an amendment to make the handcout required in 5-10 percent of the precincts as opposed to one half of one percent, and you would have a pretty solid foundation for the reform needed.

Gordon25

...Well done! Excellent job. You obviously did a damn good briefing. We're going to win this thing, yet.

Gordon25

I have found my action heroes right here at DU.

:kick:

A paper trail must be mandatory. Otherwise we have no way to check who cheated. If the company cannot figure out a way to do a paper trail then they should go out of business for either being too stupid or for trying to steal the election. Why else would idiot boy be so cocky if he weren't sure it was all taken care of.

He knows the fix is in.

I don't know what you people are talking about most of the time, but Jan is a fighter. Good going.

Bob Ney (R-OH)
Vernon Ehlers (R-MI)
John Mica (R-FL)
John Linder (R-GA)
John Doolittle (R-CA)
Tom Reynolds (R-NY)

John Larson (D-CT)
Juanita Millender-McDonald (D-CA)
Bob Brady (D-PA)


These are the members of the House Administration committee, which has jurisdiction over elections and election software.

You'll remember Bob Ney (R-Eastern Ohio) from his attempt to defeat Shays-Meehan. However, he's the chairman and it will be almost impossible to pass BBV reform without his support.

IMHO the most likely other committee Repuke to vote our way is Vern Ehlers (R-Grand Rapids)...he's a research physicist (like Holt) and might be interested in our arguments.

If we can get the three committee Dems, Ehlers, and Ney on board, we have enough votes to report from committee...then we can probably pass it.

and is a UN-hating, gun crazy, black helicopter type wingnut. He'll be a tough one.

This is a classic case of the "radical center" emerging. Whatever our views on various issues, elements of the left and right are beginning to coalesce around the defense of democracy and liberty. From my own point of view, the difference between liberal and libertarian is very small, once you exclude those who are mere ditto-heads sucking at the big-money teat. It has been mentioned that some on the FR boards seemed to see this problem; Jim M is highly effective; Slashdot has a good number of anti-authoritariasmistas of all sorts. DUers are only one part of this movement for an honest vote-counting system, and although I would be hard-pressed to write a convincing letter to a right-wing-nut-case congresscritter ("hey f*ckhead" is probably not the best salutation in this case), others who have the same concerns may be more effective.

http://opengov.media.mit.edu/
should have all the info you need... -CV

Bob Ney.
http://opengov.media.mit.edu/EX/0000/000/400/293/
http://opengov.media.mit.edu/EX/0000/100/131/557/

(I had a team of 3 -- IT/accounting consultant, PhD History professor with huge political experience, all three of us well known to Jan, which helped a lot.)

We believe that EVERY precinct should have 5-10% of the vote hand counted. If the percentages match up within reason, accept
the computer totals for the precinct and send on to the state or county. If not, count another 3-5% and check again. If the vote is still falling outside a pre-determined (by Congress) margin of error, the entire precinct must be hand counted before the vote is reported. If that happens, the officials may be at the polling place quite late, but the vote is secure. Explained that way, there's not an election judge or poll watcher in the country who wouldn't do the hand count.

I'm half dead, can someone write this up properly because I think it must be added to both the Holt bill and the Senate version to come.

Next, I'm going to push for a briefing to Congress with a demo of the hack within the next couple of weeks. Since Jan asked if we could come to DC, I think there's a good chance of getting this.

I hope to be able to get an appointment with Durbin, to pitch him on getting the Senate on it, within the next week. If he can't do it, I'll pitch his chief of staff. The team I brought today will go with me and hopefully we'll be able to do a demo then. My goal is to get Durbin to introduce the companion bill. Can anyone else take this to a Senator?

I can also get an appointment with the head of the Cook County elections commission quite rapidly. We use punch cards that run through a Diebold optical scan machine and then out to GEMS. Worse, the modems from the precincts are open ALL DAY LONG so that workers know how many have voted throughout the day. (The actual votes aren't officially transmitted, but they're open to hacking throughout election day.) Believe it or not, the elections guy is a former academic with a very clean reputation. However, there are TONS of Republican districts outside Cook County that have a reputation for massive vote fraud, so there's no need to imply that David Orr (our elections guy) has any inkling of what could be going down.

BEV or ROX ... please PM me. We need to get Eloriel's report somewhere where it can be downloaded by authorized people.

Thanks again, and please keep going with your action items. Refine mine or anybody else's as you see fit and post your changes.

hedda

Please?

with your email address and we'll send it to you.

to collect these explanatory documents, from the one and two pagers to this 50-page treatise and maybe some graphics or animations, in a common location? Maybe acessible via a link at the blackboxvoting.org homepage to an "Outreach Tools" page. This would be a real help for folks like myself who are less expert and/or less articulate and/or simply cannot type well.

everyone with a stake in this testify in Congress, even do the hack demo in front of them. I'm sure Congress can give the immunity needed from Diebold prosecuting anyone.

copyright and proprietary information fly right out the windiw by default when testifying before Congress. Of course, I may be wrong.

The Holt Bill is important,and yet if there is not enough informed leaders and constituents on the issue, it most probably wont gain the necessary momentum needed. And, I have asked this a few times and have not received an answer - are we certain the Holt Bill is an effective rock solid bill?

Congress and all of us need to address this issue at every opportunity we can and create town halls with both Federal, state and local leaders and constituents. Leaders need to get more get informed and so does the public. I think at a grassroots level, we need to gear up the Election Reform meet-ups and build some momentum here at the local level.

All the obvious media exposure, leaders working and communicating with constituents, letters to newspapers and leaders.

I of course think the information Bev has written and posted, Red Eagle, Gordon, DemActivist are the best sources of information with which to begin. For flyers I think to break ALL the information down into a summary would be the best, as David Allen wrote the other day. I think if an effective summary could be written on one page that would be better. People want it simple.

And lastly, good idea to come up with an effective slogan.

Please read my suggestions above about a more robust required audit at the precinct level. We broached this with Schakowsky today but it needs to be pushed.

Freedom of information!!

n/t

Keep it going, folks. Dig into each other's ideas. Firm it all up. I want to get this to Schakowsky tomorrow and hopefully get it to others as well.

Holt's bill (H.R. 2239) is critically important, as we all know.

Wht I would also add is that IMO they have a responsibility to talk it up, to help educate as many people as possible:

* Other Congressional members AND staff

* Their contacts at such places as ACLU, LWV, Common Cause, etc. (OR perhaps they can give us some assistance in reaching the appropriate people -- I'm not expecting them to do the activism part, but rather to add TO the activism part)

* The Public. There are ways to distill some of these concepts into very simple, easy to understand terms, and while we can and should work on that, so should they, from their own vantage point.

* State legislators AND SoSs in their states -- all states, not just those considering or already having signed on the dotted line.

* Legal help (referrals)??? There ARE things that can be done legally on this issue.

REMEMBER TOO: We may have the goods on Diebold (so to speak), but ES&S comes from the same stock and ALL computerized voting systems -- absolutely all of them -- offer the same potential pitfalls (vulnerability to outside hacking AND inside tampering).

You might also point out or reiterate (if you didn't discuss it today) that there's no way to prove fraud in some states -- and how freakin' handy is that?!?!?!?

Great job, dear lady.

Eloriel

I DID speak directly to the fact that Todd Urosevich (founder of ES&S) wrote the software for both his brother Bob's Diebold and ES&S and that between them the two companies account for 70 something percent of all voting machines in the country.

I also was very emphatic on the point that the same Diebold software (GEMS) is used regardless of whether the vote is cast on DRE, optical scan, or optically-scanned punch cards.

And YES I did talk about the fact that some states have made the electronic record the ONLY legal count, and I connected that to the voting companies and R Doug's efforts to prevent the printing of paper ballots by the machines ... despite the fact that they're almost all equipped with printers.

Wow! I really did cover a LOT more than I realized. She took very good notes as well as asking great questions and testing her understanding of everything.

I'm sending her the info posted on blackboxvoting.org on VoteHere. Bev has really gone to town on them today.

think you missed ANYthing.

Great going. I'm SO proud and even more grateful.

Hugs,

Eloriel

I didn't get the SAIC-Diebold-VoteHere information in. Oh well.

It hasn't been mentioned much, but computer voting could be quite expensive in terms of replacing overpriced, unreliable (little-used) machines and getting new programming done. Computers could be devoted to aiding the handicapped. Counting paper should be cheap; it's pretty easy to do.

Perhaps Schakowsky knows some of the best people to contact in Congress. This has to become an issue of the integrity of the American vote.

and gets national elections tallied accurately in a few hours.

It's not hard if each precinct has to count only a few hundred votes, send its totals up to the next level (city?) which tallies the totals from each precinct, then to county, which tallies the totals from the cities, etc.

kick

An amendment added that would make it illegal for any politician to have any interests at all in voting machine companies, and if any connections are found the politician so connected would have his election invalidated.

I feel some kind of checks and balances should be brought to bear on State Election Commissioners. It's too damn easy for them to be bribed. Not sure how. We have one in jail here in Louisiana, I believe, for accepting kickbacks. Don't remember how this was discovered, nor do I know what checks might be in place in different states. Also, some kind of rule making it mandatory for the person or persons who choose the machines to have adequate training in computers to at least make a decent decision.

Thanks juajen.

Let's not forget that something needs to be done about the FEC tests and requirements. The DieBold code passed those when it shouldn't have. It may just be a matter of technical competence of the people involved (thus, requiring some individuals with up-to-date knowledge may be a way to deal with it). -CV

bill through would be a good start. Getting more Democrats in power interested and speaking out on this issue would help to educate the public. This IS great news to hear that someone in a position to do something is listening, but will the "leaders". Great Job!

on C-Span this morning said he was in favor of papertrail voting machines. He seemed very serious about it. Maybe Jan could talk to him even though it appears that maybe all they would have in common. C-Span should rerun it soon.

Yes, definitely the Chuck Hagels of the world should not be able to have part-ownership of voting machine companies.

I think that massive voter fraud (more than just voting for your spouse who is out of town and forgot to vote), whether from an outsider or insider, should be a felony.

I think the Holt legislation is weak on the minimum percent tested, and it needs to be at least 3 - 5 percent regardless of whether the result is "close" or not.

I think the paper ballot should rule, and take priority if there is a conflict with the touchscreen.

I'm highly worried about getting the vote count from precinct to county to state accurately, and think this needs to be highly transparent, with checkpoints on checkpoints that are fully visible to the public, even those who don't know how to turn on a computer.


I may not get any support on this, but every day we wrestle with this stuff, it seems to me more and more true that the simple paper ballot for most voters will be the best answer. I don't think computers are well suited to a high security function like this, with tens of tousands of units being used perhaps once a year. The hardware may not remain reliable. And, all it takes is a few keystrokes, and the software is not reliable.

Use a voting machine just like a word processor in that it will print a ballot with your selections, in whatever language. But, DON'T USE THEM TO COUNT! It's just too nontransparent. Your neighbors from diverse parties can physically count the votes in your precinct -- that's what they do in rural Maine, and they're done counting in a few hours.

Oh yeah, somehow get the Voter News Service or its son out of the process -- the AP or CNN should not be reporting vote totals, election judges or secretaries of state should be.

Yes, and defund the military project that is using emails to cast military abroad votes. This should be ILLEGAL.

-------------------------

What I want is heartbreakingly simple. Paper ballots, counted at the precinct level by teams of diverse party members or academics or whatever. Number posted at the precinct, and sent to the county. Numbers there posted, and sent to state. No carrying smart cards or anything around, no modems.

And, I want there to be serious risk, not just reward, for those who would steal votes or fix elections. Jail time.

Not sure we need VNS doing it, but that's not a problem any more. They're gone.

Exit polling is now used in some third world countries to help guard AGAINST vote fraud. Our problem IMO with 2000 and 2002 is that VNS did NOT make its own data public -- we'd have had a much better clue about what was going on if they had. IMO.

Eloriel

Kicking this back. So many need to read to grasp the issue.

:loveya:

machine totals. 5 percent of the machines at least. If the totals are different we go with the hand counts on every machine. That way they cannot cheat.

Damn, You ROCK ! ...

a KICK for the team ....

it is just through this site....thank you for your hard work and courage. Gin

and I want the CD's :waaaaa: They are not "in stores yet" and I hear they are the hottest sound around.

:hi: E

This is awesome!

ITA must be held accountable, too. There has to be checks and balances to assure there is no collusion. I'm referencing this from the memos. The Independent Testing Authority, Metamor, apparently colluded with Diebold to ignore grave security weaknessess. In one memo Clark wants to know what Metamor needs for them to overlook the security flaws. Whatever Diebold offered, it worked. I would like to know exactly what benefited Metamor to ignore the flaws and pass the software. If we can't trust those we entrust, then there has to be accountability and consequences.

These are both excellent action items we should insist on. Spot-check 5% of paper ballots against the computer totals - if it's more than a certain percent out of whack, hand-count ALL the paper ballots.

As someone pointed out, Canada uses paper and gets the totals in just a few hours.

If every precinct counts its paper and then submits the totals, it can be done very fast.