Election Reform, Fraud & News Wed 3/28/07 - HAND COUNTED PAPER BALLOTS IN 2008

March 27, 2007 at 15:56:21
International observers find fault with 2006 United States election and call for Congressional reform
by Michael Richardson
http://www.opednews.com



The Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, based in Warsaw, Poland, is the election monitoring unit of international Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. The world's foremost election observation group sent a 18-member mission to the United States to assess the November 2006 election which has now filed its report. This was the third U.S. election observed by OSCE.
…………………

Electronic voting machines were also called into question by the OSCE monitors. "Vendors of voting systems are not subject to the same legal obligations applicable to government officials administering elections. Further, vendors have insisted on retaining proprietary control of computer software, which impacted negatively on transparency and fueled issues of public confidence. This left election officials in a vulnerable position, as they were responsible for election delivery but might be unable to thoroughly check their systems or open them to public scrutiny."

Although the polite diplomatic language of the report is almost a model of understatement it still, in total, amounts to a sharp critique of U.S. election practices. Using the phrasing of the report, Congress and the state legislatures could benefit from conducting hearings on the report findings and recommendations.



http://www.opednews.com/articles/genera_michael__070327_international_observ.htm

March 28, 2007 at 08:59:07

ACTION ALERT! Contact Members of Committee of House Administration

by Joan Brunwasser

http://www.opednews.com



It looks quite likely that Rep. Holt's 811 (the new incarnation of HR 550) is on the fast track for passage.

Vickie Karp of the Coalition for Visible Ballots and co-author of "Hacked! High Tech Election Theft in America" suggests faxing these members of the Committee on House Administration to voice our reservations and concern.


She included two extremely timely articles - which you can include in your fax, while you're at it- on why recounts and audits don't work: one is the recent revelation that ES&S (the electronic voting machine company) dictated the terms for the audit to the Florida officials investigating the FL-13 missing 18,000 votes of the November election. Read about the leaked memo here: http://www.bradblog.com/?p=4321#more-4321

Talk about the fox in the chicken coop!

http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_joan_bru_070328_action_alert_21__conta.htm

Judge denies Diebold request to block ES&S pact with Massachusetts
Vendor contends state erred in selecting AutoMark voting machines of rival



The IT Security Must Have for 2007: Penetration Testing Tools
Building a Resilient and Highly Available Exchange Infrastructure
Internal Virtualized Storage Platforms -- Silverpop leverages leading-edge technology to keep up with rapid data-growth


March 27, 2007 -- A Suffolk Superior Court judge yesterday denied a request from Diebold Election Systems to block a bid by Massachusetts to buy electronic voting machines from Election Systems & Software Inc.

Diebold had filed a lawsuit against the commonwealth of Massachusetts on March 15 looking to invalidate the state's $9 million contract to buy handicapped-accessible AutoMark voting machines made by rival ES&S.

At a court hearing on the lawsuit yesterday, Diebold's request for an injunction to block the execution of the contract with ES&S was rejected, a spokesman for Massachusetts Secretary of State Bill Galvin said today. The judge also denied Diebold's request to have an accelerated discovery process and to keep the state's legal team from viewing internal Diebold documents, he said.

"The suit is still there, but they went zero for three yesterday," the spokesman said. No further hearings have been scheduled yet, he said.

Galvin's spokesman called the lawsuit "frivolous." He said Galvin's office followed a proper procurement process that included field testing of potential machines, including those from Diebold, during actual elections. In announcing the selection of the AutoMark machines on March 5, Galvin stated: "After extensive testing and analysis for security, I have determined that the AutoMark terminal is the one that will best enable voters with disabilities to cast their ballots without the assistance of another person."

more at:
http://computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyName=hardware&articleId=9014518&taxonomyId=12&intsrc=kc_top

Sleepy Hollow Democrats seek new election
By LEN MANIACE
THE JOURNAL NEWS


(Original publication: March 26, 2007)
A state court judge, accompanied by both sides in the disputed Sleepy Hollow elections, will head to Mount Pleasant Town Hall tomorrow to determine whether the votes on 11 voting machines stored there can be counted.

Meanwhile, the Democrats have asked for a new election.

State Supreme Court Justice Francis Nicolai told the candidates and their attorneys that he wanted to inspect the polling machines in the hope of matching up voting booths with the election districts in which they were placed for the March 20 election.

An attempt to verify votes cast in the election, in which Republican Mayor Philip Zegarelli appeared to defeat Democratic challenger Thomas Capossela by 29 votes, was stopped just as it was beginning last Thursday. Neither the machines nor the election paperwork were marked in way that the polling booths could be readily linked to their election district. That irregularity led the Westchester County Board of Elections to defer to Nicolai, before whom a hearing on the election had already been scheduled.

more at:
http://www.nynews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070326/NEWS02/703260391

Firm sues Mass. over contract for voting machines for disabled
By Associated Press
Monday, March 26, 2007 - Updated: 07:43 AM EST

BOSTON - One of the nation’s top manufacturers of voting machines is taking the state to court Monday to try to block distribution of machines for the disabled in Massachusetts, saying it was unfairly denied the lucrative contract.

An attorney for Diebold Election Systems Inc. said the company should have been awarded the $9 million contract if Secretary of State William Galvin followed his own criteria when deciding which firm the state should contract with for the new machines.

”Diebold’s proposal provided the best value to the commonwealth,” said William Weisberg, an attorney for Diebold. ”We believe that using those criteria correctly Diebold should have received the award.”


Those criteria include cost, the ability of the company to meet the scope of the request, and the degree to which the machines met technical requirements.

Galvin called the lawsuit ”frivolous” and ”sour grapes on the part of Diebold.”

more at:
http://news.bostonherald.com/localRegional/view.bg?articleid=190940

Diebold Whines Again

It's fair to say I'm not a big fan of Diebold -- even before they sent me a cease-and-desist letter over my small part in exposing some of their illegal practices (for example, using uncertified voting machines for an election). Anyway here's their latest lunacy: Massachusetts (ie, Sec. State William Galvin) wisely decided to avoid Diebold when purchasing new machines to comply with the accessibility requirements in the Help America Vote Act (HAVA)... and in response Diebold sued the state. Here's some coverage:

Voting device pact at issue (Boston Globe)
Firm sues Mass. over contract for voting machines for disabled (AP, by way of the Boston Herald)
And even that paragon of journalism, Slashdot: Diebold Sues Massachusetts for "Wrongful Purchase"
The best bit of the articles, to my mind, is this:

Galvin called the lawsuit "frivolous" and "sour grapes on the part of Diebold."

"We've gone through an exhaustive process consulting with the disabled community to find out what's best for them," Galvin told The Associated Press. "We certainly don't feel like we have an obligation to help (Diebold) market their equipment."

I'd have said "a company guilty of breaking election laws" instead of "Diebold", and "insecure and buggy

State elections review prompts concern, optimism

By: CHRIS BAGLEY - Staff Writer

Plans for a wide-ranging review of voting machines have provoked complaints from election officials across California and delight among Southwest County activists who have criticized one variety of the machines as open to fraudulent manipulation.

Secretary of State Debra Bowen, who took over from Bruce McPherson in January, said last week that her office would examine voting machines from "top to bottom," including processes for their use. The review could lead her to bar some from use in the state, at least temporarily, she said.

The review also will include what Bowen called "red teaming" drills. In the review, a "red team" works to secure a voting system against hacking attempts by a "blue team" of rogue computer experts, Bowen said. The drills appear similar in concept to but more extensive than a public hacking attempt that Riverside County Supervisor Jeff Stone proposed for the county's touch-screen machines.


The review is scheduled to begin April 6 after Bowen finalizes a list of criteria she plans to use on the machines, according to her office. It will conclude by Aug. 3, allowing county-level elections officials six months to secure their voting systems or adopt systems that are deemed safe, Bowen said. Both major political parties in the state plan to hold their presidential nominating contests in February.

more at:
http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2007/03/27/news/californian/32607203931.txt

Commissioners seek reprieve from machines

By Bill Hankins
The Paris News

Published March 27, 2007

Lamar County commissioners are trying to rid themselves of one county job they feel they should not have to do — delivering election equipment to the polling places.

In Monday’s meeting at the Commissioners Courtroom in the Lamar County Courthouse, commissioners urged County Clerk Kathy Marlowe to look at what it would cost to contract delivery and pick-up of election equipment for the Saturday, May 12, statewide constitutional election.

“Handling the election machines is an unfair burden on the commissioners, who have to use their road hands to do the work,” Commissioner Jackie Wheeler said. “We have to rent trucks that protect the equipment, because an election machine will not fit in the back of a pickup, and it needs to be covered in case of rain.”

Wheeler said the job fell to commissioners years ago when they were volunteered to do the chore.

more at:
http://web.theparisnews.com/story.lasso?ewcd=a7801370b1e86f6a

Florida Voting Officials Warned of Glitch Before Election
Losing candidate: Slow touch screens may have been culprit in undervote
Marc L. Songini Today’s Top Stories or Other Government Stories

March 26, 2007 (Computerworld) -- An e-voting machine glitch that Florida officials were warned about last summer may have caused an undervote that Democrat Christine Jennings claims cost her the election in the race for the state’s 13th Congressional District seat last November.

Jennings said last week that a memo sent to state officials by manufacturer Election Systems & Software Inc. (ES&S) Aug. 15 acknowledging problems with some machines indicates that voting officials did not address known glitches prior to the Nov. 7 election.

“It’s a slap in the face to Florida voters that knew about a problem with our voting machines and did not do everything within their power to fix it,” Jennings said in a statement.

Jennings is contesting the election, which she lost by 369 votes. She contends that 18,000 so-called undervotes — ballots that were cast but whose votes apparently were not recorded — were caused mostly by malfunctioning voting machines.

Shortly after the election, Jennings filed a lawsuit against the Florida Division of Elections seeking a new election.

A spokesman for Jennings said that she is currently evaluating how the memo can be used to strengthen the lawsuit, which was filed in Leon County’s Second Circuit Court in Tallahassee.

more at:
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=286847&intsrc=news_ts_head

Hacking Democracy DVD Released
By Susan Pynchon, Florida Fair Elections Coalition
March 27, 2007
"It is hard to imagine...a documentary this season that is more important to the civic life of the nation--let alone one that is so compelling and ultimately moving." Baltimore Sun

The documentary film "Hacking Democracy", originally broadcast on HBO, is being released today on DVD. The film takes a nonpartisan, clear-eyed look at the secrecy, cronyism, and incompetence of elections in present-day America as it captures a citizen's movement intent on taking back elections--and democracy itself.

For me personally, I know that talking to legislators who have seen this movie is like night and day compared to those who haven't seen it. The film definitely makes the "light bulb" go on as far as the vulnerability of electronic voting systems. I wish I could afford to send a copy to every legislator in the U.S.

Christine Jennings (Florida CD-13 contested race) has said, for example, that she has seen the movie twice. A local candidate in Volusia County who saw the film demanded a ballot inspection of her race (full manual recounts
aren't allowed in Florida) and did public records requests to our supervisor of elections to get information on the memory cards used, something a typical candidate would normally not think of doing.


more at:
http://www.votetrustusa.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2352&Itemid=26

Election chief's standards could effectively end e-voting in state
By Ian Hoffman, STAFF WRITER
Article Last Updated: 03/27/2007 07:50:14 PM PDT


California's elections chief is proposing the toughest standards for voting systems in the country, so tough that they could banish ATM-like touch-screen voting machines from the state.
For the first time, California is demanding the right to try hacking every voting machine with "red teams" of computer experts and to study the software inside the machines, line-by-line, for security holes.

The proposals are the first step toward fulfilling a promise that Secretary of State Debra Bowen made during her 2006 election®MDBO¯ campaign to perform a "top-to-bottom" review of all voting machinery used in California.

County elections officials balked at the proposed standards in a letter Monday to Bowen and hinted broadly at the same conclusion reached by several computer scientists: If enforced rigidly, the standards could send many voting machines, especially touch-screens, back for major upgrades. Local elections officials argued that there isn't enough time to fix any deficiencies before the February 2008 presidential primary.

"When they moved that election up 119 days, I think the door closed on any significant changes to election systems for the presidential cycle in 2008," said Steve Weir, president of the California Association of Clerks and Elections Officials and chief elections officer in Contra Costa County.

Advocates for stronger security in voting machinery applauded Bowen's standards and said it marked a refreshing change from regulating

most at:
http://www.insidebayarea.com/ci_5534822

City hires county to run election

03/27/07
Susan Kirkland

It wasn’t hanging chads, or indecipherable marks that prompted the Calhoun City Council to vote for contracting with the county for voting services. It was floors.

“We just put new flooring in the gym at the recreation center,” said Cathy Harrison, city administrator. “Our current voting machines weigh several hundred pounds each, and we were afraid it would damage them.”

She said the machines, which are like closets, weigh close to 1,000 pounds each and have to be “walked” across the floor to their location.

“They are very tough to handle,” she said.

more at:
http://www.insidebayarea.com/ci_5534822

March 27, 2007, 7:23PM
3rd member of Ohio elections board quits


By THOMAS J. SHEERAN Associated Press Writer
© 2007 The Associated Press

CLEVELAND — A third member of the embattled elections board of Ohio's most populous county quit Tuesday under pressure from the state's top elections official, leaving Ohio's Republican chairman as the lone holdout.

Sally Florkiewicz, the board's other Republican, accused Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, a Democrat, of playing politics in demanding the four board members step down.

"Cuyahoga County has become an early turf war in the 2008 presidential election," Florkiewicz said in a news release.

Robert Bennett, the elections board chairman and head of the state GOP, is the only board member not to bow out. The two Democratic board members resigned last week.

more at:
http://news.mywebpal.com/news_tool_v2.cfm?pnpID=722&NewsID=793537&CategoryID=3388&show=localnews&om=0

March 28, 2007
"The Untimely Death of Bush v. Gore"

The last few weeks have been busy for me. In addition to finishing the final proofreading on my forthcoming book, Remedies: Examples and Explanations (Wolters Kluwer, April 2007----should be in bookstores some time in April), I just completed a draft essay, The Untimely Death of Bush v. Gore, which I've just sent out to law reviews for consideration. The paper builds on some ideas I've put forward about failures of election administration and voter id laws (see my earlier NY Times oped and pieces in Slate here and here). Comments welcome! Here is the abstract:


The moment for election reform inspired by the Supreme Court's decision in Bush v. Gore has come and gone. While some thought that election reformers could make "lemons from lemonade" from Bush v. Gore's equal protection holding, that possibility has not come to pass. Political actors have failed to respond well to the crisis in our election administration made obvious by the 2000 Florida voting fiasco.

Part I of this Essay, looking at "punch card" litigation in the Sixth and Ninth Circuits, explains that though some lower court judges still may look to the Bush v. Gore precedent as a means to force states to undertake election reform, that effort has been stymied thus far through the en banc process in the federal appellate courts.

Part II considers state and federal legislative and administrative responses to Bush v. Gore. Although vote counting technology has improved, states have made little progress otherwise in fixing their election administration problems. In fact, election administration reform has taken on an increasingly partisan direction. The debate over good election practices is taking place in the absence of good evidence, raising the possibility that some laws, most prominently new laws requiring voters to show identification at the polls, are being enacted for partisan advantage rather than to remedy any real problem.

Part III returns to the failure of the courts in the wake of Bush v. Gore. It begins by noting that the rise in election litigation that this country witnessed after Bush v. Gore continues unabated. It then uses the Supreme Court's recent opinion in Purcell v. Gonzales to show that the Court has failed to learn the lessons of Bush v. Gore. The Court's decision to issue a quick opinion, its casual empiricism, and its discouraging of pre-election litigation demonstrate that all members of the Court--both liberal and conservative Justices--are insufficiently sensitive to the kind of trouble their election administration opinions may cause. Part III concludes with an examination of Judge Posner's troubling Seventh Circuit opinion in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board upholding Indiana's voter identification law against a dissent by Judge Evans.

more at:
http://electionlawblog.org/archives/008145.html

Thank you, kpete.

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0703/S00474.htm">U.S. Attorney Firings Exposes Rough Justice

Election Fraud versus Voter Fraud

Lorraine C. Minnite, PhD of Barnard College, Columbia University just published a major article explaining voter fraud. Here distinctions between voter and election fraud are critical:

Voter fraud is the “intentional corruption of the electoral process by the voter.” This definition covers knowingly and willingly giving false information to establish voter eligibility, and knowingly and willingly voting illegally or participating in a conspiracy to encourage illegal voting by others. All other forms of corruption of the electoral process and corruption committed by elected or election officials, candidates, party organizations, advocacy groups or campaign workers fall under the wider definition of election fraud.

Voter fraud is the retail while election fraud is the wholesale corruption of elections.

Snip

Why the Effort to Attack a Problem that Doesn’t Exist? It’s All About Suppressing the Vote

Why? It’s simple. The payoff in suppressed votes from hostile voting groups is the real goal. Voter fraud initiatives result in solutions to problems that don’t exist. However, those solutions provide a rationale to create the type of problems that are desirable by those who choose to suppress the vote. Which voters am I talking about? The poor, black and Latino citizens in particular, and, to a lesser degree, college and university students strongly favor Democrats. Any process which subtracts voters from these groups adds vote margins to right wing candidates, typically but not always Republicans.

Here’s how it works:

You speak repeatedly of the non existent problem of voter fraud, over and over. At the Federal level, you start something called the Ballot Access and Voter Integrity Initiative. It suggests that there are hoards of voters out there who want to vote illegally on their own or, even worse, at the behest of nefarious individuals who might organize these hoards. You hint broadly that these voters are minorities and maybe even illegal aliens.

If there’s an initiative to solve a problem, you assume some people will believe that the problem actually exists. Those who actually know better, state legislators, sponsor and pass legislation like restrictive voter identification requirements for both the registration and voting processes. The net result is a series of laws at the state level that make it harder to vote for the previously mentioned target groups. Missouri’s most recent attempt at a restrictive voter identification law was judged to be unconstitutional before it was ever enacted.

When you are accused of suppressing the minority and poor vote, you engage in the false argument about tradeoffs. You assert that restrictive voter identification requirements are necessary to prevent voter fraud (all eight cases a year!). You say you want people to vote but opponents of voter ID requirements are really promoting voter fraud. It’s all quite brilliant, symmetrical, and self perpetuating.