BULLSHIT About “Not Enough Evidence” Election Reform, Fraud & News Wed- 5/9/07

BULLSHIT About “Not Enough Evidence” Election Reform, Fraud & News Wed- 5/9/07

Hundreds of Sworn Voter Affidavits Collected by Curtis Campaign, Suggesting Inaccurate Counts on Electronic Voting Machines in FL-24 Race Against Feeney, Disregarded as 'Not Enough Evidence'...

Congressional staffer who works for a committee member explained:

"Basically, everyone felt that affidavits aren't enough in a secret ballot election and they didn't have any other evidence."

The Curtis camp was more than dubious of the "secret ballot" explanation for disregarding sworn voter affidavits.

"In an election where the source code is proprietary, the only reliable way to evaluate the election system, is by voter affidavits," Curtis said after hearing of today's dismissal.

more at:
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=4527#more-4527






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Politics could cloud election panel's work
By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff | May 9, 2007

WASHINGTON -- The six-person Federal Election Commission, which enforces campaign-finance laws, is entering the presidential election season with three temporary commissioners who have not been confirmed by the Senate, two commissioners whose terms have expired but who have not been replaced, and one vacancy.

As a result, most of the commissioners who are now passing judgment on campaign-finance fights will also be looking ahead to their own confirmation battles -- a process that threatens to intensify the politics surrounding an agency that was set up to resolve disputes over election rules in a bipartisan manner.

"This is symbolic evidence of how dysfunctional this agency is, when there is not one commissioner serving today under the normal process for appointing and confirming federal officials," said Fred Wertheimer , president of Democracy 21, a group that has frequently criticized the commission as failing to take sufficient steps to reduce the influence of money in politics.

The failure to confirm new commissioners is the result primarily of tie-ups in the Senate, where members of both parties have threatened to use the confirmation process to revisit controversial campaign-finance laws, according to congressional aides. Senate leaders, seeking to avoid a distracting battle, quietly allowed President Bush to make the temporary appointments while Congress was in recess.

more at:
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2007/05/09/politics_could_cloud_election_panels_work/

Testimony on Voting System Testing and Cerification
By David Wagner, Computer Science Division, University of California, Berkeley
May 08, 2007
The following written testimony was submitted for the public hearing of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Subcommittee on Information Policy, Census, and National Archives on May 7, 2007.



Summary

We have seen dramatic changes in election technology over the past decade. This new technology was introduced for laudable reasons and has brought important benefits. However, it has come at a cost.

Many of today’s electronic voting machines have security problems. The ones at greatest risk are the paperless DRE voting machines. These paperless machines are vulnerable to attack: a single person with insider access and some technical knowledge could switch votes, perhaps undetected, and potentially swing an election. With this technology, we cannot be certain that our elections have not been corrupted.

In my research into electronic voting, I have come to the conclusion that the federal certification process is not adequate. The testing labs are failing to weed out insecure and unreliable voting systems. The federal certification process has approved systems that have lost thousands of votes, systems with reliability problems, and systems with serious security vulnerabilities. Over the past four years, independent researchers have discovered security vulnerabilities in voting machines used throughout the country — vulnerabilities that were not detected by state and federal certification processes. Unfortunately, the standards and certification process has not kept pace
with the advances in election technology over the past decade.

One of the most promising directions may be to reduce our reliance upon software. With today’s paperless voting machines, flaws in the software can potentially cause undetectable errors in the outcome of the election. That places an impossible burden on vendors and testing labs, because it requires perfection: a single overlooked defect can be enough to render the whole system insecure, unreliable, or inaccurate, and experience has proven that it is common for even the most capable experts to overlook flaws and defects in software. It is unreasonable to expect perfection from vendors or testing labs given the complexity of modern election technology. If the system is completely reliant upon software, failures and security flaws are inevitable.


more at:
http://www.votetrustusa.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2435&Itemid=26

Tuesday, May 08, 2007
"Democrats have a secret plan to blow up the Moon!"
While writing the piece below on vote suppression and prosecutor-gate, one unpleasant thought kept assaulting my consciousness: This whole scheme relied on the audacious Republican presumption of media control.

The Rovian hordes convinced a sizable sector of the general public that a non-existent army of voter registration fraudsters had undermined our electoral system. No matter how many journalists reported the truth of the situation, quite a few people believed the lie. And they will always continue to believe the lie.

Not only that. The public hungers for new bowls filled with new codswallop. The reactionary propagandists can make up any lie with impunity.

They could, for example, come out with a fake story saying "Democrats have a secret plan to blow up the Moon!" To spread the meme, Thor Hearne could start a new front group, the American Lunar Preservation Organization, which would immediately be invited to testify before Congressional investigators. And make no mistake: A sizable section of the public would accept this ludicrous tale at face value. I can visualize the Freeper response: "Don't those damned liberals know that we need the Moon for, like, tides and stuff?"

And even after the New York Times and CNN offered sober pieces headlined "Experts dispute Moon demolition reports" (FOX would do a "balanced" segment using the some-people-say gambit), the people who engineered the hoax would not lose credibility. The very next day, they could announce "Democrats have a secret plan to blow up the Sun!" -- and the game would start anew.

How can we fix this situation?
http://cannonfire.blogspot.com/2007/05/democrats-have-secret-plan-to-blow-up.html

Holt Election Reform Bill Passes Out of Committee, People for the American (PFAW) Still Misleading Public About It

Advocacy Group's Press Release Disingenuously Continues to Forward Unsupportable Notion that Bill Would Have Prevented Sarasota's FL-13 Election Meltdown

Legislation Still to Allow for Uncounted and Uncountable Electronic Ballots on Touch-Screen Voting Systems...

Rush Holt's Election Reform Bill (HR811) was successfully voted out of the U.S. House Administration Committee today after a four hour mark-up session. We'll have analysis of the bill in the coming days as we are able to review a copy of the final version which is now headed to the House floor. We have been told that electronic balloting on Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) touch-screen systems will continue to be allowed in the bill.

Apparently, a paper ballot --- one that is actually counted --- for every vote cast in America is of little interest to either the Democratic and Republican members of the committee.

See our Holt Bill Special Coverage Page at http://www.BradBlog.com/Holt for much more information and action points concerning the bill.

more at:
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=4527#more-4527

May 9, 2007 at 06:41:19

Letter to House on Clint Curtis Challenge

by Steven Freeman Page 1 of 1 page(s)

http://www.opednews.com



Below is a message I sent on behalf of Clint Curtis to the US House
Committee on Administration and the media contacts on the EI database (which
is in need of fixing, if anyone's interested).

Subject: Please consider the evidence of a corrupted count in Florida CD-24

Honorable members of the US House of Representatives Committee on
Administration

Today the US House Committee on Administration is being asked to consider
the evidence of a corrupted count in Florida CD-24. As House members should
know, a parade of scientific studies have shown the corruptibility of new
electronic voting machines. Indeed, there is little debate among scientists
that elections can be stolen by insiders who control the proprietary
software which reports vote totals; the only real issue is whether a
particular election has been stolen.

more at:
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_steven_f_070509_letter__to_house_on_.htm

Best ER Daily headline yet.

This bill does a lot more than advertised
By HOWARD TROXLER
Published May 8, 2007


The big elections law just passed by our Legislature, known as House Bill 537, is supposed to return Florida to a "paper trail" for elections. No more touch screen machines, just like Gov. Charlie Crist wanted.

But I gotta tell you, the Legislature tacked so much extra junk onto this sucker that it looks like a frat-house refrigerator door - and the contents are just about as unknown and dangerous.

Let's put it this way: Just the title sentence of the bill, which describes its contents by saying, "An act to do so-and-so, " is 154 lines long.

http://www.opednews.com/maxwrite/linkframe.php?linkid=35177

Clint Curtis Campaign Update
May 8th, 2007
Clint Curtis House Race (FL-24)

According to information I’m getting in e-mail this morning, the House Administration Committee is meeting and might dismiss Clint Curtis’ request to investigate the election of House Member Tom Feeney, whom Clint opposed in November.

Feeney is the Member who went to Clint Curtis when Clint was a software engineer and asked if Clint could create a vote-shifting program that would be undetected. He said he needed one to learn how to defend against it. Clint refused, saying he wouldn’t think of being the creator of something that could be used to subvert democracy.

Curt publicized this request eventually and ran against Feeney. Signed affidavits that Clint’s supporters have obtained personally, going door to door exhaustively, from Democratic voters in the district about how they voted in November, are being ignored by the Administration Committee.

Signed affidavits are accepted as testimony in every court in the land. To throw them out, to dismiss them as evidence out-of-hand, will be a disaster for the Democrats on the Committee and the party in general. In my experience leading up to November, it was the promise of election protection activists and Democrats who supported us (like Debra Bowen, who defeated incumbent Bruce McPherson to become Secretary of State in CA) to protect Democrats’ votes instead of give away the election without a fight, as happened in presidential elections ‘00 and ‘04, that helped secure the Democratic congressional majority.

Regardless of how you feel about Clint Curtis or election fraud cries as fringe-y conspiracy theory, you, as members of the House Administration Committee, cannot dismiss signed affidavits from Democratic voters about how they voted without showing utter contempt for voters. This will not go unnoticed or unremembered when next you run. Please don’t do this to yourselves or the party. It is very upsetting to question election returns; judges are reluctant to do it. But especially given Feeney’s weird request to Clint Curtis some years back, and the present state of technological problems tallying election returns, it is unforgivable for your Committee to dismiss this challenge that is backed by legal testimony from voters who know they signed their affadavits under penalty of perjury. The gathered affidavits so far suggest that there was vote-shifting in this FL-24 election by anywhere from 12 to 24 percent. Surely anyone whose job is dependent on elections would want to think this can’t happen, but the evidence is before you. To dismiss it is to deny justice to the courageous Democratic voters in the district who were willing to sign a legal document and reveal their votes in order to demand that justice.

more at:
http://blog.pdamerica.org/?p=1086#more-1086

The Legislative Privilege to Judge the Qualifications, Elections, and Returns of Members

In Stephenson v. Woodward, the Supreme Court of Kentucky functionally affirmed a quo warrant against a sitting member of the senate. Although a respectable argument can be made that the person in question was in fact not qualified to serve, the senate itself had deliberated on the issue and had reached its own respectable conclusion that she was qualified. More importantly, the Constitution of Kentucky, like the Constitution of the United States and that of virtually every other state, authorizes each house of the legislature to “judge of” its members’ “qualifications, elections and returns.” According to the Court, the senate’s authority did not apply because a lower court had found the person unqualified in a separate action litigated before the senate convened. What the Court never really explained was how this earlier ruling could supersede the senate’s authority without contradicting the language of the constitution. In this article, we examine Stephenson in light of basic principles underlying and informing the privilege, noting that the Court appears to have reached its holding in error. The authors’ criticism of the Court’s analysis takes two specific forms. First, the authors criticize the Court’s implication that the General Assembly could delegate to the judiciary irrevocable authority to resolve disputes over the qualifications of legislators-elect. Second, they criticize the Court’s indication that the legislative privilege to judge the qualifications, elections, and returns of members applies only to individuals who have already been admitted to service.

View the full text of this article in PDF format. (Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader.)
http://www.kentuckylawjournal.org/files/salamanca.pdf

Landslide of problems from new elections law

Wednesday, May 09, 2007

Some will hail Gov. Crist and U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Delray Beach, for ending the state's ill-fated infatuation with touch-screen voting. In fact, to free voters from the fear of electronic doom, they've eliminated the ease, certainty and low cost of touch-screen voting.

The elections bill that the Legislature passed last week and Gov. Crist surely will sign also squanders many millions spent by local governments, especially big counties, on touch screens. Palm Beach County spent $14 million, Broward $20 million and Miami-Dade $25 million. A spokesman for the secretary of state says the market for used touch screens, "especially from Florida," is virtually nonexistent.

Gov. Crist and Rep. Wexler played to the fiction that touch screens can't be trusted, drawing acclaim for their bipartisan plan in February at a packed meeting of south Palm Beach County Democrats. The distrust among some voters goes back to 2000, when punch-card ballots routinely failed to capture voter intent. With the state's blessing, the five largest counties - Palm Beach, Miami-Dade, Broward, Pinellas and Hillsborough - turned to touch screens to avoid the recurring cost of optical-scan paper ballots, a cost they now will be forced to absorb.

The bill converts $28 million in federal assistance for voter registration into money for new election equipment. The five large counties plus 10 smaller ones, including Martin and Indian River, will divvy up $23''million to buy one scanner for every precinct. Voters insert the fill-in-the-bubble ballot into the scanner before leaving the polling place. The scanners reject improper ballots, giving voters a chance to make corrections. Voters can't leave until the ballots are scanned, even if there's a line.

more at:
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/opinion/content/opinion/epaper/2007/05/09/m12a_leadedit_elections_0509.html

Thanks, kpete!

Attach a printer to every voting machine. When you make your vote, you get a receipt (like an ATM machine). The receipt is placed in a lockbox similar to the traditional ballot box. If there is any dispute whatsoever about the result, the lockbox is cracked open and the ballots are handcounted and re-counted as many times as necessary. Or you might want it set-up so that the boxes are cracked open and counting started as soon as the polling station closes.

Combines the speedy results of the machines with the reliability of a paper ballot.

"Bowen wants hack-free voting systems"

http://ss.ca.gov/elections/voting_systems/ttbr/press_release_050907.pdf


Voting Machines Test: A New Goal?

For the past month, everyone from local elections officials to activists have waited for word from Secretary of State Debra Bowen about exactly how she will conduct her upcoming review of voting machines currently used in California.

Today, she announced that the testing will focus on whether the machines comply with existing election laws-- and not whether they meet a set of standards that she first suggested in late March.

That resolves one of the initial criticisms of Bowen's plan-- where manufacturers argued that that there isn't time for brand new voting machine standards, given that local elections officials need to know by early August which machines are approved for next February's presidential primary.

Instead, Secretary Bowen is now leaving many of the details of the voting machine tests to a panel of researchers she has personally selected. "We have asked the experts to create measuring sticks," she said today in a conference call with reporters. "They need to tell us where the greatest threats are, and what conditions pose the greatest real world risk."

But so far, the early reaction from local elections officials has been... skepticism.
http://www.kqed.org/weblog/capitalnotes/2007/05/voting-machines-test-new-goal.jsp

When did the US Attorney Firings controversy really begin?

I discovered some new possibilities while researching this thread:
Missouri attorney a focus in USA firings = Bradley Schlozman

..........

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x853813