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Friday, April 15, 2011
Kathy Nickolaus may have been fixing elections for years
Wisconsin's Government Accountability Board is looking into the Katherine Harris of the North (from Bradblog):
As per our story published a few hours ago on the still-unexplained anomalies found in past Waukesha County, WI elections, it looks like the state's Government Accountability Board (the body which oversees elections in the state) can't understand County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus' explanations for the anomalous 2006 results either, where some 20,000 more votes were tallied than "ballots cast", according to her own reports.Just in tonight from the Wisconsin State Journal: "State investigating vote irregularities in Waukesha County going back 5 years"
Our report from earlier this evening offers a great deal more detail on the anomalies in question, and includes explanation (of a sort) and comment from Nickolaus who, the Journal reports, "was unavailable for comment Wednesday and Thursday." She did, for whatever reason, manage to offer The BRAD BLOG comment on these concerns both yesterday and today, terse as it was. FWIW.
Labels: election theft, electronic voting machines, Republican brownshirts, vote suppression
Friday, April 08, 2011
Well, who ELSE would I go to for more on this?
...other than Brad Friedman?
The lameass explanation:
There's just one problem: When you are entering data into an Access database, it is saved when you move to the next row. You don't have to "press 'save'" Now, when you write nn application in Access (which consists of a user interface in front of an auto-saving Access database with some Visual Basic code behind it to handle navigation, saving, and calculations, you can turn autosave off and put a save button on the screen. But it's hard to imagine an actual Access application where each record is a single screen AND has autosave overridden AND allows you to just navigate to the next record without doing something, such as pressing another button called something like "Next Screen". Of course if you wrote an app like that, and there was unsaved data, you would probably display a pop-up window alerting the user that there is unsaved data. And even if it was an application that was sloppily written (which is quite possible, after all, Access is part of Microsoft Office and any monkey with rudimentary programming knowledge can write an application with it. And even if this application DID display one precinct at a time, and even if it did have a save button, it's hard to imagine that she would "forget to press the save button" for EVERY SINGLE RECORD.
How stupid does she think we are? Pretty damn stupid, it seems. And the Democrat who got up with her to vouch for her is also pretty damn stupid. After a decade of screwy vote totals and demonstrations of how easy it is to change vote tallies on electronic voting machines, you'd think that the Democrats would wake the hell up. Of course you'd be assuming a party that isn't completely inept, but that's another story.
Cieran over at GOS notes why the 7500 number additional votes for David Prosser is significant. So does John Washburn, who was on the Mike Malloy show with Brad last night, and who gave more details on how Nickolaus was tallying the votes in a Microsoft Access database on a circa 1995 PC in her office.
Kathy Nickolaus has some history in this area that should also raise eyebrows:
I realize that I've been to some degree in IT for twenty-three years, and I know there are people who still think that computers are some kind of magic, and who have absolute trust in electronic voting machines. I know because when I ran for county committee a few years ago, and spent a few hours at the polling place as a poll-watcher, I was chatting with some of the over-age-75 election workers and explained to them exactly why you cannot trust the Sequoia Accu-Vote machines that are used in my district. I explained it in language even a monkey could understand, and I think that when I was done, a few of them were at least wondering about it.
But this degree of (at the very least) ineptitude, and at worst outright partisan corruption of the voting process, should not be excused or defended by anyone. And while Republicans and James O'Keefe are frothing at the mouth at the possibility that somewhere in Arizona a guy with a name like Ignacio Lopez might show up at the wrong precinct to vote, there is still, even after Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004 and thousands of questionable election results since then, absolutely no integrity in the voting systems in many areas nationwide.
I'm not making any accusations here. But there is enough here that's fishy that if the shoe were on the other foot, and this were a Democratic county clerk, Republicans would be screaming for a federal investigation. Unless votes are counted, and counted with some degree of integrity, we have no democracy.
Just sayin', is all.
The lameass explanation:
At a press conference this evening, a tearful Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus accepted blame for the error.
Nickolaus said she forgot to press "save" while entering the numbers into a database and because the turnout was so large, the missing votes didn't get noticed.
Nickolaus said on election night she enters the numbers into a Microsoft Access program and then presents them to the media. Because she didn’t save the numbers, they didn’t get transferred to the unofficial results and not discovered until the canvass took place.
“It’s important to stress this isn’t a case of extra votes or extra ballots being found,” she said. “This is error, which I apologize for, which is common in this process.”
There's just one problem: When you are entering data into an Access database, it is saved when you move to the next row. You don't have to "press 'save'" Now, when you write nn application in Access (which consists of a user interface in front of an auto-saving Access database with some Visual Basic code behind it to handle navigation, saving, and calculations, you can turn autosave off and put a save button on the screen. But it's hard to imagine an actual Access application where each record is a single screen AND has autosave overridden AND allows you to just navigate to the next record without doing something, such as pressing another button called something like "Next Screen". Of course if you wrote an app like that, and there was unsaved data, you would probably display a pop-up window alerting the user that there is unsaved data. And even if it was an application that was sloppily written (which is quite possible, after all, Access is part of Microsoft Office and any monkey with rudimentary programming knowledge can write an application with it. And even if this application DID display one precinct at a time, and even if it did have a save button, it's hard to imagine that she would "forget to press the save button" for EVERY SINGLE RECORD.
How stupid does she think we are? Pretty damn stupid, it seems. And the Democrat who got up with her to vouch for her is also pretty damn stupid. After a decade of screwy vote totals and demonstrations of how easy it is to change vote tallies on electronic voting machines, you'd think that the Democrats would wake the hell up. Of course you'd be assuming a party that isn't completely inept, but that's another story.
Cieran over at GOS notes why the 7500 number additional votes for David Prosser is significant. So does John Washburn, who was on the Mike Malloy show with Brad last night, and who gave more details on how Nickolaus was tallying the votes in a Microsoft Access database on a circa 1995 PC in her office.
Kathy Nickolaus has some history in this area that should also raise eyebrows:
Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus' response to audit recommendations aimed at improving election security in her office was not a hit with the County Board leaders Monday.
Nickolaus had said she would take the recommendations "into consideration" - sparking concern from members of the Executive Committee and, at one point, a scolding from County Board Chairman Jim Dwyer over what he later categorized as "smirks" during the discussion.
"This is the only audit in my 17 years where there's no compliance before (the audit reaches) the Executive Committee," he said at the start of Monday's audit review.
An audit of last fall's elections prompted Internal Audit Manager Lori Schubert to conclude that while the clerk's system generally complies with state and federal guidelines and accuracy of election totals was not at issue, Nickolaus should improve security and backup procedures.
For example, Schubert recommended that Nickolaus stop using the same ID and password for three employees, assigning individual ones instead, as required by county policy, so that an audit trail of each employee's work exists.
A "worst case scenario" of a disgruntled employee changing the password and locking others out of the system was possible and has occurred elsewhere in the country, Schubert said.
Nickolaus explained her rationale, saying it would take too much time for one employee to sign off so another employee could sign on to the same programming computer when one is interrupted to wait on a customer at the office counter.
Several committee members said they were uncomfortable with Nickolaus' refusal to adopt the recommendations.
During one part of the discussion, Dwyer erupted in exasperation at Nickolaus' facial expressions.
"There really is nothing funny about this, Kathy," he said, raising his voice. "Don't sit there and grin when I'm explaining what this is about.
"Don't sit there and say I will take it into consideration," he said, asking her pointedly whether she would change the passwords.
"I have not made my decision," she answered. After supervisors continued to press the issue, Nickolaus indicated she would create three different passwords.
"This isn't that big of a deal. It isn't worth an argument," she said. "This is ridiculous."
Nickolaus also said she would make her own assessment of when to back up computer programming for election ballots - and store the more frequent backup in another building, as the auditor recommended.
The audit was requested by the Executive Committee after the county's director of administration, Norm Cummings, said Nickolaus had been uncooperative with attempts to have the county's experts review her systems and confirm that backups were in place.
Because some of her equipment is so dated - such as an 11-year-old modem for transmitting data over the telephone and 1995 software no longer supported - and is not routinely getting security updates, her election systems are not connected to the county's system but are on stand-alone equipment.
I realize that I've been to some degree in IT for twenty-three years, and I know there are people who still think that computers are some kind of magic, and who have absolute trust in electronic voting machines. I know because when I ran for county committee a few years ago, and spent a few hours at the polling place as a poll-watcher, I was chatting with some of the over-age-75 election workers and explained to them exactly why you cannot trust the Sequoia Accu-Vote machines that are used in my district. I explained it in language even a monkey could understand, and I think that when I was done, a few of them were at least wondering about it.
But this degree of (at the very least) ineptitude, and at worst outright partisan corruption of the voting process, should not be excused or defended by anyone. And while Republicans and James O'Keefe are frothing at the mouth at the possibility that somewhere in Arizona a guy with a name like Ignacio Lopez might show up at the wrong precinct to vote, there is still, even after Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004 and thousands of questionable election results since then, absolutely no integrity in the voting systems in many areas nationwide.
I'm not making any accusations here. But there is enough here that's fishy that if the shoe were on the other foot, and this were a Democratic county clerk, Republicans would be screaming for a federal investigation. Unless votes are counted, and counted with some degree of integrity, we have no democracy.
Just sayin', is all.
Labels: election theft, electronic voting machines, things that make you go "hmmmmm....."
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
How to assure you win an election in a small town
You can now buy your very own Diebold Accu-Vote voting machine on eBay.
They have ten of 'em. That ought to do it.
via Brad Friedman, who followed up with the seller to get to the source of these beauties:
They have ten of 'em. That ought to do it.
via Brad Friedman, who followed up with the seller to get to the source of these beauties:
The seller tells The BRAD BLOG the systems, more than 100 of them, come from Van Wert County, Ohio! And from a state like Ohio, you know the machines work just as they are supposed to! Get yours now and become the life of the party!
Labels: electronic voting machines, You can't make this shit up
Friday, November 14, 2008
If you can't win an election outright, change the system
Saxby Chambliss must be worried about keeping the Senate seat he stole from Max Cleland in 2002. Here is what happened:
There was absolutely nothing pointing to a Chambliss win at that time:
But now, with a runoff looming, Saxby Chambliss, an incumbent who couldn't get to 50% in one of the few states that went for John McCain, wants to change the rules to benefit his own incumbency:
Somehow I think that if Jim Martin had received 45% and was ahead, Chambliss would have no problem with the current system.
There was absolutely nothing pointing to a Chambliss win at that time:
USA Today reported on Nov. 3, 2002, "In Georgia, an Atlanta
Journal-Constitution poll shows Democratic Sen. Max Cleland with a
49%-to-44% lead over Republican Rep. Saxby Chambliss." Cox News Service,
based in Atlanta, reported just after the election (Nov. 7) that, "Pollsters
may have goofed" because "Republican Rep. Saxby Chambliss defeated incumbent
Democratic Sen. Max Cleland by a margin of 53 to 46 percent. The Hotline, a
political news service, recalled a series of polls Wednesday showing that
Chambliss had been ahead in none of them."
Just as amazing was the 2002 Georgia governor's race. "Similarly," the
Zogby polling organization reported on Nov. 7, "no polls predicted the upset
victory in Georgia of Republican Sonny Perdue over incumbent Democratic Gov.
Roy Barnes. Perdue won by a margin of 52 to 45 percent. The most recent
Mason Dixon Poll had shown Barnes ahead 48 to 39 percent last month with a
margin of error of plus or minus 4 points."
Almost all of the votes in Georgia were recorded on the new touch-screen
computerized voting machines, which produced no paper trail whatsoever.
Similarly, as the San Jose Mercury News reported in a Jan. 23, 2003
editorial titled "Gee Whiz, Voter Fraud?" "In one Florida precinct last
November, votes that were intended for the Democratic candidate for governor
ended up for Gov. Jeb Bush, because of a misaligned touchscreen. How many
votes were miscast before the mistake was found will never be known, because
there was no paper audit." ("Misaligned" touchscreens also caused 18 known
machines in Dallas to register Republican votes when Democratic
screen-buttons were pushed in 2002: it's unknown how many others weren't
noticed.)
But now, with a runoff looming, Saxby Chambliss, an incumbent who couldn't get to 50% in one of the few states that went for John McCain, wants to change the rules to benefit his own incumbency:
Republican lawmakers are considering proposals for next year's legislative session that would shorten Georgia's early voting season and make it more difficult for close elections to reach a runoff.
State Rep. Austin Scott said he expects legislators to discuss tightening runoff guidelines in the wake of the surprising showing by Democrat Jim Martin that forced a Dec. 2 showdown with Republican U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss. He also said he was considering whether to draft a measure that would shorten Georgia's 45-day advance voting period.
"Most people think it was stretched out too far," said Scott, a Tifton Republican who chairs the House committee charged with drafting electoral policy. "Maybe two weeks would be long enough."
Early voting began this year on Sept. 22 and expanded to more sites a week before the November election. More than 2 million people voted during the period, and some waited in lines as long as eight hours.
Secretary of State Karen Handel, a Republican, said the long lines proved that "voters like the flexibility of having these options" but also said a thorough conversation is needed before deciding whether to revive the policy.
Her predecessor Cathy Cox, a Democrat, has said the popularity was a sign that elections officials should devote more resources toward early voting.
Scott said the six-week advance period could also expose the system to more voter fraud, and he said legislators could limit potential abuse by tightening early voting.
"The two goals of the election are access and integrity," he said. "And reaching that balance is sometimes easier said than done."
Republicans could also overhaul election rules that now require a runoff if none of the candidates earn more than 50 percent of the vote.
Scott and a slew of House Republican leaders unsuccessfully proposed lowering the bar to 45 percent last year, and he said the provision could resurface from legislators concerned about the mounting costs of runoffs.
Somehow I think that if Jim Martin had received 45% and was ahead, Chambliss would have no problem with the current system.
Labels: electronic voting machines, Republicans, WATBs
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Alaska: Florida 2000 Redux
The good news: After Alaska decided to actually COUNT 90,000 absentee and questioned votes, Anchorage mayor Mark Begich now leads convicted felon Ted Stevens in the Alaska Senate race.
If you look here, you can see that aside from the few districts that use paper ballots, much of Alaska uses two voting machines: the Accu-Vote OS and the Accu-Vote TSX, both made by "Premier Election Solutions", otherwise known as "Diebold." And when you click the above link and note the title of the page displayed in your browser, you'll see that it reads, GEMS Election Results. For those of us who have been sniffing around the disaster that is the American voting apparatus, the word GEMS is like putting garlic in front of a vampire -- it makes us recoil in horror.
This paper, published in 2007, details the inadequacy of the GEMS database for storing votes. It's an interesting paper to read if you're at all interested in database design, but the really useful part of this paper is its confirmation that "Premier Election Solutions" is still using what is essentially Access databases to store your votes, if you live in a state that uses these machines. To anyone in IT, this is at best laughable and at worst horrifying.
When I started my last job in 2000, the department had just built a new version of its clinical system. The old version was written entirely with Access, which essentially takes the same JET database engine that also runs Diebold voting machines, and marries it to a GUI and a version of Visual Basic to allow for relatively easy development of desktop applications for storing data. The new version used a server-based SQL Server database, which is what you use when you need to store large amounts of data, because Access/JET is just not up to the task.
If you want to, say, store and categorize your recipes, or if you have a small petsitting business, Access is more than adequate for your purposes. If Not-Joe the Not-a-Plumber were actually buying that $250,000-generating plumbing business, he could probably use an Access database. But for a large business, or a situation in which many voters are casting many votes at the same time, Access/Jet is woefully inadequate. Any company that develops a large, mission-critical application using Access databases ought to be laughed right out of business. But all across the country, and right now in this focus-on-Alaska moment, we have a convicted felon who was "re-elected" by a population using voting machines that use Microsoft
a desktop database application YOU can buy at Amazon.com for $189.99.
Of the 90,000+ additional votes that hadn't been counted as of election night, over 60,000 of them are absentee ballots postmarked by midnight on November 4 and just over 20,000 being provisional ballots. (The rest are from early voting.) We should thank the goddess profoundly that this is the case, rather than it being the other way around. Because somehow, if Mark Begich prevails and the vote is within the 1/2 of one percent that would trigger an automatic recount, suddenly Republican males dreaming of six years of jerking off to images of Caribou Barbie on the floor of the Senate will magically discover the shortcomings of the GEMS database.
Look for Joe the Plumber to be leading the vote count riot this time.
UPDATE: Looks like Republicans have suddenly decided that the possibility of inaccurate vote counts is a problem after all -- but only when their seats are threatened by a sketch comic. Too bad for them that Minnesota has a truly verifiable paper trail that allows a manual recount reflecting the actual vote. I wonder if this sudden concern means they're willing to declare George W. Bush's presidency illegitimate? My guess is that right about now they are, and it seems that Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh already have decided that the last eight years never happened.
(For the record: We here at Brilliant at Breakfast believe that every vote should be counted and the will of the people respected. Even when that means Republicans don't prevail.)
If you look here, you can see that aside from the few districts that use paper ballots, much of Alaska uses two voting machines: the Accu-Vote OS and the Accu-Vote TSX, both made by "Premier Election Solutions", otherwise known as "Diebold." And when you click the above link and note the title of the page displayed in your browser, you'll see that it reads, GEMS Election Results. For those of us who have been sniffing around the disaster that is the American voting apparatus, the word GEMS is like putting garlic in front of a vampire -- it makes us recoil in horror.
This paper, published in 2007, details the inadequacy of the GEMS database for storing votes. It's an interesting paper to read if you're at all interested in database design, but the really useful part of this paper is its confirmation that "Premier Election Solutions" is still using what is essentially Access databases to store your votes, if you live in a state that uses these machines. To anyone in IT, this is at best laughable and at worst horrifying.
When I started my last job in 2000, the department had just built a new version of its clinical system. The old version was written entirely with Access, which essentially takes the same JET database engine that also runs Diebold voting machines, and marries it to a GUI and a version of Visual Basic to allow for relatively easy development of desktop applications for storing data. The new version used a server-based SQL Server database, which is what you use when you need to store large amounts of data, because Access/JET is just not up to the task.
If you want to, say, store and categorize your recipes, or if you have a small petsitting business, Access is more than adequate for your purposes. If Not-Joe the Not-a-Plumber were actually buying that $250,000-generating plumbing business, he could probably use an Access database. But for a large business, or a situation in which many voters are casting many votes at the same time, Access/Jet is woefully inadequate. Any company that develops a large, mission-critical application using Access databases ought to be laughed right out of business. But all across the country, and right now in this focus-on-Alaska moment, we have a convicted felon who was "re-elected" by a population using voting machines that use Microsoft
a desktop database application YOU can buy at Amazon.com for $189.99.
Of the 90,000+ additional votes that hadn't been counted as of election night, over 60,000 of them are absentee ballots postmarked by midnight on November 4 and just over 20,000 being provisional ballots. (The rest are from early voting.) We should thank the goddess profoundly that this is the case, rather than it being the other way around. Because somehow, if Mark Begich prevails and the vote is within the 1/2 of one percent that would trigger an automatic recount, suddenly Republican males dreaming of six years of jerking off to images of Caribou Barbie on the floor of the Senate will magically discover the shortcomings of the GEMS database.
Look for Joe the Plumber to be leading the vote count riot this time.
UPDATE: Looks like Republicans have suddenly decided that the possibility of inaccurate vote counts is a problem after all -- but only when their seats are threatened by a sketch comic. Too bad for them that Minnesota has a truly verifiable paper trail that allows a manual recount reflecting the actual vote. I wonder if this sudden concern means they're willing to declare George W. Bush's presidency illegitimate? My guess is that right about now they are, and it seems that Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh already have decided that the last eight years never happened.
(For the record: We here at Brilliant at Breakfast believe that every vote should be counted and the will of the people respected. Even when that means Republicans don't prevail.)
Labels: Alaska, electronic voting machines
Friday, November 07, 2008
I really want us to get this Senate seat
I will forever believe that there was something nefarious afoot the day Paul Wellstone, his wife, and his daughter were killed in a plane crash less than two weeks before the 2002 election. The Republicans wanted that seat...badly. And Paul Wellstone was a very popular Senator in Minnesota.
Al Franken was a friend of Paul Wellstone's, and his Senate run this year had the aura not of a vanity project, but of a personal quest; a promise to a friend. There was something of Inigo Montoya to all this, as Franken worked his state county by county, talking about policy, to show that he's more than Stuart Smalley. And it seems to have largely worked. How largely remains to be seen, but Franken's vote deficit, before the recount even begins, is down to a bare 236:
Note the "accidental" dropping of a digit in the vote count. While Minnesota usually isn't mentioned among states with habitual voting problems, in a race this close, it is not immune to problems, as Brad Friedman notes:
Given that the last person to cross the Republicans in Minnesota died in an still-unexplained plane crash, it is hardly unreasonable to want the election there this year to reflect the will of the people.
If Franken prevails, things start to get interesting. Yesterday's declaration of Jeff Merkley in the Oregon Senate race against Gordon Smith gives the Democrats 57 seats. Franken would be 58. The outcome of the Georgia and Alaska seats are still up in the air. Frankly (or Frankenly), I'd rather top out at 58 and be able to give Joe Lieberman the kicking to the curb he so richly deserves than have 59 Senators plus Joe Lieberman and put that POS in the position of holding the outcome of every vote for the next six years in his foul,shit-stained little hands.
Al Franken was a friend of Paul Wellstone's, and his Senate run this year had the aura not of a vanity project, but of a personal quest; a promise to a friend. There was something of Inigo Montoya to all this, as Franken worked his state county by county, talking about policy, to show that he's more than Stuart Smalley. And it seems to have largely worked. How largely remains to be seen, but Franken's vote deficit, before the recount even begins, is down to a bare 236:
Just as Secretary of State Mark Ritchie was explaining to reporters the recount process in one of the narrowest elections in Minnesota history, an aide rushed in with news: Pine County's Partridge Township had revised its vote total upward -- another 100 votes for Democratic candidate Al Franken, putting him within .011 percentage points of Republican U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman.
The reason for the change? Exhausted county officials had accidentally entered 24 for Franken instead of 124 when the county's final votes were tallied at 5:25 Wednesday morning.
"That's why we have recounts," Ritchie said, surveying the e-mail sent in from the county auditor. "Human error. People make mistakes."
The margin in the tightest Senate race in the country bounced like the stock market throughout the day, with the difference between Coleman and Franken dropping, then rising briefly to 590 votes before shooting down to a razor-thin 236 by day's end.
In a reversal of the previous day, when Coleman had declared victory and suggested that Franken should waive a recount, Coleman kept to himself on Thursday, while Franken called reporters to talk about the prospects for a continued narrowing of the count.
"Coleman said there was no reason for a recount, that there would be no movement," Franken said Thursday, a day after unofficial results initially showed Coleman with a 725-vote advantage. "But you see that it's more than halved and the recount hasn't even started. This election will be decided by the voters, not by the candidates."
Note the "accidental" dropping of a digit in the vote count. While Minnesota usually isn't mentioned among states with habitual voting problems, in a race this close, it is not immune to problems, as Brad Friedman notes:
- While all of Minnesota votes on paper ballots, thankfully. Though all of those ballots are scanned, rather than counted, on proprietary optical-scan systems made by either ES&S or Diebold. Both companies produce systems that regularly fail to count and/or record ballots correctly.
- The majority of counties use the ES&S M-100, precinct-based optical scanner. As we noted on Monday, that same scanner was found, according to a letter sent to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) by a county in MI, to have failed pre-election "logic and accuracy testing". The M-100, according to the letter from county officials, “reported inconsistent vote totals", such that “The same ballots run through the same machines, yielded different results each time.” Public Record has more details tonight.
- Two of Minnesota's three largest counties (Anoka and Dakota) use the Diebold AccuVote OS scanners to "count" their ballots. That system is the same one seen being hacked via its memory card in the Emmy-nominated HBO documentary Hacking Democracy. You can watch the actual hack from the film below (appx 9 mins)
(By the way, the Diebold op-scanner used above, and in MN, was also used in January's New Hampshire primary when pre-election polls and exit polls determined Obama would be the winner, only to see him lose to Hillary Clinton. Obama was found to have won in the 20% of NH which counts their ballots by hand. While Clinton won, by an almost precisely flipped margin, in the 80% of NH that used the Diebold op-scan system seen being hacked in the mock-election seen being manipulated in the clip above.)
Given that the last person to cross the Republicans in Minnesota died in an still-unexplained plane crash, it is hardly unreasonable to want the election there this year to reflect the will of the people.
If Franken prevails, things start to get interesting. Yesterday's declaration of Jeff Merkley in the Oregon Senate race against Gordon Smith gives the Democrats 57 seats. Franken would be 58. The outcome of the Georgia and Alaska seats are still up in the air. Frankly (or Frankenly), I'd rather top out at 58 and be able to give Joe Lieberman the kicking to the curb he so richly deserves than have 59 Senators plus Joe Lieberman and put that POS in the position of holding the outcome of every vote for the next six years in his foul,shit-stained little hands.
Labels: Al Franken, electronic voting machines
Tuesday, November 04, 2008
Get out and vote today
...and hope it's counted the way you cast it. If you want to know what you're up against, and you find Bradblog too daunting, then take a few minutes to read the interview he did over at Buzzflash.
And for those of you who think this is about making sure only Democrats win, Brad reported about a touch-screen machine in Texas that was flipping votes from the Republican to the Democratic candidate.
And for those of you who think this is about making sure only Democrats win, Brad reported about a touch-screen machine in Texas that was flipping votes from the Republican to the Democratic candidate.
Labels: electronic voting machines
Sunday, October 26, 2008
Obama votes are disappearing in the south and swing states. Where the hell are the lawyers?
Does the Democratic Party care about the votes that are being switched in early voting? Does the Obama campaign? Or are they too busy celebrating a landslide that hasn't even happened yet?
Brad Friedman has been on top of the voting issue for the last four years. You'd think that the Democrats would have woken the hell up already.
But you'd be wrong:
Links, and much more, here.
Since the Democratic Party and the Obama campaign obviously don't give a shit whether your vote counts, you're on your own to make sure it is.
Brad Friedman has been on top of the voting issue for the last four years. You'd think that the Democrats would have woken the hell up already.
But you'd be wrong:
The following report, of another Obama vote lost, comes from Nashville (Davidson County, TN), as did the similar one last week. ES&S iVotronic touch-screen voting machines failing again, harming Democrats each time. The same machines are failing in one county and state after another, are still in use, haven't been impounded, and voters still do not get to vote on paper ballots.The "thousands of attorneys" from Obama and the DNC are still completely AWOL.
Tracey Hudson's voting attempt at the Edmondson Pike Library ended with her in tears. The machine malfunctioned and didn't let her see the ballot, but a poll worker told [her] she had voted."I was robbed," Hudson said Friday.
...
"I hit the button to go to the ballot and there was a flash," she said, adding that the screen went blank, then returned to the main menu. "I didn't see the ballot to actually choose anything."She asked a poll worker for help, but the person insisted she had voted and told her to "move on." Hudson said she had been looking forward to voting for Barack Obama.
Have we mentioned that the "thousands of attorneys" from Obama and the DNC are still completely AWOL?
Quick links to our previous coverage, of similar incidents, in at least three other states, follows --- along with a quick list from experts about what you need to do (since Obama and the DNC apparently won't) when/if you have a similar problem with a touch-screen voting machine...
Links, and much more, here.
Since the Democratic Party and the Obama campaign obviously don't give a shit whether your vote counts, you're on your own to make sure it is.
Sunday, October 19, 2008
They're Going to Steal It Again Watch, Sunday Edition
It's clear this is going to have to become a series. It's also clear that I'm going to be linking to Bradblog a lot over the next two weeks.
Today's Republican Electoral Shenanigans: Votes are being switched from Democratic to Republican on touch screens in West Virginia.
From the linked article at the Gazette Mail:
There is absolutely no way in hell this is accidental.
It is important for all of us to understand the machines on which we vote. Here in my neck of the woods, we vote on the Sequoia Advantage machines that have been shown to be vulnerable to hacking. The only thing we can do, since we have no paper trail, is to look at the LCD window that's next to the vote casting button and see if it matches what we pressed on the keypad. But the bottom line is that no matter where you vote, your vote is vulnerable to tampering. And while John McCain and Sarah Palin are whipping their frothing minions into a hate-filled frenzy about "voter fraud" because people being paid a few bucks by ACORN are slackers, there is active vote-switching, almost all of it from Democratic to Republican, going on in early voting.
Today's Republican Electoral Shenanigans: Votes are being switched from Democratic to Republican on touch screens in West Virginia.
From the linked article at the Gazette Mail:
At least three early voters in Jackson County had a hard time voting for candidates they want to win.
Virginia Matheney and Calvin Thomas said touch-screen machines in the county clerk's office in Ripley kept switching their votes from Democratic to Republican candidates.
"When I touched the screen for Barack Obama, the check mark moved from his box to the box indicating a vote for John McCain," said Matheney, who lives in Kenna.
When she reported the problem, she said, the poll worker in charge "responded that everything was all right. It was just that the screen was sensitive and I was touching the screen too hard. She instructed me to use only my fingernail."
Even after she began using her fingernail, Matheney said, the problem persisted.
When she tried to vote for candidates running for two open seats on the Supreme Court, the electronic machine canceled her second vote twice.
On her third try, Matheney managed to cast votes for both Menis Ketchum and Margaret Workman, Democratic candidates for the two open seats.
Calvin Thomas, 81, who retired from Kaiser Aluminum in Ravenswood in 1983 and now lives in Ripley, experienced the same problem.
"When I pushed Obama, it jumped to McCain. When I went down to governor's office and punched [Gov. Joe] Manchin, it went to the other dude. When I went to Karen Facemyer [the incumbent Republican state senator], I pushed the Democrat, but it jumped again.
"The rest of them were OK, but the machine sent my votes for those top three offices from the Democrat to the Republican," Thomas said.
"When I hollered about that, the girl who worked there said, 'Push it again.' I pushed Obama again and it stayed there. Then, the machine did the same thing for other candidates.
There is absolutely no way in hell this is accidental.
It is important for all of us to understand the machines on which we vote. Here in my neck of the woods, we vote on the Sequoia Advantage machines that have been shown to be vulnerable to hacking. The only thing we can do, since we have no paper trail, is to look at the LCD window that's next to the vote casting button and see if it matches what we pressed on the keypad. But the bottom line is that no matter where you vote, your vote is vulnerable to tampering. And while John McCain and Sarah Palin are whipping their frothing minions into a hate-filled frenzy about "voter fraud" because people being paid a few bucks by ACORN are slackers, there is active vote-switching, almost all of it from Democratic to Republican, going on in early voting.
Saturday, October 18, 2008
They're going to steal it AGAIN
They've all but flat-out admitted it.
They're going to steal the election again.
They're going to do it through disenfranchisement, through rigged voting machines, through plants at Fox News calling states before the votes are in.
What else do you think the "narrow victory scenario" means? It means winning by just a hair, just enough to take the White House, leaving stunned Democrats once again wondering how it all went wrong.
Here's how they're doing it:
1) They're duping voters into changing their registrations to Republican by telling them they're not allowed to sign a petition against child molesters unless they are registered Republicans. (Where's the Justice Department on this one, eh?)
2) They're inciting the same thugs that have been screaming at McCain/Palin rallies advocating the murder of Barack Obama to vandalize ACORN offices and threaten the lives of activists trying to register voters.
3) They're embarking on a nationwide quest to systematically disenfranchise Democrats -- and ONLY Democrats.
4) They're going to rely on people's trust in the voting apparatus when, four years after Wally O'Dell of Diebold said he would do whatever is necessary to deliver Ohio's electoral voters to George W. Bush, people in 34 states, including New Jersey, are going to vote on machines that are easily rigged. Let's not say "hacked", because "hacked" conjures up images of bored smart teenagers. Let's call it what it is -- vote-rigging and often vote-switching.
5) The lapdogs of the corporate media are still talking in one way or another about the so-called "Bradley Effect", in which white voters lie to pollsters, thus overstating support for the black candidate. And just to cover all the bases, Faux Noise has decided that there is a REVERSE "Bradley Effect" to try to rile up the Republican base.
"The Bradley effect." "The narrow victory scenario." It's all falling into place.
Oh, and by the way? They also have the apparatus in place to clamp down on anyone who dares to protest the results.
Yes, the Supreme Court put a roadblock in the path of Republicans to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of new voters in Ohio yesterday. But that's just a flesh wound. There are 49 other states to play with.
So there is not going to be a single minute to exhale. Not now, not on November 5 if their efforts fail, and not for the next eight fucking years. Because every damn last one of us has to get out there on November 4 and vote. No excuses. No "he doesn't need my vote." No "My state is blue anyway and I really need to cut up vegetables for stir-fry." No "I've been sitting in a 10-mile backup on the Parkway because there's an accident on the OTHER SIDE OF THE ROAD and everyone wants a show." I don't care if you've been mauled by a pack of wild dogs. Barack Obama is going to need every vote he can get. He needs every vote because he has to have enough votes that not even the Republicans can steal this election. He needs every vote because Bush Republicanism must be shown, even to Chris Matthews, to be completely discredited. He needs every vote because part of this attempt to steal the election is the contingency plan to try to delegitimize a President Obama. Because if you think for one minute that they won't try to turn Tony Rezko into Jim McDougal, that they won't go on wild goosechases finding phony birth certificates to try to "prove" that Obama is "not American" and is therefore not eligible for the presidency, that they won't try to take a shot at him if they have to, guess again.
If ever a presidential candidate needed us to have his back, it's this one. He is up against the foul forces of racism, of fear, of loathing, of white privilege, of mean-spirited little people who wish it was still 1954. We can be satisfied with nothing less than a landslide.
They're going to steal the election again.
They're going to do it through disenfranchisement, through rigged voting machines, through plants at Fox News calling states before the votes are in.
What else do you think the "narrow victory scenario" means? It means winning by just a hair, just enough to take the White House, leaving stunned Democrats once again wondering how it all went wrong.
Here's how they're doing it:
1) They're duping voters into changing their registrations to Republican by telling them they're not allowed to sign a petition against child molesters unless they are registered Republicans. (Where's the Justice Department on this one, eh?)
2) They're inciting the same thugs that have been screaming at McCain/Palin rallies advocating the murder of Barack Obama to vandalize ACORN offices and threaten the lives of activists trying to register voters.
3) They're embarking on a nationwide quest to systematically disenfranchise Democrats -- and ONLY Democrats.
4) They're going to rely on people's trust in the voting apparatus when, four years after Wally O'Dell of Diebold said he would do whatever is necessary to deliver Ohio's electoral voters to George W. Bush, people in 34 states, including New Jersey, are going to vote on machines that are easily rigged. Let's not say "hacked", because "hacked" conjures up images of bored smart teenagers. Let's call it what it is -- vote-rigging and often vote-switching.
5) The lapdogs of the corporate media are still talking in one way or another about the so-called "Bradley Effect", in which white voters lie to pollsters, thus overstating support for the black candidate. And just to cover all the bases, Faux Noise has decided that there is a REVERSE "Bradley Effect" to try to rile up the Republican base.
"The Bradley effect." "The narrow victory scenario." It's all falling into place.
Oh, and by the way? They also have the apparatus in place to clamp down on anyone who dares to protest the results.
Yes, the Supreme Court put a roadblock in the path of Republicans to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of new voters in Ohio yesterday. But that's just a flesh wound. There are 49 other states to play with.
So there is not going to be a single minute to exhale. Not now, not on November 5 if their efforts fail, and not for the next eight fucking years. Because every damn last one of us has to get out there on November 4 and vote. No excuses. No "he doesn't need my vote." No "My state is blue anyway and I really need to cut up vegetables for stir-fry." No "I've been sitting in a 10-mile backup on the Parkway because there's an accident on the OTHER SIDE OF THE ROAD and everyone wants a show." I don't care if you've been mauled by a pack of wild dogs. Barack Obama is going to need every vote he can get. He needs every vote because he has to have enough votes that not even the Republicans can steal this election. He needs every vote because Bush Republicanism must be shown, even to Chris Matthews, to be completely discredited. He needs every vote because part of this attempt to steal the election is the contingency plan to try to delegitimize a President Obama. Because if you think for one minute that they won't try to turn Tony Rezko into Jim McDougal, that they won't go on wild goosechases finding phony birth certificates to try to "prove" that Obama is "not American" and is therefore not eligible for the presidency, that they won't try to take a shot at him if they have to, guess again.
If ever a presidential candidate needed us to have his back, it's this one. He is up against the foul forces of racism, of fear, of loathing, of white privilege, of mean-spirited little people who wish it was still 1954. We can be satisfied with nothing less than a landslide.
Labels: 2008 election, disenfranchisement, electronic voting machines, vote suppression
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Heh. "Russian Roulette"
Brad Friedman spoke with Russia Today last week about the problems with how U.S. elections are conducted:
Cue the hue and cry from the right about Friedman "spilling American secrets to the Commies." Because after all, the attempts, many of them successful, to rig the American election system by Republicans over the past eight years, are supposed to be OUR dirty little secret.
Cue the hue and cry from the right about Friedman "spilling American secrets to the Commies." Because after all, the attempts, many of them successful, to rig the American election system by Republicans over the past eight years, are supposed to be OUR dirty little secret.
Labels: 2008 election, electronic voting machines, vote suppression
Sunday, September 14, 2008
Inquiring minds want to know
Libby notes the Bush Administration's new rules for FBI intelligence gathering and wonders:
Indeed. For what are they preparing?
...why they think there will be a need for such planning. Considering the problems being reported with voting machine glitches in early elections, I have to think they're planning to steal another election and they're afraid that this time the people might fight back.
Indeed. For what are they preparing?
Labels: Bush Administration, electronic voting machines, police state, Republicans, tinfoil
Sunday, August 24, 2008
10 bucks says it's not going to be Republican votes that are dropped
Signs That the Fix Is In: Part One in a continuing series.
Voting machines in 34 states may "drop votes" when the votes are uploaded to a central computer:
Yeah, right. And I am Marie of Rumania.
I can't believe that I'm about to be out of work after next Friday, and the people who designed, managed, and built this POS's still have jobs. Even more appalling is that my department has a crackerjack QA guy -- the kind of tester who can find any problem, no matter how small -- and HE's going to be out of work after next Friday. Our problem is at least attributable to loss of grant funding, not bad management. Diebold's problem is partisan management, crappy design, crappy programming, and crappy testing. The fish rots from the head. The problem is that the future of our country is in the hands of people who either don't know what they're doing or don't care.
MONDAY UPDATE: I was thinking about this while trying to drop off to sleep last night. They can call the company Premier Election Solutions all they want to, it's still Diebold. And I checked their web site, and they are still using the same Global Election Management System (GEMS) that Bev Harris demonstrated a few years ago here:
We know from other documentation, from the icons next to the database, and from the database interface itself that the voting machines themselves use Microsoft Access database files to store votes. We know from the article that there's an upload process that takes each of these Access databases from each voting machine in each precinct in each state that uses them and stores them to a central computer somewhere. What we don't know is what kind of database is on the central computer. But I would speculate that if votes are being dropped when a sizable number of machines are uploading at the same time, we're probably also looking at an Access database.
Why do I say that?
Because even Microsoft says that while in theory, the Access JET engine can handle up to 255 concurrent users, the company states in their document "When to Migrate from Microsoft Access to Microsoft SQL Server":
Let's not even get into how easy it is to alter the database on the local voting machine. But if votes are being lost at upload time, that tells me that the central database is NOT SQL Server, an enterprise database that can handle high-traffic application and virtually unlimited concurrent users. Votes lost at upload time tell me that the central database simply concatenates records from the individual machine into another Access database. Those of you who are techies or power users know what I'm talking about. Those of you who aren't need only visualize a high-traffic bridge at rush hour. If one lane is closed, more traffic has to fit through the remaining lane. And only so many cars can fit on the bridge -- so if there are too many cars, they have to wait their turn or crash into the car in front of them. Either way, simply barrelling through is not going to take you to your destination.
And if the poll workers don't see this problem and keep trying, the entire machine's tabulated votes could be lost.
I worked on an application three years ago that involved just this kind of upload process of records from databases at various sites to a central table. I didn't write the upload process, but I had to support it when things went wrong. It was a PC-based survey application, built with a third party application that stored its data in Access databases. In this case, this third-party application created an export file, which was then uploaded via an internet connection to a central database. There were no more than a few dozen sites, but the master central database was -- SQL Server, NOT Access. Now if a smallish application like this, developed by a couple of academic centers, used a scalable, secure database, you'd think that the allegedly smart people at Diebold/Premier would know not to use what is essentially a desktop database for storage of something as important as your vote.
Voting machines in 34 states may "drop votes" when the votes are uploaded to a central computer:
A major voting machine maker has notified its customers in 34 states that a programming error discovered during testing may cause votes to be dropped when they are uploaded to a computer server from the machines' vote-holding memory cards.
Premier Election Solutions Inc. supplies touch-screen voting systems as well as scanners for paper ballots to large and small customers throughout the nation. The error communicated in a Tuesday product advisory occurs when multiple memory cards are being uploaded at the same time, and it is more likely to occur in jurisdictions that have several voters and use touch-screen voting systems, said Premier spokesman Chris Riggall.
The Allen, Texas-based Premier is a unit of North Canton-based Diebold Inc.
More voters and more touch-screen machines mean more memory cards. Each individual touch-screen machine has a memory card, and scanning machines that read thousands of paper ballots each only have one card.
In Ohio, where the glitch was discovered, it caused at least 1,000 total votes to be dropped in nine of the 44 counties that used Premier's equipment during the March presidential primary and previous elections. The dropped votes were discovered within several hours by election officials who noticed the memory cards weren't being read properly. Workers re-fed the cards into the server until they worked, and the votes were added to the overall vote totals.
Errors that did not produce dropped votes were discovered in three other counties.
The company had previously blamed the problem solely on complications with an antivirus software. Officials in Ohio's Butler County kept testing the machines and claimed that there was a problem with the machines themselves. That was later verified by Premier's own testing, which prompted the company to send out a product advisory to all of its customers.
The company said that antivirus software can cause the error, but that the programming glitch can produce the error even when the software isn't used.
"We are communicating to customers around the country, making sure that we're answering any questions concerning it," Riggall said.
Ohio will continue to use the Premier machines in the Nov. 4 election. Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner said identifying the cause of the problem will enable the state to prepare election officials to watch for the problem and correct it should it resurface. Premier said in its product advisory that the problem can be corrected as long as officials monitor whether the memory cards are being uploaded, and if they are not, reload them until they are.
Yeah, right. And I am Marie of Rumania.
I can't believe that I'm about to be out of work after next Friday, and the people who designed, managed, and built this POS's still have jobs. Even more appalling is that my department has a crackerjack QA guy -- the kind of tester who can find any problem, no matter how small -- and HE's going to be out of work after next Friday. Our problem is at least attributable to loss of grant funding, not bad management. Diebold's problem is partisan management, crappy design, crappy programming, and crappy testing. The fish rots from the head. The problem is that the future of our country is in the hands of people who either don't know what they're doing or don't care.
MONDAY UPDATE: I was thinking about this while trying to drop off to sleep last night. They can call the company Premier Election Solutions all they want to, it's still Diebold. And I checked their web site, and they are still using the same Global Election Management System (GEMS) that Bev Harris demonstrated a few years ago here:
We know from other documentation, from the icons next to the database, and from the database interface itself that the voting machines themselves use Microsoft Access database files to store votes. We know from the article that there's an upload process that takes each of these Access databases from each voting machine in each precinct in each state that uses them and stores them to a central computer somewhere. What we don't know is what kind of database is on the central computer. But I would speculate that if votes are being dropped when a sizable number of machines are uploading at the same time, we're probably also looking at an Access database.
Why do I say that?
Because even Microsoft says that while in theory, the Access JET engine can handle up to 255 concurrent users, the company states in their document "When to Migrate from Microsoft Access to Microsoft SQL Server":
Microsoft Access can technically allow 255 connections for each database. However, this is a theoretical limit and cannot be attained in an organization. In reality, the number of connections or users that an Access database can support is dictated by how well the application was designed and implemented.
For example, a professionally designed and well-tuned Access application can support up to 20 concurrent users who are updating data with good performance. Databases that are used largely for running read-only reports can scale up to about 100 users.
Unfortunately, few Access databases are well-designed and implemented with best practices. This is because most Access databases are created by beginners or power users who do not have the experience or knowledge to create professional applications. They are built over time, and new features and data models are added as needed. The result is that many solutions don’t reliably support more than a few users.
Let's not even get into how easy it is to alter the database on the local voting machine. But if votes are being lost at upload time, that tells me that the central database is NOT SQL Server, an enterprise database that can handle high-traffic application and virtually unlimited concurrent users. Votes lost at upload time tell me that the central database simply concatenates records from the individual machine into another Access database. Those of you who are techies or power users know what I'm talking about. Those of you who aren't need only visualize a high-traffic bridge at rush hour. If one lane is closed, more traffic has to fit through the remaining lane. And only so many cars can fit on the bridge -- so if there are too many cars, they have to wait their turn or crash into the car in front of them. Either way, simply barrelling through is not going to take you to your destination.
And if the poll workers don't see this problem and keep trying, the entire machine's tabulated votes could be lost.
I worked on an application three years ago that involved just this kind of upload process of records from databases at various sites to a central table. I didn't write the upload process, but I had to support it when things went wrong. It was a PC-based survey application, built with a third party application that stored its data in Access databases. In this case, this third-party application created an export file, which was then uploaded via an internet connection to a central database. There were no more than a few dozen sites, but the master central database was -- SQL Server, NOT Access. Now if a smallish application like this, developed by a couple of academic centers, used a scalable, secure database, you'd think that the allegedly smart people at Diebold/Premier would know not to use what is essentially a desktop database for storage of something as important as your vote.
Labels: 2008 election, Diebold, electronic voting machines
Saturday, June 28, 2008
Here we go again
It looks already like Florida is going to be an electoral mess again.
In 2000, Palm Beach County was the home of the infamous butterfly ballot which the Palm Beach Post concluded cost Al Gore the election in 2000.
With just over four months till the 2008 election, Palm Beach is having election problems again:
The other fortunate thing is that it allows partisan election officials to come up with ways to change the counts in the post-election audit to produce the desired result.
In 2000, Palm Beach County was the home of the infamous butterfly ballot which the Palm Beach Post concluded cost Al Gore the election in 2000.
With just over four months till the 2008 election, Palm Beach is having election problems again:
The votes for three precincts weren't counted on election night after Tuesday's special city commission election, prompting the candidates to ponder the reliability of the new optical-scan system as the county heads toward a busy election season culminating with the presidential vote in November.
Nearly 700 votes from three precincts - 14 percent of the total cast - were added into the final results released by the supervisor of elections office after the standard post-election audit Wednesday and Thursday.
The uncounted votes included those from Ibis Golf & Country Club and Riverwalk, two gated communities that produced the highest vote totals in the race. The third precinct was Ironhorse, another gated community.
Under the new totals, Kimberly Mitchell, who served as District 3 commissioner through March, remained the winner. But retired technology company executive Gregg Weiss vaulted into second place, and real estate attorney Rebecca Young finished third.
"The fact that they could not get this right in this small election gives me really grave concern about what's going to happen in a very important national election," Mitchell said. "That's a lot of votes to have not counted the first time."
The county primary election is Aug. 26, and the general election is Nov. 4.
Weiss said he is considering asking for a public inspection of all 4,792 ballots but will first try to talk with Supervisor of Elections Arthur Anderson about the issue. As of Friday evening, he hadn't received a return phone call, he said.
"Woo-hoo. I'm going to have to go out and celebrate tonight, I guess," he said, referring to his new second-place finish. "Are they sure they got them all?"
During the audit in the two days after the election, three cartridges containing vote totals were labeled "suspended," meaning their votes hadn't been counted on election night when all the cartridges were brought to a tabulation center to be "read" by vote-counting machines, said elections office spokeswoman Kathy Adams.
After the audit, they were read and the votes were added to the totals. The cartridges were secure and accounted for at all times, Adams said.
In the end, the system worked the way it was supposed to, she said. The results posted on the elections office Web site and on the county's cable TV channel are unofficial until after the audit, she noted.
"That's why it's marked unofficial, because when they do the audit, they find out if anything was not included," Adams said.
She said the office didn't know why the cartridges weren't read properly the first time. She said it was possible that one reader wasn't working properly and that all three cartridges were read by that reader.
"That's one of the things that they're researching now," she said. "That was the fortunate part of being able to have an election like this, before the primary."
The other fortunate thing is that it allows partisan election officials to come up with ways to change the counts in the post-election audit to produce the desired result.
Labels: 2008 election, electronic voting machines
Thursday, June 05, 2008
Then, of course, there's still THIS problem
So now we have our nominee, and Hillary Clinton is going to "suspend" her campaign this weekend after one last victory rally on Saturday. But any Democrat that thinks all we have to worry about now is John McCain is a fool.
Brad Friedman has been all over the completely FUBAR voting system in this country for the last four years now. If you're not reading Bradblog every day, you should be. Because when you go to vote in November, you have no idea what's going on inside that box.
I ran for county Democratic Committee this year after being recruited by a group of renegade Democrats in an attempt to topple the organization's pay-to-play, crony-driven, self-enriching Chairman. I didn't figure on winning, but it was a toe-dip into the political waters, because the town iin which I live is not only controlled entirely by Republicans, but no one from either party ever runs against the existing machine. I kid you not. We have elections every few years, but the only names on the ballot are the current mayor and council. Our mayor was busted in DWI charges last year with a cocktail waitress in the car, and his house is on the market. So who knows if he's even still planning to live in town? This year the council has allocated $1 million in a town of just over 9000 people to install artificial turf on the sports fields. The budget is determined behind closed doors, it's already been approved, and while you can go to the next open council meeting (there's only one a month) and voice your opinion (which I plan to do), it's already a done deal. This is part of the reason why voter turnout in at least my own voting district in Tuesday's primary was eight percent. Not eighty. Eight.
No, I didn't win, but I did get ten votes out of 37 votes cast, which I think is quite impressive considering I was up against a machine hack and my "campaign" consisted of a letter dropped off at around 20 houses. Imagine if I'd done a real mailing with follow-up. Of course, since the others running on my line got their asses profoundly kicked, I would have ended up on committee with a bunch of pay-to-play thugs, so it's actually a blessing that I didn't win.
But since I spent the last half-hour the polls were open as a "challenger", and stayed to get the numbers, I got to talk to the poll workers about what they do, and about the machines, and got a pretty good sense that these poll workers have absolute trust in the voting machines and absolutely no sense that these machines could be tampered with. Their "check" of discrepancies is to count the number of stubs from the tickets for each party they hand to voters against the machine's vote totals. Of course after I got through with them they had more of an idea of just how the software could be changed to produce a predetermined result, but my guess is they will continue to trust the voting machines, because what choice do they have?
In my county, we use the Sequoia AVC Advantage voting machine. The brochure for the machine (scroll down to the last page) states:
This machine allows "no access to the embedded programming", but what happens if the firmware goes on the fritz? Are the guts of the machine yet another "modular component"?
As Ellen Thiesen of Voters Unite wrote at Bradblog earlier this year, 60 of these machines showed vote discrepancies in New Jersey's February presidential primary. More on this here.
Given the close attention that Brad Friedman pays to the nuts and bolts of voting, you'd think that whoever's tampering with these machines would make damn sure that he votes on one that works the way it's supposed to. But you'd be wrong:
The elderly poll workers at the 1950's-vintage public school where I vote are lovely people. Most of them have lived in the town for decades, raising their children there and trying valiantly to stay in their homes despite property taxes that see hundreds of dollars of increases every year because of their unaccountable local government. One of the poll workers told me of growing up in northern Ireland where only property owners had the right to vote. These are not technologically-literate people. MAYBE a few of them know their way around the internet enough to get to the Flickr albums of photos of their grandchildren. For all that they've been closing these machines for a decade, watching them close the vote at the end of the day was sort of like watching myself try to connect the DVR box, the DVD player, and the VCR to the television set in the basement family room. How do you explain to these people how you can write a dozen lines of code that would take every nth vote for Candidate A and change it to a vote for Candidate B?
Perhaps we can all take a day or so and pat ourselves on the back about the vision of our party. But we can't take any more than that. Because not only are we up against yet another complete wackjob running on the Republican side, we are also up against a voting system that is at best unreliable, and at worst designed to be rigged to produce a predetermined result.
Brad Friedman has been all over the completely FUBAR voting system in this country for the last four years now. If you're not reading Bradblog every day, you should be. Because when you go to vote in November, you have no idea what's going on inside that box.
I ran for county Democratic Committee this year after being recruited by a group of renegade Democrats in an attempt to topple the organization's pay-to-play, crony-driven, self-enriching Chairman. I didn't figure on winning, but it was a toe-dip into the political waters, because the town iin which I live is not only controlled entirely by Republicans, but no one from either party ever runs against the existing machine. I kid you not. We have elections every few years, but the only names on the ballot are the current mayor and council. Our mayor was busted in DWI charges last year with a cocktail waitress in the car, and his house is on the market. So who knows if he's even still planning to live in town? This year the council has allocated $1 million in a town of just over 9000 people to install artificial turf on the sports fields. The budget is determined behind closed doors, it's already been approved, and while you can go to the next open council meeting (there's only one a month) and voice your opinion (which I plan to do), it's already a done deal. This is part of the reason why voter turnout in at least my own voting district in Tuesday's primary was eight percent. Not eighty. Eight.
No, I didn't win, but I did get ten votes out of 37 votes cast, which I think is quite impressive considering I was up against a machine hack and my "campaign" consisted of a letter dropped off at around 20 houses. Imagine if I'd done a real mailing with follow-up. Of course, since the others running on my line got their asses profoundly kicked, I would have ended up on committee with a bunch of pay-to-play thugs, so it's actually a blessing that I didn't win.
But since I spent the last half-hour the polls were open as a "challenger", and stayed to get the numbers, I got to talk to the poll workers about what they do, and about the machines, and got a pretty good sense that these poll workers have absolute trust in the voting machines and absolutely no sense that these machines could be tampered with. Their "check" of discrepancies is to count the number of stubs from the tickets for each party they hand to voters against the machine's vote totals. Of course after I got through with them they had more of an idea of just how the software could be changed to produce a predetermined result, but my guess is they will continue to trust the voting machines, because what choice do they have?
In my county, we use the Sequoia AVC Advantage voting machine. The brochure for the machine (scroll down to the last page) states:
The AVC Advantage requires no specialist knowledge to operate
or maintain. It performs a self-diagnosis at every power-up, and
its error messages display in plain, easy-to-understand language
for quick and simple trouble-shooting. Plus its modular-component
design allows easy in-field part replacement or system upgrade.
This machine allows "no access to the embedded programming", but what happens if the firmware goes on the fritz? Are the guts of the machine yet another "modular component"?
As Ellen Thiesen of Voters Unite wrote at Bradblog earlier this year, 60 of these machines showed vote discrepancies in New Jersey's February presidential primary. More on this here.
Given the close attention that Brad Friedman pays to the nuts and bolts of voting, you'd think that whoever's tampering with these machines would make damn sure that he votes on one that works the way it's supposed to. But you'd be wrong:
As a fairly well-known Election Integrity journalist who has personally covered, for years, the myriad election woes of thousands (if not millions) of voters around the country who have tried to bring seemingly endless stories of votes flipped on e-voting systems to the attention of officials, these stories always continue to be remarkable to me, even if not to many others in the rest of the mainstream media.
It's even more troubling when one realizes that so little ever seems to be done in light of so many of these horror stories, as those very same failed systems are still deployed across the nation, with little or no modification to correct the mountains of documented problems even now, as we head towards an election likely to be of historic proportions this November.
What follows is yet another one of those stories, where a voter had vote selections flipped by the electronic voting system, such that candidates were chosen other than the ones intended to be selected by the voter, though no fault of his own.
But this time, the voter is me.
Though I've covered so many of these stories, it was nonetheless remarkable to see it happen before ones very eyes, as occurred yesterday when I voted here in Los Angeles during our very low turnout California state Primary election.
The ES&S electronic voting system that I used to try to vote on yesterday, ended up flipping a total of 4 out of the 12 contests and initiatives for which I had attempted to vote.
Right before my very eyes, the computer-printed ballot produced by the voting system I was using, incorrectly filled in bubbles for four of the races I was voting in. Had I not been incredibly careful, after the ballot was printed out, to painstakingly compare what was printed to what I actually voted for, I'd have never known my votes were being given to candidates I did not vote for.
Had I been a blind voter --- as the system I was using is largely intended for use by the disabled --- I would have cast my ballot without having a clue that a full 40% of the votes I'd tried to cast for various California Superior Court judges were flipped to other candidates...
After speaking late last night about the problem to Dean Logan, the current acting Registrar-Recorder for Los Angeles County (the country's largest voting jurisdiction) and officials from the CA Sec. of State's office, I can report the failed e-voting machine in question is now being quarantined for testing to try and determine what happened in this, just the latest in a mounting string of failures by voting systems made by ES&S, the country's largest supplier of voting equipment.
The elderly poll workers at the 1950's-vintage public school where I vote are lovely people. Most of them have lived in the town for decades, raising their children there and trying valiantly to stay in their homes despite property taxes that see hundreds of dollars of increases every year because of their unaccountable local government. One of the poll workers told me of growing up in northern Ireland where only property owners had the right to vote. These are not technologically-literate people. MAYBE a few of them know their way around the internet enough to get to the Flickr albums of photos of their grandchildren. For all that they've been closing these machines for a decade, watching them close the vote at the end of the day was sort of like watching myself try to connect the DVR box, the DVD player, and the VCR to the television set in the basement family room. How do you explain to these people how you can write a dozen lines of code that would take every nth vote for Candidate A and change it to a vote for Candidate B?
Perhaps we can all take a day or so and pat ourselves on the back about the vision of our party. But we can't take any more than that. Because not only are we up against yet another complete wackjob running on the Republican side, we are also up against a voting system that is at best unreliable, and at worst designed to be rigged to produce a predetermined result.
Labels: electronic voting machines
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Many DRE voting problems in Pennsylvania
Nobody's accusing anyone of stealing the Pennsylvania primary, but Brad Friedman is monitoring reports of voting machine malfunctions and related problems. Even Faux Noise is reporting on it:
Labels: electronic voting machines, primaries
Saturday, January 19, 2008
Is this any way to run an election?
John Gideon of VotersUnite.org is reporting over at BradBlog that ES&S Notronic (heh...NO-tronic) voting machines have failed in 100% -- yes, folks, that's ALL -- of Horry County, South Carolina's precincts.
SLEEPOVERS????
Poll workers are allowed to take these machines HOME with them?
There's too much to excerpt any more here, but if you want a taste of what's to come in November, go read the whole story. And if you still think this isn't important, take twenty bucks out of your anticipated "tax rebate" and order a copy of "Uncounted: The New Math of American Elections" to watch and pass along to your friends. Because if we can't have any faith in the electoral process, then what does democracy mean?
This is happening in a state where election officials were recently asked about their paperless ES&S iVotronic touch-screen (DRE) voting system and the fact that other states have found the machines to be insecure, poorly designed, inaccurate and not accessible for voters with disabilities. These officials have all said that they anticipate a smooth voting process for both the Republican presidential preference primary on Jan. 19 and the Democratic primary on Jan. 26 in South Carolina.
Prior to the reports of the mass failure of their voting machines, Horry County had released their plan on how they were going to conduct two primary elections on two straight Saturdays.
Late in the week poll workers picked up the iVotronic machines that they are using today. They took them home on voting machine "sleepovers" and then set-up the poll sites for today's primary.
Today only the Republicans are voting.
When the polls close this evening all memory cards, machines and supplies will be returned to the county election office.
The tallies will be done and results reported. The machines will then be prepared to be picked-up next Thursday by the same poll workers who will take them home and repeat the "sleepover" process for the Democratic primary next Saturday.
This plan seems to be a welcome mat for security problems, since the machines are highly susceptible to tampering, and even short periods outside the view of the public and election officials can be a recipe for disaster. Also in question is whether memory cards will be saved between the two primaries, as per federal law. This Train Wreck will probably throw a locomotive wheel into the counties plans.
SLEEPOVERS????
Poll workers are allowed to take these machines HOME with them?
There's too much to excerpt any more here, but if you want a taste of what's to come in November, go read the whole story. And if you still think this isn't important, take twenty bucks out of your anticipated "tax rebate" and order a copy of "Uncounted: The New Math of American Elections" to watch and pass along to your friends. Because if we can't have any faith in the electoral process, then what does democracy mean?
Labels: 2008 election, electronic voting machines
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