Liberal Repercussion: 10/31/2004

http://www.washingtondispatch.com/article_10500.shtml

Should America Trust the Results of the Election? Commentary by Shane Cory
November 5, 2004

Days after the election, 55 million Americans are still scratching their heads and wondering how it is that George W. Bush won reelection. Garnering 8 million more votes than he earned in 2000, many are raising eyebrows as to how this was accomplished.

While no one wants to cry "fraud" and lead a tinfoil hat brigade, a buzz is growing on the Internet that whispers to the amazed and confused that they should not close the books on this election just yet.

Members of the discussion forum, DemocraticUnderground.com dug in and have already found a clear error in the vote count within Ohio. In one voting precinct in Gahanna, Ohio, 4,258 voters supposedly cast an electronic ballot for George Bush while only 260 voted for John Kerry. While it is vaguely possible that over 94% of voters in the precinct supported George W. Bush, it is a hard number to believe considering that only 638 voters were counted at the polling center.

The Columbus Dispatch has investigated the matter and the director of the board of elections within the county admitted that Bush only received 365 votes. He stated that a "glitch" occurred in the electronic voting machine during the vote tally. This glitch could have given nearly 4,000 fake votes to George Bush if it had not discovered.

The Gahanna incident is just one confirmed mistake and was discovered by activists on the Internet. It was a fairly easy "glitch" to detect given the large discrepancy between the head count at the polling station and the votes for Bush. Given this voting error one must ask, how many more glitches occurred that only involved tens or hundreds of votes?

In Florida, exit polling data showed the opposite of the final results provided through the state. Even more surprising are the changes in votes per party that occurred on November 2nd. Counties using e-touch voting machines in Florida showed an average vote gain of 29% for Republicans and a 23.8% increase for Democrats. However in the Florida, counties that used optical scan vote machines showed drastic differences. Republicans gained by 128.45% in counties using optical scan voting machines while Democrats had a -21% loss (yes, that is negative 21%). Some districts in Florida showed gains over 400% while one, Liberty County, gained over 700% for Republicans.

Many within the nation are left on the verge of outrage when faced with such evidence of possible fraud. Many are gearing up to investigate and determine what actually happened to the votes of millions of Americans or possibly the votes of many non-existent Americans.

One organization that is investigating the matter is BlackBoxVoting.org which is run by Bev Harris. Mrs. Harris has turned over evidence to authorities regarding vote fraud and has come to the conclusion that fraud did occur on November 2nd. However her group is uncertain as to the scope of the possible conspiracy. Unfortunately, Mrs. Harris has an uphill battle as no paper trail exists to verify the electronic voting data.

Over the past few years, Republicans have fought to prevent any type of paper trail through electronic voting. Despite printable ATM type receipts being a reasonable fail-safe, Republicans and corporations such as Diebold fought hard and eventually won the battle against a verifiable voting system.

Without question, the evidence presented thus far should raise suspicion among honest individuals. While maintaining a calm and reasonable demeanor, the results of the Novermber 2nd election should be fully investigated simply for the sake of the nation and our future confidence in the democratic process.

Shane Cory is the editor of the Washington Dispatch.

Vote Fraud in Ohio?
November 5, 2004 12:25 AM

Now that the data is beginning to trickle in from the November 2nd election, many across the nation are raising an eyebrow to results that do not seem to mesh with reality.

In one voting precinct in Gahanna, Ohio, 4,258 voters supposedly cast an electronic ballot for George Bush while only 260 voted for John Kerry. While it is vaguely possible that over 94% of voters in the precinct supported George W. Bush, it is a hard number to believe considering that only 638 voters were counted at the polling center.

To view the vote count for yourself, click on this link and scroll to page 23 (Adobe Acrobat Reader required).

Another curious number that should be investigated is how the Gahanna District ended up with a voter turnout above 100% according to data compiled by the members of DemocraticUnderground.com and confirmed by the Washington Dispatch. Within this recent election, 20,736 voters cast ballots in all of Gahanna's districts while the City of Gahanna only shows that it has roughly 20,130 citizens of voting age. Even with 90% voter registration, 20,736 ballots cast within the City of Gahanna would be an amazing feat worthy of biblical notoriety. Others may call it fraud.

For more information, see Shane Cory's latest commentary on the matter: Should America Trust the Results of the Election?

Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,65579,00.html

06:21 PM Nov. 02, 2004 PT

The jury is still out on e-voting machines used in the election but reports collected by late Tuesday evening by election watchdogs seem to contradict assurances by voting company representatives that the election should "put to rest the unreasonable suspicion" about e-voting machines.

The National Protection Coalition, composed of several nonpartisan groups that include the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Verified Voting, reported Tuesday afternoon it had received more than 600 calls from voters complaining about problems with e-voting machines around the country.

A separate group, Common Cause, reported receiving 50,000 calls, though not all of them were related to voting technology. Both groups had established toll-free phone lines for voters to report problems.

The National Protection Coalition received 80 reports of problems in New Orleans where machines made by Sequoia Voting Systems failed to start on election morning, resulting in voters being turned away from polls because election officials didn't have a back-up plan. By late afternoon some machines still had not booted up.

Lawyers for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and EFF filed a complaint in Civil District Court for the Parish of New Orleans to force election officials to keep the parish polls open longer to accommodate voters disenfranchised by the faulty machines. Sequoia did not return a call for comment by press time.

In Florida, where George W. Bush won the 2000 presidential election by only 537 votes, 10 touch-screen voting machines failed at precincts in Broward County.

Voters in Florida and Texas complained about calibration problems with touch-screen machines. Problems occurred when voters touched the screen next to one candidate's name and an "X" appeared in a box next to another candidate's name. The Election Protection Coalition also received more than 32 reports from various states that spread across all the top e-voting brands made by Diebold Election Systems, Election Systems & Software, Hart InterCivic and Sequoia.

These problems involved e-voting machines that appeared to record votes correctly when voters touched the screen, but indicated a different selection on the review screen before voters cast their ballot. In some cases voters had to redo their ballot five or six times before the correct votes took.

"If we end up with a race as close as predicted, small changes could mean the difference in who wins the presidential election," said Cindy Cohn, EFF's legal director. "We don't have any margin of error by voting machines in a close race. That's particularly troubling."

Voters in Palm Beach County, Florida, reported that when they went to vote on Sequoia machines some races on their electronic ballots were already pre-marked before they started voting. They had to ask poll workers to assist them in removing the selections from the ballot so they could start with a clean ballot. In some cases they weren't successful in doing this.

In Texas, voters casting straight-party tickets reported that machines cast ballots for candidates outside of their chosen party. For example, if a voter chose to vote straight Republican, rather than automatically marking all Republican choices on the ballot, the machine marked some Democratic choices.

And in Pennsylvania voters in at least six precincts that used an older variety of e-voting machines made by Danaher were prevented from voting because of failing machines. Election officials claimed in news reports that they had never had problems with the machines in the past. But Cohn expressed doubts about this.

"Is it true they never had problems in the past or was no one looking (at problems)?" she said. "I suspect if there had been folks looking at elections past (we would have seen problems with the machines). But election officials were able to pretend there were no problems with their machines with no one watching."

Michelle Shafer, spokeswoman for Hart InterCivic, said the problem that occurred in Texas with her company's machines were caused by voters rather than by the machines. The Hart machines are not touch-screen machines but instead use a wheel that voters turn to make their selections. Shafer said after choosing the straight-party option, many voters turned the wheel to manually go through the races and click their choices individually to emphasize them, not realizing that in doing so they de-selected their choices. Shafer said they probably then mistakenly moved the wheel to select a candidate from another party.

"It's not a machine issue," Shafer said. "It's voters not properly following the instructions."

David Beirne, spokesman for Harris County, where some of the problems occurred, said voters had made the same mistake two years ago when political parties instructed voters to go back through the ballot and emphasize their choices.

"I think that often times the voter information passed out to voters is incorrect," he said. "We encourage voters to take their time and ask questions and watch the videotape demonstration that's provided."

Representatives for other voting machine vendors couldn't immediately be reached for comment.

Doug Chapin, director of the Election Reform Information Project, a nonpartisan research group, characterized the e-voting problems reported so far as "lots of littles" that didn't add up to major complications. "We know of no major meltdowns anywhere along the lines some people were worried about," he told the Associated Press.

But David Dill, a founder of Verified Voting and Stanford computer scientist, said although the reports might not appear to be statistically significant -- given that more than 100,000 touch-screen machines are being used in 29 states this year -- they raise questions about the number of problems that are not being caught or reported.

"We're only receiving a small percentage of (reports) on the problems that are actually out there," Dill said. "Most voters wouldn't be motivated to call in and complain and may not know about the number for calling."

Cohn said most voters, if they report problems at all, tend to report them to election officials. She said election officials have been "stingy" in the past about sharing that information with lawyers and watchdog groups.

The Information Technology Association of America, which recently began representing the e-voting machine vendors, called e-voting for early voters a "success."

"Returns suggest nothing but the accurate and secure operation of electronic voting machines," ITAA President Harris Miller, said in a statement.

But Dill noted that the data that voting machine vendors and academics generally use to evaluate the integrity of e-voting machines doesn't include the kinds of problems that voters have been reporting. Generally, the number of undervotes and overvotes on a machine are used to measure their effectiveness.

Undervotes occur when a machine records no choice for a particular race -- either because the machine failed to record it or the voter chose to skip the race. Overvotes occur when voters choose more options or candidates than the race allows. E-voting machines are supposed to make it impossible for voters to overvote.

But "recording a vote for a wrong candidate is not something that shows up in the statistics," Dill said. It doesn't show up in the statistics because officials have no way to know whether a machine incorrectly recorded votes. Without a paper trail or some other way to independently verify that the votes on the machines are the votes voters intended, there's no way to truly measure the accuracy of the machines.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2004/11/02/news/observe.html

Global monitors find faults

By Thomas Crampton International Herald Tribune

Wednesday, November 3, 2004
MIAMI The global implications of the U.S. election are undeniable, but international monitors at a polling station in southern Florida said Tuesday that voting procedures being used in the extremely close contest fell short in many ways of the best global practices.
.
The observers said they had less access to polls than in Kazakhstan, that the electronic voting had fewer fail-safes than in Venezuela, that the ballots were not so simple as in the Republic of Georgia and that no other country had such a complex national election system.
.
"To be honest, monitoring elections in Serbia a few months ago was much simpler," said Konrad Olszewski, an election observer stationed in Miami by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
.
"They have one national election law and use the paper ballots I really prefer over any other system," Olszewski said.
.
Olszewski, whose democratic experience began with Poland's first free election in 1989, was one of 92 observers brought in by the Vienna-based organization, which was founded to maintain military security in Europe at the height of the cold war.
.
Two-member observer teams fanned out across 11 states and included citizens of 36 countries, ranging from Canada and Switzerland to Latvia, Kyrgyzstan, Slovenia and Belarus.
.
Formation of the U.S. election mission came after the State Department issued a standard letter on June 9 inviting the group to monitor the election. All 55 states in the organization have, since 1990, agreed to invite observation teams to their national elections. The decision to observe a U.S. presidential election for the first time was made because of changes prompted by controversy over the U.S. elections in 2000, involving George W. Bush and Al Gore.
.
"Our presence is not meant as a criticism," said Ron Gould, Olszewski's team partner and the former assistant chief electoral officer for Elections Canada. "We mainly want to assess changes taken since the 2000 election."
.
Speaking as voting began at 7 a.m. in the Firefighter's Memorial Hall for precincts 401 and 446 of Miami-Dade County, the observers drew sharp distinctions between U.S.-style elections and those conducted elsewhere around the world.
.
"Unlike almost every other country in the world, there is not one national election today," said Gould, who has been involved in 90 election missions in 70 countries. "The decentralized system means that rules vary widely county by county, so there are actually more than 13,000 elections today."
.
Variations in local election law not only make it difficult for election monitors to generalize on a national basis, but also prohibit the observers from entering polling stations at all in some states and counties. Such laws mean that no election observers from the organization are in Ohio, a swing state fraught with battles over voter intimidation and other polling issues.
.
As for electronic voting, Gould said he preferred Venezuela's system to the calculator-sized touchpads in Miami.
.
"Each electronic vote in Venezuela also produces a ticket that voters then drop into a ballot box," Gould said. "Unlike fully electronic systems, this gives a backup that can be used to counter claims of massive fraud."
.
Venezuela had trouble implementing the system, Gould added, because the ticket printers kept breaking down.
.
The United States is also nearly unique in lacking a unified voter registration system or national identity card, Gould said, adding that he would ideally require U.S. voters to dip a finger in an ink bowl or have a cuticle stained black after voting.
.
"In El Salvador, Namibia and so many other elections, the ink was extremely important in preventing challenges to multiple voting," Gould said. "In Afghanistan it didn't work so well, because they used the dipping ink for the cuticles, so it wiped right off."
.
To observe elections in Florida, Gould and his partner first stopped to meet state election officials in Tallahassee.
.
Their visit to Miami included failed attempts to witness election preparations at two polling stations on Monday evening. After a two-hour drive through heavy traffic, the observers found both polling stations deserted.
.
"In Venezuela we drove around to all the polling stations ahead of time to make sure this didn't happen," Gould said. "Here we consider studying the system more important than looking at actual voting."
.
Indeed, the team left the Miami polling station little more than half an hour after voting began to make a live interview scheduled on CNN. Media relations has become a major part of their mission, with reporters mobbing the monitors at every stop in Florida and a Japanese television crew from NTV tailing them across the state since Friday.
.
"There is a lot of interest in Japan where this election observation is seen as a kind of satire," said Fumi Kobayashi, the New York-based correspondent for NTV. "So strange to imagine Europeans coming to monitor elections in the U.S., don't you think?"
.
A selection of voters and election officials who were questioned as they left the Miami polling station said they mainly found the monitors reassuring.
.
"The United States has long been a model for the world," said Richard Williams, a poll watcher officially designated by the Democratic party. "If we allow international observers, we will continue to have a leading role."
.
Not everyone agrees. Jeff Miller, a Republican congressman from Florida, considers the monitors an insult and has publicly urged them to leave. "Get on the next plane out of the United States to go monitor an election somewhere else, like Afghanistan," he said.
.

See more of the world that matters - click here for home delivery of the International Herald Tribune.
< < Back to Start of Article
MIAMI The global implications of the U.S. election are undeniable, but international monitors at a polling station in southern Florida said Tuesday that voting procedures being used in the extremely close contest fell short in many ways of the best global practices.
.
The observers said they had less access to polls than in Kazakhstan, that the electronic voting had fewer fail-safes than in Venezuela, that the ballots were not so simple as in the Republic of Georgia and that no other country had such a complex national election system.
.
"To be honest, monitoring elections in Serbia a few months ago was much simpler," said Konrad Olszewski, an election observer stationed in Miami by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
.
"They have one national election law and use the paper ballots I really prefer over any other system," Olszewski said.
.
Olszewski, whose democratic experience began with Poland's first free election in 1989, was one of 92 observers brought in by the Vienna-based organization, which was founded to maintain military security in Europe at the height of the cold war.
.
Two-member observer teams fanned out across 11 states and included citizens of 36 countries, ranging from Canada and Switzerland to Latvia, Kyrgyzstan, Slovenia and Belarus.
.
Formation of the U.S. election mission came after the State Department issued a standard letter on June 9 inviting the group to monitor the election. All 55 states in the organization have, since 1990, agreed to invite observation teams to their national elections. The decision to observe a U.S. presidential election for the first time was made because of changes prompted by controversy over the U.S. elections in 2000, involving George W. Bush and Al Gore.
.
"Our presence is not meant as a criticism," said Ron Gould, Olszewski's team partner and the former assistant chief electoral officer for Elections Canada. "We mainly want to assess changes taken since the 2000 election."
.
Speaking as voting began at 7 a.m. in the Firefighter's Memorial Hall for precincts 401 and 446 of Miami-Dade County, the observers drew sharp distinctions between U.S.-style elections and those conducted elsewhere around the world.
.
"Unlike almost every other country in the world, there is not one national election today," said Gould, who has been involved in 90 election missions in 70 countries. "The decentralized system means that rules vary widely county by county, so there are actually more than 13,000 elections today."
.
Variations in local election law not only make it difficult for election monitors to generalize on a national basis, but also prohibit the observers from entering polling stations at all in some states and counties. Such laws mean that no election observers from the organization are in Ohio, a swing state fraught with battles over voter intimidation and other polling issues.
.
As for electronic voting, Gould said he preferred Venezuela's system to the calculator-sized touchpads in Miami.
.
"Each electronic vote in Venezuela also produces a ticket that voters then drop into a ballot box," Gould said. "Unlike fully electronic systems, this gives a backup that can be used to counter claims of massive fraud."
.
Venezuela had trouble implementing the system, Gould added, because the ticket printers kept breaking down.
.
The United States is also nearly unique in lacking a unified voter registration system or national identity card, Gould said, adding that he would ideally require U.S. voters to dip a finger in an ink bowl or have a cuticle stained black after voting.
.
"In El Salvador, Namibia and so many other elections, the ink was extremely important in preventing challenges to multiple voting," Gould said. "In Afghanistan it didn't work so well, because they used the dipping ink for the cuticles, so it wiped right off."
.
To observe elections in Florida, Gould and his partner first stopped to meet state election officials in Tallahassee.
.
Their visit to Miami included failed attempts to witness election preparations at two polling stations on Monday evening. After a two-hour drive through heavy traffic, the observers found both polling stations deserted.
.
"In Venezuela we drove around to all the polling stations ahead of time to make sure this didn't happen," Gould said. "Here we consider studying the system more important than looking at actual voting."
.
Indeed, the team left the Miami polling station little more than half an hour after voting began to make a live interview scheduled on CNN. Media relations has become a major part of their mission, with reporters mobbing the monitors at every stop in Florida and a Japanese television crew from NTV tailing them across the state since Friday.
.
"There is a lot of interest in Japan where this election observation is seen as a kind of satire," said Fumi Kobayashi, the New York-based correspondent for NTV. "So strange to imagine Europeans coming to monitor elections in the U.S., don't you think?"
.
A selection of voters and election officials who were questioned as they left the Miami polling station said they mainly found the monitors reassuring.
.
"The United States has long been a model for the world," said Richard Williams, a poll watcher officially designated by the Democratic party. "If we allow international observers, we will continue to have a leading role."
.
Not everyone agrees. Jeff Miller, a Republican congressman from Florida, considers the monitors an insult and has publicly urged them to leave. "Get on the next plane out of the United States to go monitor an election somewhere else, like Afghanistan," he said.
.
MIAMI The global implications of the U.S. election are undeniable, but international monitors at a polling station in southern Florida said Tuesday that voting procedures being used in the extremely close contest fell short in many ways of the best global practices.
.
The observers said they had less access to polls than in Kazakhstan, that the electronic voting had fewer fail-safes than in Venezuela, that the ballots were not so simple as in the Republic of Georgia and that no other country had such a complex national election system.
.
"To be honest, monitoring elections in Serbia a few months ago was much simpler," said Konrad Olszewski, an election observer stationed in Miami by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
.
"They have one national election law and use the paper ballots I really prefer over any other system," Olszewski said.
.
Olszewski, whose democratic experience began with Poland's first free election in 1989, was one of 92 observers brought in by the Vienna-based organization, which was founded to maintain military security in Europe at the height of the cold war.
.
Two-member observer teams fanned out across 11 states and included citizens of 36 countries, ranging from Canada and Switzerland to Latvia, Kyrgyzstan, Slovenia and Belarus.
.
Formation of the U.S. election mission came after the State Department issued a standard letter on June 9 inviting the group to monitor the election. All 55 states in the organization have, since 1990, agreed to invite observation teams to their national elections. The decision to observe a U.S. presidential election for the first time was made because of changes prompted by controversy over the U.S. elections in 2000, involving George W. Bush and Al Gore.
.
"Our presence is not meant as a criticism," said Ron Gould, Olszewski's team partner and the former assistant chief electoral officer for Elections Canada. "We mainly want to assess changes taken since the 2000 election."
.
Speaking as voting began at 7 a.m. in the Firefighter's Memorial Hall for precincts 401 and 446 of Miami-Dade County, the observers drew sharp distinctions between U.S.-style elections and those conducted elsewhere around the world.
.
"Unlike almost every other country in the world, there is not one national election today," said Gould, who has been involved in 90 election missions in 70 countries. "The decentralized system means that rules vary widely county by county, so there are actually more than 13,000 elections today."
.
Variations in local election law not only make it difficult for election monitors to generalize on a national basis, but also prohibit the observers from entering polling stations at all in some states and counties. Such laws mean that no election observers from the organization are in Ohio, a swing state fraught with battles over voter intimidation and other polling issues.
.
As for electronic voting, Gould said he preferred Venezuela's system to the calculator-sized touchpads in Miami.
.
"Each electronic vote in Venezuela also produces a ticket that voters then drop into a ballot box," Gould said. "Unlike fully electronic systems, this gives a backup that can be used to counter claims of massive fraud."
.
Venezuela had trouble implementing the system, Gould added, because the ticket printers kept breaking down.
.
The United States is also nearly unique in lacking a unified voter registration system or national identity card, Gould said, adding that he would ideally require U.S. voters to dip a finger in an ink bowl or have a cuticle stained black after voting.
.
"In El Salvador, Namibia and so many other elections, the ink was extremely important in preventing challenges to multiple voting," Gould said. "In Afghanistan it didn't work so well, because they used the dipping ink for the cuticles, so it wiped right off."
.
To observe elections in Florida, Gould and his partner first stopped to meet state election officials in Tallahassee.
.
Their visit to Miami included failed attempts to witness election preparations at two polling stations on Monday evening. After a two-hour drive through heavy traffic, the observers found both polling stations deserted.
.
"In Venezuela we drove around to all the polling stations ahead of time to make sure this didn't happen," Gould said. "Here we consider studying the system more important than looking at actual voting."
.
Indeed, the team left the Miami polling station little more than half an hour after voting began to make a live interview scheduled on CNN. Media relations has become a major part of their mission, with reporters mobbing the monitors at every stop in Florida and a Japanese television crew from NTV tailing them across the state since Friday.
.
"There is a lot of interest in Japan where this election observation is seen as a kind of satire," said Fumi Kobayashi, the New York-based correspondent for NTV. "So strange to imagine Europeans coming to monitor elections in the U.S., don't you think?"
.
A selection of voters and election officials who were questioned as they left the Miami polling station said they mainly found the monitors reassuring.
.
"The United States has long been a model for the world," said Richard Williams, a poll watcher officially designated by the Democratic party. "If we allow international observers, we will continue to have a leading role."
.
Not everyone agrees. Jeff Miller, a Republican congressman from Florida, considers the monitors an insult and has publicly urged them to leave. "Get on the next plane out of the United States to go monitor an election somewhere else, like Afghanistan," he said.
.
MIAMI The global implications of the U.S. election are undeniable, but international monitors at a polling station in southern Florida said Tuesday that voting procedures being used in the extremely close contest fell short in many ways of the best global practices.
.
The observers said they had less access to polls than in Kazakhstan, that the electronic voting had fewer fail-safes than in Venezuela, that the ballots were not so simple as in the Republic of Georgia and that no other country had such a complex national election system.
.
"To be honest, monitoring elections in Serbia a few months ago was much simpler," said Konrad Olszewski, an election observer stationed in Miami by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
.
"They have one national election law and use the paper ballots I really prefer over any other system," Olszewski said.
.
Olszewski, whose democratic experience began with Poland's first free election in 1989, was one of 92 observers brought in by the Vienna-based organization, which was founded to maintain military security in Europe at the height of the cold war.
.
Two-member observer teams fanned out across 11 states and included citizens of 36 countries, ranging from Canada and Switzerland to Latvia, Kyrgyzstan, Slovenia and Belarus.
.
Formation of the U.S. election mission came after the State Department issued a standard letter on June 9 inviting the group to monitor the election. All 55 states in the organization have, since 1990, agreed to invite observation teams to their national elections. The decision to observe a U.S. presidential election for the first time was made because of changes prompted by controversy over the U.S. elections in 2000, involving George W. Bush and Al Gore.
.
"Our presence is not meant as a criticism," said Ron Gould, Olszewski's team partner and the former assistant chief electoral officer for Elections Canada. "We mainly want to assess changes taken since the 2000 election."
.
Speaking as voting began at 7 a.m. in the Firefighter's Memorial Hall for precincts 401 and 446 of Miami-Dade County, the observers drew sharp distinctions between U.S.-style elections and those conducted elsewhere around the world.
.
"Unlike almost every other country in the world, there is not one national election today," said Gould, who has been involved in 90 election missions in 70 countries. "The decentralized system means that rules vary widely county by county, so there are actually more than 13,000 elections today."
.
Variations in local election law not only make it difficult for election monitors to generalize on a national basis, but also prohibit the observers from entering polling stations at all in some states and counties. Such laws mean that no election observers from the organization are in Ohio, a swing state fraught with battles over voter intimidation and other polling issues.
.
As for electronic voting, Gould said he preferred Venezuela's system to the calculator-sized touchpads in Miami.
.
"Each electronic vote in Venezuela also produces a ticket that voters then drop into a ballot box," Gould said. "Unlike fully electronic systems, this gives a backup that can be used to counter claims of massive fraud."
.
Venezuela had trouble implementing the system, Gould added, because the ticket printers kept breaking down.
.
The United States is also nearly unique in lacking a unified voter registration system or national identity card, Gould said, adding that he would ideally require U.S. voters to dip a finger in an ink bowl or have a cuticle stained black after voting.
.

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/03/1520249

We speak with investigative reporter Greg Palast and Barbara Arnwine of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law about voting problems in Florida, Ohio and New Mexico. [includes rush transcript] President Bush won Florida along with its 27 electoral votes four years after the Supreme Court stopped the recount and put him in the White House.

With 99% of precincts reporting, Bush won 52 percent of the votes and John Kerry 47 percent. Independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader won less than 1 percent.

Hundreds of thousands of people across the state took advantage of early voting, which started 15 days ago. By the time the polls opened on Nov. 2nd, more than 2 million voters had cast ballots. But in heavily Democratic Broward County, thousands of voters never received their absentee ballots in time.

Broward elections Supervisor Brenda Snipes came under fire over the weekend for losing track of as many as 58,000 ballots that were allegedly given to the Postal Service earlier in the month.

County officials moved to get the ballots sent out in time for voters to return them by November 2nd as required by state election rules. According to the U.S. Postal Service, after mail carriers had left on Saturday, both Broward County and Palm Beach County dropped off more than 8,000 absentee ballots for mailing. Many of the ballots arrived unsealed, forcing postal employees to take the time to seal envelopes. In a video press release from the US Postal Service, spokesperson Gerald McKiernan described the situation.

* Gerald McKiernan, U.S. Postal Service Spokesman speaking in Broward County, FL on October 30.

US Postal Service, spokesperson Gerald McKiernan. The American Civil Liberties Union has now filed a lawsuit against Secretary of State Glenda Hood and elections supervisors in Miami-Dade and Broward counties, asking that completed absentee ballots mailed in the U.S. be subject to the same Nov. 12 deadline as overseas votes. State law required those ballots to reach county offices by Tuesday night. As the ACLU was preparing to file the suit, Glenda Hood addressed the issue to reporters.

November 4, 2004
EDITORIAL
Lessons of the Ballot Box

When the last of the Ohio returns came in, the 2004 election ended up being outside the so-called margin of litigation. But an uncontested election is not necessarily a well-run one. In Ohio, and around the country, this year's election exhibited flaws that will continue to detract from our democracy until they are addressed. One of the first issues that both parties should commit to is working to produce a first-class elections system.

There were significant problems with the Ohio voting, even though the Kerry campaign determined that a recount would not change the outcome. Incredibly, four years after the 2000 election mess, more than 70 percent of Ohioans still cast their vote on punch-card machines, whose hanging, pregnant and dimpled chads routinely disenfranchise as many as 2 percent, or more, of the voters who use them. Many of the more than 130,000 Ohioans who were forced to vote on provisional ballots were registered voters who should have been on the rolls. The system did not melt down, but there were plenty of problems that showed its vulnerability.

Partisan poll workers challenged voters in Ohio and Florida, relying on laws that in future elections could be used to disenfranchise large numbers of voters and to slow voting in some precincts to a crawl. Voter identification requirements were arbitrarily, and often incorrectly, enforced. Minority voters in some states were the targets of dirty tricks, including leaflets telling newly registered voters that they could not vote in this year's election.

One of the most troubling problems with the voting was the extraordinary lines many voters faced at the polls. In some areas, the wait to vote was four hours or more, and in many cases the longest lines were in minority neighborhoods. Many people literally cannot afford to wait that long to vote, and there were numerous reports of voters leaving the lines without voting. The nation should commit itself to providing enough voting machines and election workers to make waiting times reasonable.

The controversy over provisional ballots, one of the few reforms to come out of the 2000 election, showed that the rules governing them need improvement. Many states quietly adopted laws requiring these provisional ballots to be thrown out if they are cast in the wrong precinct. But election officials are often unable to direct voters to the right precinct on Election Day. A valid ballot should count wherever it is filed. There were also too many reports of absentee ballots duly applied for, including by military personnel, that did not arrive in time.

Nearly one-third of voters nationwide cast their ballots on electronic voting machines that do not produce a paper trail. As the public has learned more about the vulnerability of electronic voting to errors and intentional tampering, there has been a fast-growing movement to require voter-verified paper trails. Until these are provided, many voters will not have confidence in these machines.

The good news about the election system this week is that more than 114 million Americans, including many young people and new voters, believed in it enough to vote. There is great work to be done, however, to give them the system they deserve.

Making Votes Count: Editorials in this series remain online at nytimes.com/makingvotescount.

Specter as ally

By LARA JAKES JORDAN
Associated Press

PHILADELPHIA -- The Republican expected to chair the Senate Judiciary Committee next year bluntly warned newly re-elected President Bush today against putting forth Supreme Court nominees who would seek to overturn abortion rights or are otherwise too conservative to win confirmation.

"When you talk about judges who would change the right of a woman to choose, overturn Roe v. Wade, I think that is unlikely," Specter said, referring to the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion.

"The president is well aware of what happened, when a bunch of his nominees were sent up, with the filibuster," Specter added, referring to Senate Democrats' success over the past four years in blocking the confirmation of many of Bush's conservative judicial picks. "... And I would expect the president to be mindful of the considerations which I am mentioning."

(As Chairman of the Judiciary Committee) Specter, 74, would have broad authority to reshape the nation's highest court (in the new Congress). He would have wide latitude to schedule hearings, call for votes and make the process as easy or as hard as he wants.

Legal scholar Dennis Hutchinson said Specter's message to the White House appears to be "a way of asserting his authority" as he prepares to chair the Judiciary Committee when Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, is term-limited from keeping the post next year.

"A self-proclaimed moderate, he helped kill President Reagan's nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court and of Jeff Sessions to a federal judgeship. Specter called both nominees too extreme on civil rights issues. Sessions later became a Republican senator from Alabama and now sits on the Judiciary Committee with Specter.

Kerry Won. . .
Greg Palast
November 04, 2004

Bush won Ohio by 136,483 votes. In the United States, about 3 percent of votes cast are voided—known as “spoilage” in election jargon—because the ballots cast are inconclusive. Drawing on what happened in Florida and studies of elections past, Palast argues that if Ohio’s discarded ballots were counted, Kerry would have won the state. Today, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports there are a total of 247,672 votes not counted in Ohio, if you add the 92,672 discarded votes plus the 155,000 provisional ballots. So far there's no indication that Palast's hypothesis will be tested because only the provisional ballots are being counted.

Greg Palast, contributing editor to Harper's magazine, investigated the manipulation of the vote for BBC Television's Newsnight. The documentary, "Bush Family Fortunes," based on his New York Times bestseller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, has been released this month on DVD .

Kerry won. Here are the facts.

I know you don't want to hear it. You can't face one more hung chad. But I don't have a choice. As a journalist examining that messy sausage called American democracy, it's my job to tell you who got the most votes in the deciding states. Tuesday, in Ohio and New Mexico, it was John Kerry.

Most voters in Ohio thought they were voting for Kerry. At 1:05 a.m. Wednesday morning, CNN's exit poll showed Kerry beating Bush among Ohio women by 53 percent to 47 percent. The exit polls were later combined with—and therefore contaminated by—the tabulated results, ultimately becoming a mirror of the apparent actual vote. [To read about the skewing of exit polls to conform to official results, click here .] Kerry also defeated Bush among Ohio's male voters 51 percent to 49 percent. Unless a third gender voted in Ohio, Kerry took the state.

So what's going on here? Answer: the exit polls are accurate. Pollsters ask, "Who did you vote for?" Unfortunately, they don't ask the crucial, question, "Was your vote counted?" The voters don't know.

Here's why. Although the exit polls show that most voters in Ohio punched cards for Kerry-Edwards, thousands of these votes were simply not recorded. This was predictable and it was predicted. [See TomPaine.com, "An Election Spoiled Rotten," November 1.]

Once again, at the heart of the Ohio uncounted vote game are, I'm sorry to report, hanging chads and pregnant chads, plus some other ballot tricks old and new.

The election in Ohio was not decided by the voters but by something called "spoilage." Typically in the United States, about 3 percent of the vote is voided, just thrown away, not recorded. When the bobble-head boobs on the tube tell you Ohio or any state was won by 51 percent to 49 percent, don't you believe it ... it has never happened in the United States, because the total never reaches a neat 100 percent. The television totals simply subtract out the spoiled vote.

Whose Votes Are Discarded?

And not all votes spoil equally. Most of those votes, say every official report, come from African-American and minority precincts. (To learn more, click here.)

We saw this in Florida in 2000. Exit polls showed Gore with a plurality of at least 50,000, but it didn't match the official count. That's because the official, Secretary of State Katherine Harris, excluded 179,855 spoiled votes. In Florida, as in Ohio, most of these votes lost were cast on punch cards where the hole wasn't punched through completely—leaving a 'hanging chad,'—or was punched extra times. Whose cards were discarded? Expert statisticians investigating spoilage for the government calculated that 54 percent of the ballots thrown in the dumpster were cast by black folks. (To read the report from the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, click here .)

And here's the key: Florida is terribly typical. The majority of ballots thrown out (there will be nearly 2 million tossed out from Tuesday's election) will have been cast by African American and other minority citizens.

So here we go again. Or, here we don't go again. Because unlike last time, Democrats aren't even asking Ohio to count these cards with the not-quite-punched holes (called "undervotes" in the voting biz). Nor are they demanding we look at the "overvotes" where voter intent may be discerned.

Ohio is one of the last states in America to still use the vote-spoiling punch-card machines. And the Secretary of State of Ohio, J. Kenneth Blackwell, wrote before the election, “the possibility of a close election with punch cards as the state’s primary voting device invites a Florida-like calamity.”

But this week, Blackwell, a rabidly partisan Republican, has warmed up to the result of sticking with machines that have a habit of eating Democratic votes. When asked if he feared being this year's Katherine Harris, Blackwell noted that Ms. Fix-it's efforts landed her a seat in Congress.

Exactly how many votes were lost to spoilage this time? Blackwell's office, notably, won't say, though the law requires it be reported. Hmm. But we know that last time, the total of Ohio votes discarded reached a democracy-damaging 1.96 percent. The machines produced their typical loss—that's 110,000 votes—overwhelmingly Democratic.

The Impact Of Challenges

First and foremost, Kerry was had by chads. But the Democrat wasn't punched out by punch cards alone. There were also the 'challenges.' That's a polite word for the Republican Party of Ohio's use of an old Ku Klux Klan technique: the attempt to block thousands of voters of color at the polls. In Ohio, Wisconsin and Florida, the GOP laid plans for poll workers to ambush citizens under arcane laws—almost never used—allowing party-designated poll watchers to finger individual voters and demand they be denied a ballot. The Ohio courts were horrified and federal law prohibits targeting of voters where race is a factor in the challenge. But our Supreme Court was prepared to let Republicans stand in the voting booth door.

In the end, the challenges were not overwhelming, but they were there. Many apparently resulted in voters getting these funky "provisional" ballots—a kind of voting placebo—which may or may not be counted. Blackwell estimates there were 175,000; Democrats say 250,000. Pick your number. But as challenges were aimed at minorities, no one doubts these are, again, overwhelmingly Democratic. Count them up, add in the spoiled punch cards (easy to tally with the human eye in a recount), and the totals begin to match the exit polls; and, golly, you've got yourself a new president. Remember, Bush won by 136,483 votes in Ohio.

Enchanted State's Enchanted Vote

Now, on to New Mexico, where a Kerry plurality—if all votes are counted—is more obvious still. Before the election, in TomPaine.com, I wrote, "John Kerry is down by several thousand votes in New Mexico, though not one ballot has yet been counted."

How did that happen? It's the spoilage, stupid; and the provisional ballots.

CNN said George Bush took New Mexico by 11,620 votes. Again, the network total added up to that miraculous, and non-existent, '100 percent' of ballots cast.

New Mexico reported in the last race a spoilage rate of 2.68 percent, votes lost almost entirely in Hispanic, Native American and poor precincts—Democratic turf. From Tuesday's vote, assuming the same ballot-loss rate, we can expect to see 18,000 ballots in the spoilage bin.

Spoilage has a very Democratic look in New Mexico. Hispanic voters in the Enchanted State, who voted more than two to one for Kerry, are five times as likely to have their vote spoil as a white voter. Counting these uncounted votes would easily overtake the Bush 'plurality.'

Already, the election-bending effects of spoilage are popping up in the election stats, exactly where we'd expect them: in heavily Hispanic areas controlled by Republican elections officials. Chaves County, in the "Little Texas" area of New Mexico, has a 44 percent Hispanic population, plus African Americans and Native Americans, yet George Bush "won" there 68 percent to 31 percent.

I spoke with Chaves' Republican county clerk before the election, and he told me that this huge spoilage rate among Hispanics simply indicated that such people simply can't make up their minds on the choice of candidate for president. Oddly, these brown people drive across the desert to register their indecision in a voting booth.

Now, let's add in the effect on the New Mexico tally of provisional ballots.

"They were handing them out like candy," Albuquerque journalist Renee Blake reported of provisional ballots. About 20,000 were given out. Who got them?

Santiago Juarez who ran the "Faithful Citizenship" program for the Catholic Archdiocese in New Mexico, told me that "his" voters, poor Hispanics, whom he identified as solid Kerry supporters, were handed the iffy provisional ballots. Hispanics were given provisional ballots, rather than the countable kind "almost religiously," he said, at polling stations when there was the least question about a voter's identification. Some voters, Santiago said, were simply turned away.

Your Kerry Victory Party

So we can call Ohio and New Mexico for John Kerry—if we count all the votes.

But that won't happen. Despite the Democratic Party's pledge, the leadership this time gave in to racial disenfranchisement once again. Why? No doubt, the Democrats know darn well that counting all the spoiled and provisional ballots will require the cooperation of Ohio's Secretary of State, Blackwell. He will ultimately decide which spoiled and provisional ballots get tallied. Blackwell, hankering to step into Kate Harris' political pumps, is unlikely to permit anything close to a full count. Also, Democratic leadership knows darn well the media would punish the party for demanding a full count.

What now? Kerry won, so hold your victory party. But make sure the shades are down: it may be become illegal to demand a full vote count under PATRIOT Act III.

I used to write a column for the Guardian papers in London. Several friends have asked me if I will again leave the country. In light of the failure—a second time—to count all the votes, that won't be necessary. My country has left me.

Liberal Repercussion

vendredi, novembre 05, 2004

Qui suis-je

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