Greg Palast's report about the caging of voters in Florida and Ohio finally made it to U.S. TV - 3 years too late. The News magazine NOW on PBS finally showed his reporting. You can watch it online.

JaBbA says check it out.

New Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner is taking Voting Rights seriously. And she's not letting the status quo get in the way of creating a voting system that people might actually trust:

Brunner Calls For Clean Slate In Cuyahoga County

Columbus, OH – March 19, 2007 – Pledging to restore trust to elections in Ohio amidst the myriad of challenges facing the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections, the state's chief election officer, Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, has asked for the resignation of the four-member board, two Democrats and two Republicans, effective the close of business March 21, 2007.

“Cuyahoga County has historically faced challenges with its board of elections, but we are at a time when these challenges are so great that extraordinary measures are needed to improve the election process in the state's most populous county,� said Brunner.

[...]

“With maximum 18-month prison sentences being handed down to two Cuyahoga County election workers last week for their roles in the 2004 Presidential recount, the tremendous problems that surfaced in the May 2006 primary that delayed even the unofficial vote count for 5 days, and the uncertain future of this board as another Presidential election looms on the near horizon, it is incumbent on me as Secretary of State to provide the direction needed to get this troubled board on track. The voters of Cuyahoga County deserve it, the citizens of Ohio expect it, and the rest of the nation will be watching,� said Brunner.

[...]

Those who do not resign by Wednesday will face a complaint and public hearing to be conducted in Cleveland by the Secretary of State's office at a time and date to be determined. Under state law the Secretary of State may “summarily remove� board members for cause.

I love the phrase "summarily remove" when it comes to Bill Bennett. This is long overdue, and would NEVER have happened under Blackwell.

A report on the front page of the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports that at least some of the Cuyahoga County Commissioners want to dump the DREs for Optical Scan ballots:

Cuyahoga County commissioners want to dump their new touch-screen voting machines, which cost taxpayers $17 million, and get another system in time for the 2008 presidential election.

"Even though we have a substantial amount of money in it, we're considering scrapping the whole system," Commissioner Tim Hagan said.

[...]

"In 2008, we're going to be in a predicament," Dimora said. "Our system can't handle the number of voters,"

Tom Hayes, who helped run the election, said counties with optical scan voting machines can handle big fluctuations in the number of voters. With optical scanners, voters fill out paper ballots to be scanned into computers. Elections officials can handle large turnouts just by adding places for voters to mark ballots.

"Electronic voting systems are not scalable to meet demand on Election Day," Hayes wrote in his final report to the commissioners. "Unlike optical scan or punch cards, where you can simply add inexpensive voting stations, there are not additional DRE (touch screen) machines available."

The dark lining to this good news is that they aren't looking past Diebold to supply the optical scan readers. The political influence, and the fact that they are an Ohio company, seems to be enough to have the county commissioners ignoring Diebold's recent history of incompetence and gross distortions to cover up their problems.

We need to look past the current crop of voting machines and look to companies that have a track record for secure machines that can be easily audited - slot machine manufaturers, for instance.

Bruce Schneier has a clear understanding of the requirements for secure elections.

UPDATE Vote for this at Daily Kos

Read this. And take tomorrow off, go help. What are you doing?

Here's what I'm doing:

5:30am - Official Poll Monitor, setup at a local polling place that had problems in May.
6:30am - 10:00am - Official Poll Monitor at 15 of the 23 Polling places in Cleveland Hts. I will be going from place to place observing and reporting.

10am - I go from Monitor to Pollster. Exit Polling at a precinct in Cleveland.
2pm - Election Protection - Working for the Democratic Party to make sure voters in Euclid aren't turned away at the polls.
7pm - Monitoring the website I wrote that will collect exit poll data so that any inconsitencies here in Cuyahoga County can be challenged.

Tomorrow - if necessary, participating in protests. If all goes well, enjoying morning in America.

So tell me...What are you doing?

HOW THEY STOLE THE MID-TERM ELECTION

by Greg Palast
for The Guardian (UK), Comment
Monday November 6, 2006

Here's how the 2006 mid-term election was stolen.

Note the past tense. And I'm not kidding.

And shoot me for saying this, but it won't be stolen by jerking with the touch-screen machines (though they'll do their nasty part). While progressives panic over the viral spread of suspect computer black boxes, the Karl Rove-bots have been tunneling into the vote vaults through entirely different means.

For six years now, our investigations team, at first on assignment for BBC TV and the Guardian, has been digging into the nitty-gritty of the gaming of US elections. We've found that November 7, 2006 is a day that will live in infamy. Four and a half million votes have been shoplifted. Here's how they'll do it, in three easy steps:

Theft #1: Registrations gone with the wind.

On January 1, 2006, while America slept off New Year's Eve hangovers, a new federal law crept out of the swamps that has devoured 1.9 million votes, overwhelmingly those of African-Americans and Hispanics. The vote-snatching statute is a cankerous codicil slipped into the 2002 Help America Vote Act -- strategically timed to go into effect in this mid-term year. It requires every state to reject new would-be voters whose identity can't be verified against a state verification database.

Sounds arcane and not too threatening. But look at the numbers and you won't feel so fine. About 24.3 million Americans attempt to register or re-register each year. The New York University Law School's Brennan Center told me that, under the new law, Republican Secretaries of State began the year by blocking about one in three new voters.

How? To begin with, Mr. Bush's Social Security Administration has failed to verify 47% of registrants. After appeals and new attempts to register, US Elections Assistance Agency statistics indicate 1.9 million would-be voters will still find themselves barred from the ballot on Tuesday.

But don't worry: those holding passports from their ski vacations to Switzerland are doing just fine. And that's the point. It's not the number of voters rejected, it’s their color. For example, California's Republican Secretary of State Bruce McPherson figured out how to block 40% of registrants, mostly Hispanics. In a rare counter-move, Los Angeles, with a Hispanic mayor, contacted these citizens, "verified" them and got almost every single one back on the rolls. But throughout the rest of the West, new Hispanics remain victims of the "José Crow" treatment.

In hotly contested Ohio, Kenneth Blackwell, Secretary of State and the Republican's candidate for Governor, remains voter-rejection champ -- partly by keeping the rejection criteria a complete secret.

Theft #2: Turned Away - the ID game

A legion of pimple-faced Republicans with Blackberries loaded with lists of new voters is assigned to challenge citizens in heavily Black and Hispanic(i.e. Democratic) precincts to demand photo ID that perfectly matches registration data.

Sounds benign, but it's not. The federal HAVA law and complex new ID requirements in states like New Mexico will easily allow the GOP squads to triple the number of voters turned away. Rather than deny using these voter suppression tactics, Republican spokesmen are claiming they are "protecting the integrity of the vote."

I've heard that before. In 2004, we got our hands on fifty confidential internal memos from the files of the Republican National Committee. Attached to these were some pretty strange spreadsheets. They called them "caging lists" -- and it wasn't about zoo feeding times. They were lists (70,000 for Florida alone) of new Black and Jewish voters -- a very Democratic demographic -- to challenge on Election Day. The GOP did so with a vengeance: In 2004, for the first time in half a century, more than 3.5 million voters were challenged on Election Day. Worse, nearly half lost their vote: 300,000 were turned away for wrong ID; 1.1 million were allowed a "provisional" ballot -- which was then simply tossed out.

Tomorrow, new federal ID requirements and a dozen new state show-me-your-ID laws will permit the GOP challenge campaign to triple their 300,000 record to nearly one million voters blocked.

Theft #3: Votes Spoiled Rotten

The nasty little secret of US elections is that three million ballots are cast in national elections but not counted -- 3,600,380 not counted in 2004 according to US Election Commission stats. These are votes lost because a punch card didn't punch (its chad got "hung"), a stray mark voided a paper ballot and other machinery glitches.

Officials call it "spoilage." I call it, "inaugurating Republicans." Why? According to statisticians working with the US Civil Rights Commission, the chance your vote will "spoil" this way is 900% higher for Black folk and 500% higher for Hispanics than for white voters. When we do the arithmetic, we find that well over half of all votes spoiled or "blank" are cast by voters of color. On balance, this spoilage game produces a million-vote edge for the GOP.

That's where the Black Boxes come into play. Forget about Karl Rove messing with the software to change your vote. Rather, the big losses occur when computers crash, fail to start or simply don't respond to your touch. They are the new spoilage machines of choice with, statistically, the same racial bias as the old vote-snatching lever machines. (Funny, but paper ballots with in-precinct scanners don't go rotten on Black voters. Maybe that's why Republican Secretaries of State have installed so few of them.)

So Let's Add it Up

Two million legitimate voters will be turned away because of wrongly rejected or purged registrations.

Add another one million voters challenged and turned away for "improper ID."

Then add yet another million for Democratic votes "spoiled" by busted black boxes and by bad ballots.

And let's not forget to include the one million "provisional" ballots which will never get counted. Based on the experience of 2004, we know that, overwhelmingly, minority voters are the ones shunted to these baloney ballots.

And there's one more group of votes that won't be counted: absentee ballots challenged and discarded. Elections Assistance Agency data tell us a half million of these absentee votes will go down the drain.

Driving this massive suppression of the vote are sophisticated challenge operations. And here I must note that the Democrats have no national challenge campaign. That's morally laudable; electorally suicidal.

Add it all up -- all those Democratic-leaning votes rejected, barred and spoiled -- and the Republican Party begins Election Day with a 4.5 million-vote thumb on the vote-tally scale.

So, what are you going to do about it? May I suggest you … steal back your vote.

It's true you can't win with 51% of the vote anymore. So just get over it. The regime's sneak attack via vote suppression will only net them 4.5 million votes, about 5% of the total. You should be able to beat that blindfolded. If you can't get 55%, then you're just a bunch of crybaby pussycats who don't deserve to win back America.

Is it paranoia if they are really out to get you?

Thanks to early voting, we are already seeing the vote-flipping happening.

In Texas

She watched I as I finished my choosing. I voted for the State Board of Education Representative and then the the slate offered only Republicans for the rest of the offices. I did not vote for any of them telling the woman when I did not want a candidate with no opposition I did not give them my vote.

As the summary appeared for me to check it, Perry, Dewhurst and Combs all had an X WHICH I AM SURE I DID NOT GIVE TO THEM. As the woman watched, I ran the summary twice to be sure that it was correct as I intended it to be voted before removing the card from the machine.

Arkansas

Worst of all, the machine on which Serge tried to vote hadn't been calibrated correctly so that when he touched the screen to vote for Mike Beebe the vote was cast for A$a! Serge finally figured it out but when he went to look at the paper-tape printout of his votes the ballot was too big to show through the little window anything except the last three or four votes on his ballot.

Missouri

A friend of our family’s went last Friday to early vote in Maplewood at Sunnen Park. He voted for Claire McCaskill, but each time he, the election worker, and the election supervisor pressed the screen for Claire, the screen said he had voted for Jim Talent.

and Florida

Debra A. Reed voted with her boss on Wednesday at African-American Research Library and Cultural Center near Fort Lauderdale. Her vote went smoothly, but boss Gary Rudolf called her over to look at what was happening on his machine. He touched the screen for gubernatorial candidate Jim Davis, a Democrat, but the review screen repeatedly registered the Republican, Charlie Crist.
…
Joan Marek, 60, a Democrat from Hollywood, was also stunned to see Charlie Crist on her ballot review page after voting on Thursday. "Am I on the voting screen again?" she wondered. "Well, this is too weird."

Marek corrected her ballot and alerted poll workers at the Hollywood satellite courthouse, who she said told her they'd had previous problems with the same machine.

So where are the reports of Republicans being surprised to see their votes being cast for Democrats?

Godwin's Law:

As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.

There is a tradition in many newsgroups and other Internet discussion forums that once such a comparison is made, the thread is finished and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically "lost" whatever debate was in progress. This principle is itself frequently referred to as Godwin's Law.

I porpose the Blackwell Corollary to Godwin's Law:

When a political candidate attempts to use an opponent's voting record to tie that opponent in the voter's minds to the National Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA), that race can now be considered over and the opponent so slandered declared the likely victor

Blackwell's desperate. Buckeye State Blog. The Beacon Journal.

I've said it before. The guy is nuts.

Mark Crispin Miller lays out the case for the danger of wholesale vote fraud in the upcoming election at the Washington Spectator Online.

Not voter fraud, which is what Blackwell keeps claiming is the problem.

You should read the article, but here is a summary:

#1: The media line that the terrorism and the evangelicals won the election for Bush in 2004 just doesn't stand up to scrutiny. The 4 million votes Bush may have gotten from evangelicals doesn't equal the 11 million extra votes he got with 40% approval ratings.

#2: The terrorism/evangelical party line is essential cover for the massive election fraud that was used to keep the administration in power.

#3: With the Christian Right becoming more and more disillusioned with the current administration (Read Tempting Faith. I'll have a review when I'm done with it) the only political cover for a Republican victory is terrorism.

#4: The party line, in the face of clear evidence of no Iraq/9-11 connection and increasing danger, is to "stay the course" and that victory is possible. This is necessary to allow the Republicans a plausible explanation for an election win on November 7.

#5: The pervasiveness of e-voting and the changes in the election law under the guise of preventing voter fraud will make an undetectable election fraud that much easier to commit.

#6: If that doesn't work, the Republican Party has shown itself willing to simply take an election brazenly and has been allowed to do so. "Duke" Cunningham's seat was filled by a special election, whose official results were contested due to incredible irregularities, not the least of which was that Republican pollworkers were told to take the voting machines to their houses for days and even weeks before the election, where undetectable changes could easily be made to the software. In the face of an official contesting of the election, the Republicans simply flew their candidate to Washington DC and swore him in - and then, in an amazing legal twist, casued that action to invalidate the contesting of the election. It's exactly equivalent to a NFL football team going into a hurry-up offense to prevent the opposing coach from having the time to throw the red flag to have a official's call reviewed.

#7: MOST IMPORTANT - The Democratic Party has shown itself to be entirely unwilling to take on the mantle of the protectors of our Democracy. This MUST be a grass roots effort.

Read the article.

If you see ANYTHING that makes you wonder, call the Election Protection hotline at 1-866-OUR-VOTE (1-866-687-8683).

Help by contacting one of the organizations working on this issue. Try Pollworkers For Democracy.

I was pointed to the Ohio Revised Code section pertaining to returned election notices. The BOE screwed up.

Control of the congress is going down to the wire, and there is no reason to think that the election is going to go any more smoothly this time than in May, especially here in Cuyahoga County.

See my Voter Registration experience.

And a new article today from the IBM Center for Business and Government about possible large scale disenfranchisement

I'm about half way through Brave New Ballot, the new book about electronic voting by Avi Rubin. Since I've been following the Diebold case since Bev Harris first reported problems with the machines, none of the facts presented are any surprise to me. However, the book is well written, and fair to a fault, as appropriate for a serious academic. I'd recommend it to anyone interested in why the Voter Verified Paper Trails are so important to saving American Democracy. I'll have more as I finish the book.

Also, I finally got the info about helping with the election itself. I was planning on volunteering but, as it turns out, since I'm a computer expert the Cuyahoga County BOE will pay me $250 to be a technical person helping with the vote. So, like Avi Rubin, I'll be working at the polls on election day. I'll be on the lookout for issues that could allow wholesale vote fraud, not that I can fix them, mind you. But the first step is to be sure that someone is watching.

Especially Computer Security people....

Your skills are needed on November 7th to work the election. The more computer-literate election judges and technicians we have, the more likely it is that people will be able to exercise their right to vote.

NIPA MEETING

Network for Interfaith Political Action
Educate-Organize-Advocate

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 7, 2006
1:00 – 3:00

Make a difference on November 7th (and beyond)



Get the Facts …. Get Involved …. Make a difference!!!!!




Place: Forest Hills Presbyterian Church
3031 Monticello Blvd, Cleveland Heights
(Corner of Lee Rd and Monticello)

Purpose: Make a difference on November 7th (and beyond).
This election is too important to be left to chance.
• Learn about the new voter I.D. requirements
• Publicize absentee ballot use in your congregation
• How to avoid voting a “provisional� ballot
• Board of Election poll worker recruitment (paid) and other poll worker volunteer opportunities
• NIPA’s enforcement of the 1993 Voter Registration Act with Cuyahoga County Assistance Agencies
• Hear success stories of people (like you) making a difference in their congregation and beyond

Questions and Registration: Susan Alcorn, 440-247-6604

I received my copy of Avi Rubin's Brave New Ballot the other day and am just starting it - I'll have a recap of it as soon as I can finish it. (Along with a long list of other books. I should post them all....hmmm....)

The critics of Electronic Voting are beginning to gain a voice. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has published another op-ed in Rolling Stone - Will The Next Election Be Hacked? - in which he talks about Chris Hood, an ex-Diebold emploee:

Diebold employees altered software in some 5,000 machines in DeKalb and Fulton counties - the state's largest Democratic strongholds. To avoid detection, Hood and others on his team entered warehouses early in the morning. "We went in at 7:30 a.m. and were out by 11," Hood says. "There was a universal key to unlock the machines, and it's easy to get access. The machines in the warehouses were unlocked. We had control of everything. The state gave us the keys to the castle, so to speak, and they stayed out of our way." Hood personally patched fifty-six machines and witnessed the patch being applied to more than 1,200 others.

And now, Maryland Governor Rober Erlich, at the urging of Avi Rubin, has called for a return to paper ballots.

"I'm not sure we can afford another experiment," Ehrlich said after the Board of Public Works hearing. "I want to play it safe."

Avi Rubin, one of the world's experts on the security of voting machines, was a poll judge for the third time in the Maryland primary.

The last two times things went relatively smoothly, although he pointed out areas where someone who wanted to tamper with the election could have easily done so.

This time was a disaster:

Throughout the early part of the day, there was a Diebold representative at our precinct. When I was setting up the poll books, he came over to "help", and I ended up explaining to him why I had to hook the ethernet cables into a hub instead of directly into all the machines (not to mention the fact that there were not enough ports on the machines to do it that way). The next few times we had problems, the judges would call him over, and then he called me over to help. After a while, I asked him how long he had been working for Diebold because he didn't seem to know anything about the equipment, and he said, "one day." I said, "You mean they hired you yesterday?" And he replied, "yes, I had 6 hours of training yesterday. It was 80 people and 2 instructors, and none of us really knew what was going on." I asked him how this was possible, and he replied, "I shouldn't be telling you this, but it's all money. They are too cheap to do this right. They should have a real tech person in each precinct, but that costs too much, so they go out and hire a bunch of contractors the day before the election, and they think that they can train us, but it's too compressed." Around 4 pm, he came and told me that he wasn't doing any good there, and that he was too frustrated, and that he was going home. We didn't see him again.

Yup. That's the company our In-Charge-of-this-election and running-for-governor Secretary of State Ken Blackwell has mandated be used for all voting precincts in the state of ohio.

I was just notified by Amazon that my copy of Avi's new book is on it's way. I'll post a review when I read it.

More from his report:

Maybe some of us on the left are finally getting it. Rather than waiting to respond to Swift-Boat ads, the left is putting out ads of their own. This ad was actually featured on an NPR news story this week about negative ads.

Damn right! It's about time that we make George Allen and his ilk play defense!

THe ad is from VoteVets.org.

The guy they got to do the ad is a real find - a Veteran who is charismatic, plain spoken and comfortable in front of that camera. See more at votevets.org.

A study released last week by the Brennan Center Task Force on Voting System Security concluded that the nation's most commonly purchased voting machines are vulnerable to software attacks. From c|net:

Rep. Rush Holt, a New Jersey Democrat who has introduced legislation to upgrade security for electronic voting machines, arranged to attend a news conference on Capitol Hill on Tuesday where the report was to be released.

Holt's bill has 192 cosponsors, most of them fellow Democrats, an aide said. He introduced the bill last year and it remained unclear whether Congress would enact it into law.

The measure would require all voting machines to produce a paper record voters could inspect to check the accuracy of their votes and election officials could use to verify votes in the event of a computer malfunction or other irregularity.

"Anything of value should be auditable," Holt said. "Votes are valuable, and each voter should have the knowledge and the confidence that his or her vote was recorded and counted as intended."

When discussing voting machines, I'm often asked if I trust ATM machines, because people equate ATMs and voting machines. The answer is no, I don't completely trust ATMs - but I do trust the auditing process at the banks and I check the records. Every transaction shows up the next day on a website, in my Quicken software, and on a paper copy at the end of the month. So I use ATMs because it's verifiable and documented. Same with web transactions, Paypal, Amazon, etc...

If there's something wrong with a banking transaction, I can challenge it and get my money back. My vote is no less valuable. When voting machines are verifiable, auditable and documented then I'll trust them. Until then, I'm voting absentee.