http://truevote.us/nucleus/ en-us Nucleus CMS v3.33 � Weblog http://backend.userland.com/rss http://truevote.us/nucleus//nucleus/nucleus2.gif http://truevote.us/nucleus/ http://truevote.us/nucleus/index.php?itemid=991 Said Recently Threatened by Karl Rove, Had Beeen Key Witness in OH '04 Election Fraud Case
Built Alternate WH Email System, Websites for Bush, McCain, Swiftboaters, '04 OH Election, More...

By Emily Levy

The Akron Beacon Journal is reporting that the private plane of the GOP's highly-placed "IT guru" Mike Connell's went down in Lake Township, Ohio on Friday evening. Connell was killed in the crash and is reported to have been the only person on board. There are no reports of anyone on the ground being hurt, though his plane crashed in a residential neighborhood.
Connell is a familiar name to readers of The BRAD BLOG as a key witness in the King-Lincoln v. Blackwell lawsuit regarding fraud in the 2004 Presidential Election in Ohio. That recently revived, long-standing lawsuit led to Connell's recent deposition on November 3, 2008, the day before this year's general election. According to plaintiff's lead attorney Cliff Arnebeck in July, a tipster had warned that Connell had been threatened by Karl Rove, as The BRAD BLOG reported at the time, in an attempt to intimidate him into "taking the fall" for Ohio election fraud not long after a motion was filed to lift the stay in that case.

Connell had been memorably described as a "high IQ Forrest Gump", by the attorneys for the plaintiffs in the Ohio fraud case, for his apparent penchant at the scene of "every single crime" from Florida 2000 to Ohio 2004 to the network firewall on a number of key Congressional committees to the case of the missing White House emails. (Video and text transcript of the interview with the attorneys here.)

In late September, the federal judge in the Ohio case agreed to lift the stay, and in late October he compelled Connell to give a deposition to plaintiff attorneys on the Monday before the Tuesday general election.

Connell had been served with a subpoena to appear in the federal courtroom in Ohio at the same College Park, MD airport where his single engine plane reportedly took off from last night, on his final solo flight...

Source: BradBlog


One of my sources died in a plane crash last night...

Larisa Alexandrovna

I don't usually reveal sources, but I think this is incredibly important. Michael Connell died in a plane crash last night. He was a key witness in the Ohio election fraud case that I have been reporting on. More importantly, however, he had information that he was ready to share.

You see, Mike Connell set-up the alternate email and communications system for the White House. He was responsible for creating the system that hosted the infamous GWB43.com accounts that Karl Rove and others used. When asked by Congress to provide these emails, the White House said that they were destroyed. But in reality, what Connell is alleged to have done is move these files to other servers after having allegedly scrubbed the files from all "known" Karl Rove accounts.

In addition, I have reason to believe that the alternate accounts were used to communicate with US Attorneys involved in political prosecutions, like that of Don Siegelman. This is what I have been working on to prove for over a year. In fact, it was through following the Siegelman-Rove trail that I found evidence leading to Connell. That is how I became aware of him. Mike was getting ready to talk. He was frightened.

He has flown his private plane for years without incident. I know he was going to DC last night, but I don't know why. He apparently ran out of gas, something I find hard to believe. I am not saying that this was a hit nor am I resigned to this being simply an accident either. I am no expert on aviation and cannot provide an opinion on the matter. What I am saying, however, is that given the context, this event needs to be examined carefully. If you want to understand the context more broadly, I suggest you read this article I did a while back about the break-ins and arson cases that Siegelman and others have experienced.

Just to be very clear and state again, I am not claiming conspiracy theory or direct relation to Karl Rove or the White House in any of these events. What I am saying, however, is that these possible relationships cannot and should not be overlooked by investigators. There are far too many serious and reasonable questions that must be answered for the public.

I have been to Mr. Connell's home. Mr. Connell has confided that he was being threatened, something that his attorneys also told the judge in the Ohio election fraud case. When I met with Heather, his wife, I did so carefully because of the threats he was getting.

I left a note for her in her mailbox and asked her to meet me in a local park near their home. Heather came and through our conversation I got the sense that these were not bad people or corrupt people. The Connell's really believed that what they were involved in served God's plan. Regardless of of what any of us think about their religious views or allegations relating to Connell's involvement in various things, I do think these were good people who got caught up in something bigger than themselves. My heart goes out to Heather and the children.

Source: At Largely

More on Mike Connell:

Stark Co. plane crash: Who was Michael Connell?
WKYC TV [Cleveland/Akron, Ohio]
December 20, 2008
http://www.wkyc.com/news/local/news_article.aspx?storyid=103520&catid=3

Ken Blackwell Outsources Ohio Election Results to GOP Internet Operatives, Again
by luaptifer
Tue Nov 07, 2006
ePluribus Media
http://scoop.epluribusmedia.org/story/2006/11/7/115314/922

Ohio's election website still sent real-time results to GOP mirror server
by intranets
Thu Nov 09, 2006
ePluribus Media
http://scoop.epluribusmedia.org/story/2006/11/9/61233/1283

The GOP, GeorgeWBush.com and the Line that Jumped the Congressional Firewall
ePluribus Media
Mar 27, 2007
http://scoop.epluribusmedia.org/story/2007/3/26/22612/9031

Who is Michael L. Connell? Part I: The Atwater School of Politics
ePluribus Media
Mar 28, 2007
http://scoop.epluribusmedia.org/story/2007/3/28/143050/889

Who is Michael L. Connell? Part II: Behind the firewall
ePluribus Media
Apr 02, 2007
http://scoop.epluribusmedia.org/story/2007/4/2/6328/14926

Rove -ing emails: what else could go missing?
by Todd Johnston and Luaptifer
ePluribus Media
Sun Apr 22, 2007
http://scoop.epluribusmedia.org/story/2007/4/22/33926/1773

Unusual Election Integrity-related Deaths

1. Dan Rocco -- April 1, 2002 -- ChoicePoint VP -- plane crash
He died on April 1, 2002, in a plane crash in Gainesville, Georgia. He was an executive vice president at ChoicePoint, the firm that gained infamy with their faulty "felons" list supplied to Katherine Harris during the 2000 election in Florida. As a result of this list, over 90,000 voters (mostly African-American voters) were wrongly identified as felons and purged from the rolls.
http://www.bk2k.com/bushbodycount/stolen-election/bodies.shtml

2. Wesley Vance -- April 26, 2003 -- Diebold VP -- plane crash
Pilot Killed In Plane Crash Was Top Exec At Diebold
April 28, 2003
http://www.wkbn.com/Global/story.asp?S=1253108
(Jackson-AP) -- The pilot of a single-engine airplane that crashed in southern Ohio over the weekend was the chief operating officer of Canton-based Diebold Incorporated.
The company says 45-year-old Wesley Vance of Canton was flying a private plane that crashed Saturday near the Jackson County Airport. ...The company says Vance joined Diebold in October, 2000, as president of its North America business unit. He was named chief operating officer in 2001. Chief Executive Walden O'Dell will assume the company's daily operational responsibilities until a successor is found for Vance. An airport spokesman says Vance was practicing takeoffs and landings in a six-seat Beachcraft A-36 when it crashed near the airport.

[Note - On September 21, 2005, Diebold announces that its current COO will leave his post and the board. Stock drops 16% intraday. O'Dell will temporarily assume the post.]

http://www.abqjournal.com/obits/profiles/vance05-02-03.htm

Vance was an Eagle Scout, elected to Boys State, and a church-going Mormon, married, father of five. He earned a degree from Brigham Young University. He was described as a confident person who people liked to be around. His senior class in high school voted him "favorite boy". He had been a pilot for over twenty years. He was named to Diebold's No. 2 position as COO in 2001, managing the company's global operations.

3. Anthony J. Celebrezze Jr. -- July 4, 2003 -- Diebold consultant -- cause of death not confirmed
Anthony Celebrezze Dies
07/05/03


Former Ohio Attorney General Anthony J. Celebrezze Jr., 61, died yesterday in an Urbana hospital. Champaign County Coroner Joshua Richards confirmed that Celebrezze died about 9 p.m. yesterday, but would not confirm a cause of death.

Celebrezze, a Democrat of Columbus, was a stalwart in Cleveland and Ohio politics.... He was 38 when he was elected secretary of state in 1978.

He was Ohio attorney general from 1983 to 1991, and Ohio secretary of state from 1979 to 1983. Celebrezze ran against George Voinovich for governor in 1990 but lost.

Wayne Hill, Celebrezze's longtime communications director during the 1978 campaign for secretary of state and then attorney general, was in shock at Celebrezze's death yesterday.

Hill said Celebrezze, who enjoyed racing cars, was at Shady Bowl Speedway in De Graff for a Fourth of July race when he felt ill. De Graff is west of Columbus.

"It's beyond a shock. Tony had a passion for racing," said Hill in a telephone interview. "It's unbelievable. It's not right."

...After his loss to Voinovich, Celebrezze joined the law firm of Kegler, Brown, Hill & Ritter, and recently was a consultant for Diebold Inc., promoting electronic voting machines.

4. Athan Gibbs, Jr. -- March 12, 2004 -- invented the TruVote system -- car crash - collided w/ 18-wheeler
Was planning to present his new voting machine, and its paper verification features, to the Georgia legislature within a week of the crash.

"Death of a Patriot: No More 'Blind Faith Voting,'" by Bob Fitrakis http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0318-02.htm

"Black Voting Machine Inventor Dies," by Hazel Trice Edney, The Call,

March 26, 2004 http://www.kccall.com/News/2004/0326/Community/081.html

5. Andy Stephenson -- July 7, 2005 -- nationally known election activist -- pancreatic cancer

Andy had worked for Black Box Voting and barnstormed around the country investigating and speaking. It was Andy who uncovered (among other things) much of the story of Jeffrey Dean, the VP at Diebold who did software programming, who was a convicted felon whose crime had been embezzlement using computers. Andy went to many of the nation's election hotspots, including Florida and Ohio.

In January 2005, Andy noticed he didn't feel well. In April, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He was eventually treated at Johns Hopkins, after the national election community raised $50,000 in eleven days for his treatment. He died of post-surgery complications and a series of strokes. He was 43. His surgery had been postponed for two weeks due to the efforts of people who tried to monkeywrench Paypal and Johns Hopkins, and who spread nasty rumors that Andy wasn't really sick, and that this was all a scam. Someone managed to shut down his Medicaid after the surgery, once again slowing things down. One of his supporters in Baltimore had her car vandalized.

He had said a year earlier: "I've been threatened by these people [makers of voting machines]. I've been followed from my home to work. The president of Diebold told me to back off or I would get a visit. My phone's been tapped. I've been ridiculed. I've been called a conspiracy theorist. You bet I'm going to demonize them. It's wrong. We're privatizing our elections. It's something that should remain in the hands of the people...We need to take it back. It's We the People." "If they take our right to vote away, we're nothing but slaves. I'm sorry. I'm not willing to be a slave. I'm not willing to go quietly into the night." --Andy Stephenson, July 13, 2004 in an interview following a press conference next to the Austin State Capitol Rotunda.

6. Rev. Bill Moss -- August 2, 2005 -- lead plaintiff in Moss v. Bush -- stroke

Columbus, Ohio resident Bill Moss was highly visible in the efforts to rectify the many wrongs of the November 2004 election in Ohio. Elected five times to the Columbus Board of Education, Rev. Moss was an eloquent speaker. He was considered a possible national spokesperson for the election reform movement, in an informal meeting held in Houston on June 30, 2005 after the Election Assessment Hearing. Like Athan Gibbs, Moss was African-American.

7. Mike Connell -- December 19, 2008 -- national GOP computer guru -- solo plane crash

"Pilot killed as plane crashes in Lake Twp."
By Jewell Cardwell, John Higgins and David Knox
Akron Beacon Journal staff writers
11:30 p.m. EST, Dec 19, 2008
http://www.ohio.com/news/break_news/36482529.html

Connell was "a key witness in the King-Lincoln v. Blackwell lawsuit regarding fraud in the 2004 election in Ohio. That ongoing lawsuit led to Connell's deposition on November 3, 2008, the day before the general election. According to plaintiff's lead attorney Cliff Arnebeck, Connell was also threatened by Karl Rove in attempt to intimidate him into 'taking the fall' for Ohio election fraud."
--"BREAKING: Mike Connell, GOP 'IT Guru' Reportedly Killed in Solo Plane Crash!"
By Emily Levy
12/19/2008
BradBlog
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=6765#more-6765

]]> General http://truevote.us/nucleus/index.php?itemid=991 Sun, 21 Dec 2008 10:48:35 -0500 http://truevote.us/nucleus/index.php?itemid=990 Franken Gets Big Win At Canvass Board
By Eric Kleefeld
Talking Points Memo
December 12, 2008

Al Franken's chances of winning the Minnesota recount may have just gone up astronomically.

The state canvassing board just voted unanimously that absentee ballots that were initially rejected because of clerical errors -- and the current estimate from the hearing is that there could be nearly 1,600 of them, based on some extrapolation -- should be counted, probably the single biggest issue that the Franken campaign has been hammering ever since this recount began, and which really seemed up in the air going into this hearing.
The board can't directly order the county officials to do the counting, only making a formal request to go back and count the votes and then submit amended totals. But many counties have already begun or finished the process of sorting the rejected absentees at the board's request, and board members did castigate any election officials who wouldn't do so, with some of them even leaving open the option of seeking a court order if necessary.

Because of all that, it seems very likely that the vast majority of these ballots will be counted before this is over -- and it could possibly seal the deal for Franken. Pre-election polling showed him winning the overall pool of absentee ballots by a solid margin, so it seems pretty reasonable to assume that the newly-counted votes will break for Al. If that proves to be correct -- and if Norm Coleman is unable to stop it through further litigation -- Franken will probably pull ahead of Coleman and win the election.

Late Update: Just to clarify, this was a separate question from the missing Minneapolis ballots, which they ruled on earlier and we posted on below. The board took on two crucial issues this morning, and on both of them ruled in favor of the Franken camp's position.

Source Talking Points Memo]]> General http://truevote.us/nucleus/index.php?itemid=990 Sat, 13 Dec 2008 16:31:51 -0500 http://truevote.us/nucleus/index.php?itemid=989
Rep. Rush Holt
December 11th, 2008

Chairman Scutari, Vice Chair Weinberg, and honorable Members of the New Jersey Senate State Government Committee, thank you for giving me the opportunity to address you today on the matter of S. 2380, a bill to remove the requirement that voting machines produce voter-verified paper records by January 1, 2009, and to replace that requirement with a pilot program for paper records or ballots. I want to commend Assemblyman Reed Gusciora for his leadership and commitment in securing passage of New Jersey’s paper record requirement in 2005, and to express my very deep disappointment and concern not only that New Jersey has failed to implement it, but is now considering possibility of abolishing the requirement and its timetable for implementation altogether.
Voting must not be an act of faith, it must be an act of record, and that is why we must implement requirements that make computer-assisted elections independently auditable, and we must do it without further delay. I will explain my concerns in detail below, but let me dispel some possible misconceptions at the outset. First, as you know, I am a physicist, and so I am not arguing in favor of paper-ballot-based voting out of some fear or lack of understanding of the technology we vote on. Second, the original group of experts who helped me draft my legislation when I first introduced it in Congress in 2003 were computer security experts – among the best and most highly-credentialed computer security experts in the country. Therefore, I would also like to think it is obvious that the driving force behind my legislation is not a lack of understanding of computer security risks, but rather a long experience and familiarity with computers, computer security and computer experts. And finally, as you may recall, I have personally experienced human error in vote counting: in my very first run for the seat I now hold, one of the county clerks in my district ascribed my vote totals to my opponent, and newspapers reported that I had lost the race. In fact, you might even say it runs in my family, because my own father was the apparent victim of the theft of paper ballots when he ran for office. So I am not operating under the assumption that human beings are automatically more reliable than computers, nor that paper ballots are fraud-proof and computer tallies are not. The point is – voting must not be an act of faith, it must be an act of record, and independent audit records (voter verified paper ballots) must be required.

New Jersey enacted such a requirement in 2005. But inexplicably, although more than half of the country has succeeded in implementing such requirements since I first commenced this effort in 2003, New Jersey – once a national leader – is slow to act. Do people in those other states know something we don’t? Say what one will about Frank Hague and wandering paper ballots, if it had been pocket-sized memory cards or cartridges we were using back then, that’s what would have wandered off. Or software would have been modified, if that is what we were using. Whatever the ballots are recorded on, theft is possible and rigorous chain of custody must be required; this is just as true for memory cards and cartridges as it is for paper ballots.

Jurisdictions across the country upgraded their voting systems between 2004 and 2006 in response to the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), and touch screen deployment increased from 21.5% to 36.6% of counties during that period in part because touch screen machines were specifically recommend by HAVA. However, as reported by the voting systems information clearinghouse Election Data Services in its report on voting equipment usage in 2008, “[a]fter nearly three decades of consistent growth in their use with each election, nearly 10 million fewer registered voters will be using electronic voting equipment in the 2008 general election compared to just two years ago. Every county that has changed voting systems since 2006 has moved to optical scan equipment” [my emphasis added]. In 2008, 92.5 million registered voters resided in jurisdictions using optical scan equipment, while only 55 million resided in jurisdictions using touch screen voting equipment (much of which was equipped with voter verified paper audit trail (VVPAT) printers), and the trend is clear. Although the optical scan systems are not perfect – and no voting system is perfect – the fewer problems with optical scan systems and – most important – the ease of verification by each voter and the probability of meaningful audits and recounts make that the system the choice of most states, even states that like New Jersey, at first moved toward electronic, touch screen voting machines.

The national trend is clearly to move away from touch screen voting and towards more reliable, less troublesome optical scan voting systems. There are only seven states left in the country that, on a statewide basis, use paperless voting systems. Regrettably, and despite passage of the Gusciora bill more than three years ago, New Jersey is still one of them.

Based on what other states are doing, New Jersey could certainly have implemented its paper record requirement as of the original implementation date of January 2008. And it could and should do so now, without further delay.

What is the best choice? From a technical standpoint, touch screen voting machines – whether outfitted with voter verified paper record printers or not – suffer from certain performance problems that optical scan systems do not. For example, since 2004 incident reporting systems have produced an endless stream of reports of calibration problems on touch screen machines – so called “jumping Xs” – in which the voter will touch the screen for one candidate only to find his or her choice register for another. Last month, that reportedly even happened to Oprah Winfrey. This cannot happen with an optical scan system, because voters mark paper ballots, rather than touch a temperamental screen interface that may or may not be properly calibrated. Similarly, when a touch screen machine malfunctions, even if it is equipped with a so-called VVPAT printer, voters cannot vote unless they are given paper ballots. This problem delayed our Governor from voting not long ago, and evidently prevented some others in his district from voting. With an optical scan system, all voters are given paper ballots anyway. If the scanner jams, the completed ballots can simply be placed in a ballot box for later counting.

Optical scan systems are less problematic and more reliable, and they are more cost effective. Today, if the job can be done at least as effectively and reliably but at lower cost, that should be the choice we make. And that is the case with optical scan systems as compared to touch screen systems. That is what other states have determined evidently.

First, fewer items of equipment are needed if optical scan systems are used instead of touch screen systems. The act of voting takes time -- often many minutes per voter. When touch screen machines are used, voters engage in the act of voting on the machine itself. To avoid waits counties provide multiple voting machines. When optical scan systems are used, voters engage in the act of voting in a private marking station using a paper ballot. They only occupy the optical scan machine when feeding the completed ballot into it, which takes seconds. The optical scanner will identify over-voted ballots or ballots with improper marks, and will tally only ballots correctly marked. Even if the machine rejects the ballot, that too only takes seconds and the voter can return to the marking station to correct the ballot. Therefore, while touch screen systems were deployed at the rate of one per every 250 to 850 registered voters in New Jersey in 2004 according to New Jersey’s report to the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), jurisdictions using optical scan systems often deployed their optical scanners at the rate of one per thousands of voters. No matter how many voters are assigned to an optical scan election district, it will likely need only one optical scanner and one accessible ballot marking device, for a total of two items of equipment. In 2004, according to the EAC survey, the average number of touch screen machines per polling place was 4.4 in Gloucester County, 4.5 in Sussex County, and 5.3 in Salem County; 18 of New Jersey’s 21 counties used more than two voting machines on average per polling place. 

In purchase costs alone, converting to an optical scan system would likely cost no more than adding printer retrofits to New Jersey's existing touch screen machines, and probably less. (By the way, get independent estimates; beware of vendor claims.) According to New Jersey’s currently-posted Voting Equipment Inventory, there are approximately 11,200 touch screen voting machines in the state. The estimated cost of a printer attachment is $2,000. In 2005, the Office of Legislative Services produced two separate fiscal estimates for the cost of retrofitting the machines, one for $26.4 to $39 million, which assumed that more than 3,000 of the underlying machines would have to be replaced entirely to meet the paper record requirement, and two months later an estimate for $21.4 million, which assumed that only 209 of the underlying machines would have to be replaced entirely to meet the paper record requirement (although almost 3,000 new machines were still needed to meet HAVA disability access requirements). As I understand it, the printer retrofit recommended by the Title 19 Committee only works with the AVC Advantage Model D-10, which is not yet in use in any county. By reference to a recent contract between Sequoia voting systems and a New Jersey County, the price for a headset-equipped Sequoia touch screen machines is $8,000. Therefore, arguably, every county will need not only new printers at $2,000 each, but also new touch screen machines at $8,000 each. The total cost could be as high as $112 million.

In contrast, if New Jersey converted to optical scan systems, the total cost would be closer to $36 million. With optical scan systems, only two items of equipment would be needed per election district, and I have been advised that advanced optical scanners and ballot marking devices retail for approximately $5,000 each. New Jersey has approximately 3,600 election districts. Therefore, two items of equipment at a total cost of $10,000 for each of New Jersey’s 3,600 election districts would put the cost of converting to an optical scan system at approximately $36 million. In addition, fewer items of equipment translates to costs savings not simply in the purchase, but also in the storage, programming, use, maintenance and transportation.

Finally, the printer retrofit recommended by the Title 19 Committee does not appear to provide a way for disabled voters to verify the accuracy of the paper printout from the paper printout itself, rather than from the internal memory. The most current version of the EAC’s Voluntary Voting System Guidelines provides that: “[i]f state statute designates the paper record produced by the VVPAT to be the official ballot or the determinative record on a recount, the accessible voting equipment shall provide features that enable visually impaired voters and voters with an unwritten language to review the paper record. . . . [f]or example, the accessible voting equipment might provide an automated reader that converts the paper record contents into audio output.”

In the New Jersey law, as in my federal legislation, if there is a discrepancy between the electronic record and the paper record, the paper record is the vote of record. This is as it should be, because that is the only tangible record of the vote verified by the voter. Therefore, each voter must be able to verify that the contents of the paper printout accurately reflect his or her choices. The New Jersey law specifically requires that the paper records "be made available for inspection and verification by the voter at the time the vote is cast," and that includes disabled voters. 

Advanced ballot marking devices used with optical scan systems meet this requirement, by allowing voters to use audio and other features to mark a paper ballot, and also to convert the contents of the paper record into audio output, to confirm to the voter that the ballot accurately reflects his or her choices. There are no VVPAT printers currently on the market that do this, and nothing I have seen in the descriptions of the printer attachment recommended by the Title 19 Committee reflects that it does that. Therefore, if New Jersey chooses to deploy VVPAT printers instead of converting to an optical scan system, even after spending as much as $100 million or more, New Jersey will find that it is back to square one in terms of meeting HAVA’s accessibility requirements.


I would urge you not to proceed with any legislation that removes New Jersey’s requirement for paper-based auditable voting, but rather to honor New Jersey’s paper record requirement by taking such action as is necessary to deploy optical scan voting systems accompanied by accessible ballot marking devices across the state as expeditiously as possible. Thank you again for your time and consideration. I look forward to continuing to work with you to protect the accuracy, integrity and security of voting systems in New Jersey.

]]> General http://truevote.us/nucleus/index.php?itemid=989 Sat, 13 Dec 2008 16:27:51 -0500 http://truevote.us/nucleus/index.php?itemid=988
By Alan Bernstein
Houston Chronicle
Dec. 10, 2008

The presidential election is in the history books and Harris County voter registrar Paul Bettencourt is quitting, but the Texas Democratic Party is expanding its lawsuit claiming the county illegally has blocked thousands of residents from registering to vote.

"Mr. Bettencourt's late-night resignation announcement is his attempt to avoid bringing to light the inner workings of his office over the past several years and still does not ensure that the problems surrounding Harris County voter registration will be resolved," the state party said Wednesday in a statement distributed by Houston lawyer Chad Dunn.
Republican Bettencourt, the tax assessor-collector, said it was ridiculous to suggest he and his staff purposely foiled voter registrations or that his resignation was triggered by the lawsuit.

Bettencourt acknowledged last Friday night that he had given a resignation letter to County Judge Ed Emmett the day before — a month after both Republicans won their elections. Emmett and the four county commissioners will pick Bettencourt's replacement.

Attractive job offer
Bettencourt repeated on Wednesday that he is walking away from another four-year term only because he received an attractive job offer in private business.

He refused to describe his new job. His last day in office probably will be Dec. 23, he said.

Dunn, the Democrats' lawyer, said the lawsuit was expanded to, among other things, include as plaintiffs four people whose voter registration applications were stymied by what the party calls the county's "unlawful and hyper-technical voters registration activities." The lawsuit alleges Bettencourt's staff has disenfranchised voters by using unwarranted technical reasons for rejecting their registration applications.

Bettencourt said the four were rejected for routine, justifiable reasons involving their paperwork, and that the registration system in the county works well.

"You are going to have mistakes made," he said. "What you do is fix them."

Some decisions reversed
The bipartisan ballot board that decided whether to accept provisional ballots cast by voters whose names were missing from the Nov. 4 rolls accepted some that Bettencourt's staff had classified as incomplete. His staff was unable to get thousands of registrations onto the rolls before early voting.

Bettencourt apparently still will have to give pre-trial testimony in the lawsuit after this month and will be represented by the new county attorney, Democrat Vince Ryan.

The majority-Republican Commissioners Court is expected to pick a Republican to handle Bettencourt's tax collection and voter registrar operations.

Contact: alan.bernstein@chron.com

Source: Houston Chronicle

Candidate's suit claims voting problems cost him race
By Alan Bernstein
Houston Chronicle
Dec. 11, 2008

The Democratic candidate who lost a Harris County judicial race by 230 votes last month is asking a court to make him the winner, saying a variety of alleged vote count and voter registration failures by the county cost him a victory.

Democrat J. Goodwille Pierre, a lawyer who manages small business programs for the Houston airport system, is no stranger to voting rights lawsuits; he said he worked on such issues in Texas for the liberal group People For The American Way, particularly on behalf of Prairie View A&M University students registering in Waller County.

Now the first-time candidate is filing suit on behalf of his own campaign against Republican civil court Judge Joseph "Tad" Halbach of the 333rd District Court.

A spokeswoman for Pierre said the lawsuit was filed in state district court this morning. Halbach said he could not comment because he had not seen the lawsuit.

Halbach's winning margin of 230 votes in the Nov. 4 election was the smallest in more than two dozen countywide judicial elections, most of which were won by Democratic challengers.

Pierre was among four challengers who lost, each of whom have unusual first or last names.

But his lawsuit focuses instead on Harris County voting controversies being aired in a separate federal lawsuit brought against the county by the Texas Democratic Party.

Both suits now allege that outgoing Tax Assessor-Collector Paul Bettencourt, a Republican who also serves as voter registrar, rejected legitimate voter registration applications.

Pierre's lawsuit also cites a non-partisan ballots board's rejection of about 5,800 ballots cast by voters who, according to records from Bettencourt's office and other agencies, had not been properly registered. The ballot board chairman said some of the ballots, after being processed by Bettencourt's staff, had information obscured by correction fluid.

"Had all persons who cast a vote in this race been allowed to have their vote counted; it would have changed the outcome of the election by providing Pierre with more votes than Joseph "Tad" Halbach," the suit said. "Moreover, various irregularities make it impossible to ascertain the true outcome of the election."

Contact: alan.bernstein@chron.com

Source: Houston Chronicle]]> General http://truevote.us/nucleus/index.php?itemid=988 Sat, 13 Dec 2008 16:24:58 -0500 http://truevote.us/nucleus/index.php?itemid=987 WOAI-TV
December 10, 2008

SAN ANTONIO - 500,000 San Antonians turned out to vote last month. A record turnout in an historical election. But for some voters, the experience did not go smoothly. News 4 Trouble Shooter Mireya Villarreal exposes one of election night's biggest problems: The voting machines.

The News 4 Trouble Shooters uncovered more than 400 complaints were filed by election judges and voters this past November. Some of the complaints are so serious, the Bexar County Elections Department is already making changes.
"I think we just came out stellar," says elections administrator Jackie Callanen. "It went very smoothly."

For the most part, things did go smoothly.

But taking a closer look at these complaints reveals more than 160 calls about the Ivotronic voting machine, or IVO's for short. The complaints range from one about a voting machine that disappeared to another that died with lots of votes inside.

"It still comes down to the human factor," explains Callanen. "We're asking our election officials, and especially on election day, to come back and remember what you did six months ago. When you haven't seen it or set it up for those six months."

Callanen says her department has used the IVO's for the last five years. And for the last five years, there have been complaints. Callanen tells the News 4 Trouble Shooters, there is a valid explanation for each complaint.

"They have forgotten to plug it in the back, they've forgotten to stand it up so the air circulates around it, or as we talked yesterday, they forget to push the button on the surge protector," says Callanen. "It wasn't a problem. We collected every vote."

Every vote counts? "Every vote counts!" adds Callanen.

Callanen says the machines that died were taken to the elections warehouse where the votes were extracted.

News 4 spoke with Bexar County Democratic Chair Carla Vela. She says the November election flowed smoothly in comparison to other years, but is still concerned about the number of complaints.

"I'm sure we still have glitches, because people did say they pushed a button, for let's say democrat, and it popped up republican." Vela says there will always be problems when voting on electronic machines, but she believes more training for election judges could mean fewer complaints in the future.

Callanen says they are taking these complaints seriously. Before the next city election in May, election judges will go through an IVO refresher course, including an online training session.

Email: MireyaVillarreal@woaitv.com

Source: WOAI-TV]]> General http://truevote.us/nucleus/index.php?itemid=987 Sat, 13 Dec 2008 16:19:15 -0500 http://truevote.us/nucleus/index.php?itemid=986 Minnesota Post
December 11, 2008

In upbeat Minnesota fashion, state officials have said some good lessons could come from the headaches of having to recount the nearly 3 million votes cast in the state's U.S. Senate race.

Indeed, lessons are emerging even before the recount turns into a critical phase next week when the State Canvassing Board is to rule on contested ballots. They range from the handling of absentee-ballots to the recount process to gaps in state election law.
Absentee ballots
Minnesota needs to revamp the error-laden process for casting and counting absentee ballots, Joe Mansky, Ramsey County's Elections Manager said at a forum presented Wednesday by the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs.

Whether or not the state intended or sanctioned early voting, it clearly has come to Minnesota through the absentee ballot process used by some 288,000 voters this year, Mansky said.

Nearly 12,000 of those absentee votes were rejected by election officials for allegedly violating voting rules, Secretary of State Mark Ritchie said at the forum. Whether or not those rejections should be reviewed is one of the flash points in the recount battle. Ritchie estimated that 9 or 10 percent of them were in error.

Whatever the outcome of the absentee-ballot battle in the Senate race, Mansky said the rejection rate is too high and the state should:

• Create a Website where absentees could learn whether they are eligible to vote, whether their ballots were received and whether there were any problems.

• Acknowledge that early voting has arrived and make it more accessible by setting up early-voting facilities at "Cub Foods, Target ... where the people are."

• Set up ballot counting machines in government buildings so that instead of wrestling with a "maze of envelopes" early voters could fill in their ballots and feed them to the counter just as others do on Election Day.

• Relieve local election judges of the duties of counting the absentee ballots on top of everything else they have to do.

Of about 100 improperly rejected absentee ballots in Ramsey County this year, two of the errors were made by office staffers before the votes were counted and all of the rest were made by election judges, Mansky said.

"They are overworked on Election Day," Mansky said. "We need to put them in a position to succeed and the way to do that is to never send them the absentee ballots."

Some counties have reviewed their rejected absentee ballots even though state law is murky on how they should be handled. Others have taken the position that voters can go to court to challenge rejections, Ritchie said. He called the court option unacceptable, especially for soldiers and Marines who are stationed overseas.

"I'm supposed to tell a soldier in Baghdad, 'Get yourself a lawyer and sue Ramsey County?'" he asked.

The recount
The recount process also could be streamlined, speakers said at the forum.

Campaigns for incumbent Republican Sen. Norm Coleman and his Democratic challenger Al Franken have challenged more than 6,000 ballots during the recount. While both sides have withdrawn some of their challenges, 4,000 to 5,000 are left to be reviewed by the Canvassing Board, Ritchie said.

Local officials should be empowered to reject frivolous challenges during a recount, Mansky said. "I saw every challenged ballot in Ramsey County, and 90 percent were frivolous," or the intent of the voter was obvious, he said.

Mansky also questioned whether the recount process is appropriate for a high-stakes statewide election. The automatic recount law was designed for legislative races, not statewide contests, he said, and the courts may be a better venue for settling questions about bigger races. Courts have ruled in close races for at least two congressional seats in recent years.

State election law
Minnesota sets the gold standard for the nation in its administration of elections, said Edward Foley, who directs an election law program for Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University.

"Imagine if this [recount] was occurring in Illinois," Foley quipped on the day after the Illinois governor was arrested for alleged corruption.

Even so, "Minnesota might have done some things differently," Foley said.

The state should audit its election code, he said, "looking for gaps and holes that stress the system,"

If the election law "had spelled out in black and white what to do" in situations like the 133 ballots that went missing in Minneapolis, Foley said, there would have been less room for controversy.

Overall, Foley said, the state should look for ways to minimize mistakes that lead to lost ballots and rejected absentee ballots.

"Five percent of absentee ballots rejected is pretty high," he said.

Mansky said the last major revamping of Minnesota's election law was in 1988. Since then, it's become increasingly difficult to push through legislation related to sensitive election issues.

"Politics have become more contentious," he said. "It's harder to bring people together."

If there is any chance for meaningful change, it would have to pass in a non-election year, Ritchie said.

Asked when the recount of the Senate race will be finished, Ritchie said we will know how Minnesota voted Dec. 19 when the Canvassing Board expects to finish reviewing the challenged ballots.

That is not to say Minnesotans will know who won the seat before all chances of court battles are resolved.

Soource: Minnesota Post]]> General http://truevote.us/nucleus/index.php?itemid=986 Sat, 13 Dec 2008 16:16:32 -0500 http://truevote.us/nucleus/index.php?itemid=985 TVTechnology
December 11, 2008

BUFFALO, N.Y. So how many videographers does it take to help the world's foremost democracy achieve its fairest (presidential) election in over a decade? Based on this year's results, perhaps a few thousand or so (beyond the working press). That's how many persons officially participated in "Video the Vote"'s first presidential election effort in 2008. Video the Vote (VtV) was launched in 2006 in response to bipartisan charges of vote stealing, voter suppression and fraud etc. which marred the prior two presidential elections in 2000 and 2004).
In response, assorted grass roots initiatives were launched to prevent and discourage many of these abuses in future elections. The aim of VtV was to capture voting abuses, or at least first hand accounts, on video, and to make this widely available, online and on TV. "We want to expose how elections are manipulated and votes suppressed in elections and to help make them a bit fairer by sharing this with millions of Americans," said VtV co-founder, John Ennis. More than 3,000 persons volunteered to particpate in VtV this year, many of them seasoned videographers but with many concerned amateurs as well.

More than 3,000 volunteer camera operators monitored polling places.
My own decision to participate in VtV harks back to the 2004 presidential election when I volunteered as an election monitor in Columbus Ohio, ground zero on the election roadmap for both presidential candidates. At every polling place we visited, on Columbus' heavily black East Side, and in university precincts, long lines of voters waited for hours in the rain to vote due to a shortage of voting machines. The persistent rain caused lens fogging, and permeated the audio track, but the biggest problem was moving the video afterwards.

Also, as an election monitor, I had limited time to shoot video, let alone to edit or get it to a TV news hub from a laptop. Wifi networks weren't nearly as prevalent then as now, so locating a network then wasn't nearly as easy as it is today.

This year I wanted to spend all of my time shooting the election and any problems that might crop up, and also to be able to quickly get it to TV news outlets too, if noteworthy, and to post it online. VtV's partnership with (units within) PBS, CNN, New York Times, etc., and also with YouTube, made it feasible to access both pipelines via their Web site, at least theoretically.

ONE MAN BAND

As a shooter working with VtV, all I needed, besides my camera package, was a computer and a broadband connection to feed edited footage to the VtV Web site. They were equipped to handle a variety of file formats captured and edited on either a PC, a Mac or an IntelMac. Because a substantial minority of their volunteers were rank amateurs, video-wise and didn't have their own editing software, VtV even provided uploading instructions for footage captured in free editing software bundled with Mac and PC OS's. Naturally, they were ready to work with files output from most major NLEs too, like Final Cut, Avid Express and Vega, for example, by having all participants output to universal file formats like H.264 (before uploading to their Web site) at broadcast resolution (720x480) and data rates (2000 kbps) at manageable file sizes—all critical when transmitting files over the Internet. They also wanted file sizes accessible to persons with dialup as well as broadband connections.

To do this VtV designed a one stop portal for uploading and downloading. The H.264 files were ingested at full quality and could be downloaded at full quality from their Web site as well. For online viewing, the files were further compressed by VtV partner, You Tube, using Adobe Flash, a very efficient codec for Web streaming. This was critical as the VtV site on YouTube was anticipating a high volume of video of unknown length, within 48 hours of election day. In an effort to manage the data load VtV urged all contributors to keep clips under 3 minutes, although it didn't block larger clips from being uploaded.

To get everyone playing from the same rulebook all VtV volunteers had to undergo "basic training," which emphasized shooting protocol around polling stations: how to document an election without affecting it, or breaking the law. There were also detailed instructions on their Web site including compressing and uploading specs for both PC and Mac users… plus details on legal releases, logging, credentialing, etc.

On election day, by the time I met up with Cleveland's VtV coordinator, Dan Kozminski at 7:30 a.m., I'd already heard radio reports of long lines at Cleveland-area polling places and expected a repeat of the chronic long lines of the 2004 election, minus the rain. In fact, our first two calls were to polling stations which reported early long lines. But, in both cases, the lines had dissipated by the time we arrived. At several East Side polling places plagued with long lines all day in 2004, we were met by volunteer election protection lawyers and other monitors, and no visible bottlenecks or notable voting irregularities to record. In fact, once the lines vanished by mid-morning, we stopped getting calls from dispatch, and kept busy by visiting polling places where problems abounded in 2004.

After the polls closed, the task of editing and uploading the days' interviews began. This took another several hours, spilling into the next morning, not due to any bottlenecks on the Web site, but because we experimented with different encoding options, using Vegas, (which I was unfamiliar with). Ultimately, the compression specs specified by VtV proved the most efficient and enabled a fast, smooth upload which looked surprisingly good on YouTube. Within a week of the election, Video the Vote registered over a million hits on roughly 1000 video clips.

DRAMATIC IMPROVEMENT

Within a week of the election, VtV registered more than 1 million hits on 1,100+ video clips.

The videos will remain online for the indefinite future. At presstime there was no information on how many election day clips were used by media organizations to bolster their election coverage, but some pre-election day reports by VtV on alleged efforts to suppress the black vote in Indiana and in Florida were widely used by various TV news organizations according to Ennis. "Our pre-election reports helped prevent thousands of black voters from being disenfranchised in the 2008 election. My hope is that by spotlighting these abuses we can reduce them, like the Help America Vote Act intended," Ennis said.

Overall, the technical quality of election day coverage by VtV volunteers improved dramatically over 2006. "Camera quality has improved a lot even in the past two years," Ennis said. "Many of our volunteers had their own HDV camera packages, including pro mics, lights, etc., hence a lot of the footage ingested was in 16:9 and HD. We were even able to provide a few hundred flip camera to volunteers who didn't have cameras. They record to flash, which made uploading much faster and easier. An HD camera for under $300 is a great asset for a grassroots organization like Video the Vote."

Source: TV Technology]]> General http://truevote.us/nucleus/index.php?itemid=985 Sat, 13 Dec 2008 16:12:40 -0500 http://truevote.us/nucleus/index.php?itemid=984 LA Times
December 10, 2008

Now that our country has elected a 21st century president, we should reconsider our 18th century electoral system.

Two examples from the seemingly never-ending 2008 election showcase the system's flaws. More than a month after election day, we still don't know who won Minnesota's Senate race. In Georgia's U.S. Senate contest, it took two elections and tens of millions of dollars to produce a winner. Both races could have been resolved quickly and with less expense using instant runoff voting. Because the Constitution leaves it up to the states to decide how to elect their senators and presidential electors, instant runoff voting could be used at all levels of government.
Instant runoff voting is worth learning about -- not just because it saves time and money and is more democratic than our current methods, but because you may find yourself using it before too long. The Los Angeles City Council has created a task force to determine the feasibility of using it for local elections. It already has been used for several election cycles in San Francisco and has been approved for use in a number of Bay Area municipalities.

With instant runoff voting, voters indicate their first, second and third choices among candidates on the ballot. If a candidate wins a majority of first-choice rankings, that candidate is elected. If no candidate receives an initial majority of first-choice rankings, the candidate with the fewest first-choice rankings is eliminated and that candidate's supporters have their votes count for their second choice. The process repeats until a candidate emerges with majority support.

The Georgia runoff was triggered because a Libertarian candidate won 3% of the vote and the Republican finished the first round a handful of votes shy of a majority. In Minnesota, 16% of the votes went to a third-party candidate. In both cases, had voters been able to indicate their second choice on the ballot, we would have known the outcomes of the races on election night, saving a second election, a recount and lots of time and money.

Instant runoff voting is also an important innovation because it produces a winner who has demonstrated support from a majority of voters. When a candidate wins election with less than majority support, it means that a majority of voters have actually rejected that candidate. That's not fair to the voters, and it undercuts the legitimacy of the electoral process. It is also, unfortunately, a common occurrence in California and national politics. Three of the last five presidential elections, and three of the last four gubernatorial elections in California, were won by a candidate who failed to win the support of a majority of voters.

A similar dynamic played out in recent U.S. Senate races in Alaska and Oregon. In those cases, a Democrat won election with a minority of votes cast when the Republican and a third-party candidate split the conservative vote. The problem isn't that we have too many candidates; the problem is an electoral system that doesn't always allow voters to state their true preferences. The solution is instant runoff voting.

Instant runoff voting is politically neutral. It might have resulted in the election of two GOP senators in 2008 or a Democratic president in 2000. Who would have won the Minnesota Senate race using it is anybody's guess, but a winner -- regardless of party affiliation -- already would have emerged, the preference of the voters would be clear, and the winner would have a legitimate mandate to govern.

Instant runoff voting is used by cities in Maryland, Vermont and North Carolina and approved for use in Tennessee and Minnesota, and it has been used for years in Ireland and Australia. With momentum growing for a national popular vote to replace the electoral college, the day may come when it is used to elect the president. We, the people, deserve no less: a simple and civilized way to ensure that the outcomes of our elections reflect the intentions of our citizens.

Blair Bobier is a deputy director of the New America Foundation's Political Reform Program.

Source: LA Times
]]> General http://truevote.us/nucleus/index.php?itemid=984 Sat, 13 Dec 2008 16:10:10 -0500 http://truevote.us/nucleus/index.php?itemid=983 December 10, 2008

Paralysis at the Federal Election Commission: Image With 3-3 deadlocks common on key issues, often along party lines, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) — made up of three Democrats and three Republicans — has sometimes seemed like it was built for paralysis. 2008 Republican presidential nominee John McCain has called the commission’s design a “fundamental problem.” The FEC is supposed to enforce the nation’s federal campaign finance laws. But even in cases of bipartisan agreement that a campaign or committee has violated those laws, the FEC’s lengthy investigation process means there can be no punishment until after the election is long past. And in 2008, the FEC’s inability to exercise meaningful control of the most expensive presidential election ever ran into an even more serious impediment: lack of a quorum. With the terms of three commissioners expired and one other seat vacant, President George W. Bush and the U.S. Senate’s Democratic majority engaged in a procedural stand-off over the confirmation of new commissioners from December 2007 until late June 2008. As the campaign steamed along and questions and controversies arose, there was literally no one there to field them — leaving the nation’s elections without a referee.
Follow-up:
After a compromise between the Senate Democrats and the Republican administration led to confirmation of a total of five new commissioners on June 24, 2008, the quorum issue was resolved. Efforts by some in Congress to enact broader reform have not made it out of committee in the House or the Senate.

Source: Public Integrity]]> General http://truevote.us/nucleus/index.php?itemid=983 Sat, 13 Dec 2008 16:07:40 -0500 http://truevote.us/nucleus/index.php?itemid=982 December 10, 2008

Election Assistance Commission Has Not Met Mandates: Image Established in response to the chaos of the 2000 election, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC), by many accounts, has been ineffective thus far in smoothing out the nation’s voting problems. The commission, created as part of the 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA), is an “independent, bipartisan commission” tasked with “developing guidance to meet HAVA requirements, adopting voluntary voting system guidelines, and serving as a national clearinghouse of information about election administration,” as well as accrediting testing laboratories and certifying voting systems. Former President Ronald Reagan called the right to vote “the crown jewel of American liberties,” but after the controversial 2000 election, Democrats and Republicans agreed major legislation was needed to address serious problems in the election system. The EAC got off to a stumbling start, chronically short of funds – receiving only $1.2 million of $10 million authorized in 2004 – and unable to secure office space for its first two years. Subsequently, the commission came under significant criticism — including multiple reprimands from the Government Accountability Office — for its failure to establish and maintain a clearinghouse of information on how state and local governments implemented guidelines and operated voting systems. The EAC admitted it was “resource constrained” in its ability to ensure voting systems “perform securely and reliably.”
Follow-up:
On November 8, 2007, less than a year before the 2008 election, the EAC finally announced what then-Commission Chairman Donetta Davidson called “an important first step in building a national clearinghouse of voting system reports that have been conducted by states and counties.” That step became the “Voting System Reports Clearinghouse” section on the EAC’s website, which now includes five reported problems. But the Commission only includes those reports voluntarily filed by states and localities, and the information in the clearinghouse only reaches those state and local election officials who actually visit the website. An EAC spokeswoman said that the agency has made “significant progress” since the GAO criticisms. She noted that the EAC’s power is limited by the mandates of the Help America Vote Act and that the GAO recently recommended that Congress expand the Commission’s role in resolving voter system problems. Meanwhile, a 2006 Gallup poll indicated that only 28 percent of Americans were “very confident” that across the country the vote would be accurately cast and counted.

Source: Public Integrity]]> General http://truevote.us/nucleus/index.php?itemid=982 Sat, 13 Dec 2008 16:06:09 -0500 http://truevote.us/nucleus/index.php?itemid=981 Wired
December 09, 2008

Prior to the general election this year, problems arose in Texas whereby voters who opted to cast straight-party tickets on electronic voting machines were losing their presidential votes when they touched their presidential candidate's name after selecting the straight-party option.

That issue has raised a new controversy in Dallas County because of how this action of voters is interpreted differently if the voters vote on a paper ballot or an electronic machine.

Let me explain.
When a voter opts to vote a straight-party ticket on an electronic machine, he or she touches a button indicating the choice, and the machine automatically selects every candidate from that party in each race. But a problem arose in Texas this year because prior to the election many Democratic voters received a misleading e-mail that told them that if they voted the straight-party option, the machine would record all of their choices except one in the presidential race. Voters were instructed to specifically touch their presidential candidate's name after they'd selected the straight-party option to ensure that their presidential vote was recorded.

The problem with this is that the e-mail was wrong. A straight-party vote on a touch-screen machine did record a vote in the presidential race. Any voters in Texas who followed the e-mail instruction wound up erasing their vote in the presidential race because touching a candidate's name that had already been selected on a straight-party ticket de-selected the candidate's name.

Touch-screen machines are programmed to do this so that voters have the option of voting a straight-party ticket on most races, then casting a cross-over vote in selected races for a candidate from a different party.

But the issue has raised an interesting dilemma in Dallas County where a recount of a close race is underway. The race involves a seat in the state House of Representatives and could decide whether Republicans or Democrats control the state legislative body. The Republican incumbent currently leads the Democratic challenger by only 20 votes.

Apparently, some voters who voted straight-party tickets also touched their candidate's name in the state House race after they selected the straight-party ticket, to emphasize their choice and make sure the machine recorded their vote in that race.

Voters do this all the time on paper ballots. They'll fill in an oval indicating they want to vote a straight-party ticket then fill in the individual candidate's oval as well to emphasize their choice and ensure that officials have no question about their intent.

But, as I mentioned, when voters do this on electronic machines, instead of adding emphasis to their choice, they inadvertently delete their choice.

The Texas secretary of state's office has said that a de-selected vote on a straight-party ballot should not be counted. The state Democratic party, however, has filed a lawsuit saying that these votes should be counted since the voter's intent is clear and would be counted if the voter performed the same action on a paper ballot.

It's likely the Democrats will lose in this case since it's impossible to know if a voter truly intended to de-select the candidate and cast no vote in the race or if he intended to emphasize the candidate and inadvertently deleted the vote instead. Either way, however, it's interesting that a voting machine feature that is designed to give a voter more flexibility in making candidate choices has possibly thwarted voters' choices in this case.

Source: Wired]]> General http://truevote.us/nucleus/index.php?itemid=981 Sat, 13 Dec 2008 15:52:51 -0500 http://truevote.us/nucleus/index.php?itemid=980 NorthJersey.com
December 9, 2008

TRENTON — New Jerseyans would have to wait nearly two more years for retrofitted voting machines under a bill approved Monday by an Assembly committee.

The legislation would roll back the Jan. 1 deadline to alter 10,000 machines with printers so voters could verify that their ballots were recorded correctly. It also would allow local tests of those machines, plus trials of optical-scanning technology used elsewhere in the country.
"Let the consumers really test what works," the bill's sponsor, Assemblywoman Joan Quigley, testified before the Assembly Appropriations Committee.

If passed by the full Legislature and signed by Governor Corzine, the bill would lead to the third deadline extension for the project. The new deadline would be November 2010, well beyond next year's gubernatorial election.

"The image of Keystone Kops comes to mind," Nick Lento, an activist from Cliffside Park, told the panel. "You can't keep on doing this. This is wrong."

The retrofit issue was forced four years ago by voting-rights activists who sued the state, claiming that the equipment was defective and unreliable. The manufacturer, Sequoia Voting Systems, disputed their claims, but agreed to add printers and make other alterations.

Tests of the altered machines by New Jersey Institute of Technology computer scientists found jamming and other problems with the printers, and experts are working on those fixes.

More recently, Princeton University scientists demonstrated that the machines' software was vulnerable to tampering. But the manufacturer and New Jersey voting officials disputed the Princeton team's findings and stood behind the equipment, which was used for the Nov. 4 election.

TRENTON — New Jerseyans would have to wait nearly two more years for retrofitted voting machines under a bill approved Monday by an Assembly committee.

The legislation would roll back the Jan. 1 deadline to alter 10,000 machines with printers so voters could verify that their ballots were recorded correctly. It also would allow local tests of those machines, plus trials of optical-scanning technology used elsewhere in the country.

"Let the consumers really test what works," the bill's sponsor, Assemblywoman Joan Quigley, testified before the Assembly Appropriations Committee.

If passed by the full Legislature and signed by Governor Corzine, the bill would lead to the third deadline extension for the project. The new deadline would be November 2010, well beyond next year's gubernatorial election.

"The image of Keystone Kops comes to mind," Nick Lento, an activist from Cliffside Park, told the panel. "You can't keep on doing this. This is wrong."

The retrofit issue was forced four years ago by voting-rights activists who sued the state, claiming that the equipment was defective and unreliable. The manufacturer, Sequoia Voting Systems, disputed their claims, but agreed to add printers and make other alterations.

Tests of the altered machines by New Jersey Institute of Technology computer scientists found jamming and other problems with the printers, and experts are working on those fixes.

More recently, Princeton University scientists demonstrated that the machines' software was vulnerable to tampering. But the manufacturer and New Jersey voting officials disputed the Princeton team's findings and stood behind the equipment, which was used for the Nov. 4 election.

Source: NorthJersey.com]]> General http://truevote.us/nucleus/index.php?itemid=980 Sat, 13 Dec 2008 15:51:15 -0500 http://truevote.us/nucleus/index.php?itemid=979 Jackson Free Press
December 9, 2008

The Mississippi Republican Party filed suit against the Leflore County Election Commission and Southeast Greenwood poll manager Gail Griggs today for “failure to perform their statutory duties in the November 4 election.”
“Our evidence and eye witnesses reveal a serious failure in this precinct to follow Mississippi’s election laws and ensure a fair and honest election,” said Mississippi Republican Party Chairman Brad White in a statement. “We will not tolerate voter fraud, voter intimidation and violations of election laws. We want the next election in Leflore County to follow the law. And we want voters, candidates, and elected officials around the state to know we support honest elections and will fight against election fraud.”

White alleges that Leflore County poll watchers were “seated too far away” from the booths, rendering them ineffective, while unauthorized poll watchers “loitered about the polling location.” The party also claims people were assisting voters who had not requested any help and that “voters received instruction and direction on who to vote for at the voting machines.”

The suit also claims affidavit voters left the view of poll workers to go vote in a different room at one polling place and that the poll manager and bailiff “ignored notifications of violations and refused to enforce the law.”

The party filed a petition for writ of mandamus asking the Leflore County Circuit Court to find that the Leflore County Election Commission and Griggs “failed to perform their statutory duties.” The party also asks the court to issue a writ of mandamus “commanding the defendants and their successors in office to execute their duties in all future elections.”

The party is basing its suit on information it received from Republican Secretary of State Delbet Hosemann. The case is before Leflore County Circuit Judge Jannie M. Lewis.

Democratic Party Chairman Jamie Franks did not immediately return calls for comment.

Source: Jackson Free Press]]> General http://truevote.us/nucleus/index.php?itemid=979 Sat, 13 Dec 2008 15:48:55 -0500 http://truevote.us/nucleus/index.php?itemid=978 December 8, 2008

COLUMBUS, Ohio · Democrats will hold at least 256 seats in the House when the 111th Congress is sworn in next month, after a county commissioner came from behind to win an open seat in central Ohio.

Mary Jo Kilroy, a Franklin County commissioner who came within 1,062 votes of unseating incumbent Republican Deborah Pryce two years ago, will be representing Ohio's 15th Congressional District.
On Sunday she overcame a 594-vote deficit to beat Republican Steve Stivers by 2,311 votes after provisional ballots were counted in Franklin County, home to Columbus.

The district is now in Democratic hands for the first time in 42 years.

Kilroy's victory gives the Democrats a gain of 21 House seats, but two races are not totally over.

In Virginia, incumbent GOP Rep. Virgil Goode has requested a recount in his narrow loss to Democrat Tom Perriello in the 5th district. A recount also appears likely in the 4th Congressional District in western Louisiana after Republican John Fleming squeaked past Democrat Paul Carmouche in the race to replace retiring 10-term Rep. Jim McCrery, R-La. Only a few hundred votes separated the two.

If the results stand, Democrats would have have 257 Congressional seats to the GOP's 178, a 79-seat majority.

The weekend news wasn't all bad for Republicans. GOP attorney Anh "Joseph" Cao stunned the political establishment Saturday by defeating indicted Democratic Rep. William Jefferson in Louisiana's 2nd Congressional District, and will become the first Vietnamese-American in Congress. The race was delayed by Hurricane Gustav.

In Ohio, Kilroy got 139,582 votes to Stivers' 137,271, or 46 percent to 45 percent. Two minor candidates split the remaining 9 percent.

"I am very proud to serve our community as the next congresswoman from central Ohio," Kilroy said in a statement. "In Washington, I will work together with both Democrats, Republicans and president-elect Obama to tackle the real problems that our community faces."

Stivers, a state senator, conceded the race to Kilroy shortly after the results were released Sunday.

"While I am extremely proud of the race I ran, ultimately, is was not enough," Stivers said. "I have called Commissioner Kilroy to congratulate her for her hard-fought victory, and I wish her well in Washington."

The counting of the roughly 24,000 provisional ballots — 40 percent of them cast by voters in the 15th District — went forward after the Ohio Supreme Court ruled Friday that 1,000 of the ballots under dispute must be thrown out because of voter error. In a 4-2 decision, the court struck down Democratic Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner's directive that said the votes should be counted.

Justices said Brunner improperly instructed county elections officials to apply conflicting standards to election law by ruling that the votes should be counted, even though the envelopes failed to comply with legal guidelines set out before Nov. 4.

The disputed ballots contained varying errors on the outer envelope, such as lacking either a signature or a name. Others had the signature or name written in the incorrect space.

The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati had ruled on Nov. 25 that the state high court should rule on the issue, vacating a ruling by U.S. District Judge Algenon Marbley a week earlier in favor of counting the ballots.

The provisional ballots also settled two state House races, both of which were won by Democrats.

Source: Associated Press]]> General http://truevote.us/nucleus/index.php?itemid=978 Sat, 13 Dec 2008 15:44:34 -0500 http://truevote.us/nucleus/index.php?itemid=977 The Times-Standard
December 7, 2008

Since 2004, Premier Elections Solutions has known about the programming error in its software that caused almost 200 ballots to be dropped from Humboldt County's final November election tally, but that came as news to California Secretary of State Debra Bowen's office.

”Secretary Bowen is certainly concerned about Premier's carelessness with yet another elections product and thinks it's distressing that the company took virtually no action for years on this apparent defect,” Secretary of State Press Secretary Kate Folmar wrote in an e-mail to the Times-Standard. “Secretary Bowen is talking with the company, county elections officials and others about how to prevent this problem from ever happening again in California.”
Just days after the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors certified the November election results, the county election's first-of-its-kind Humboldt County Election Transparency Project uncovered the fact that 197 vote-by-mail ballots, which had been scanned through vote counting machines, were mysteriously deleted from the final ballot tally as tabulated by Premier Elections Solutions GEMS software.

The 197 missing ballots would not have changed any of the election's outcomes, according to Humboldt County Registrar of Voters Carolyn Crnich.

However, transparency project volunteer

Mitch Trachtenberg said, the unveiled problem in Premier's software underscores a major issue.

”Our votes are too
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important to be counted by secret code running on proprietary machines,” he said in a statement.

The problem was traced to a programming error with the specific version of the software used in Humboldt County -- a programming error that sometimes results in the first deck of ballots scanned through the vote counting machine vanishing without a trace from the final results.

Premier Elections Solutions spokesman Chris Riggall said the company became aware of the problem in October 2004, and sent out e-mails to its customers detailing how to “work around” the problem and schooled its customers on the procedure at a variety of events.

The two other counties in California that use the same version of the software -- Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo -- were aware of the problem and how to work around it, but Bowen's office was not, despite having conducted a top-to-bottom review of all the state's voting equipment in 2006 due to concerns about the reliability of the state's elections systems.

San Luis Obispo Assistant County Clerk Recorder Tommy Gong said his office received the advisory from Premier, quickly worked the work-around procedure into its election protocol, and hasn't had any problems. Gong also said his county has a method for double checking the results.

”Physically, we know how many ballots we've counted through the machines and the final report should reflect that number,” he said. “If not, there's an issue.”

Similarly, Santa Barbara County Chief Deputy Registrar of Voters Billie Alvarez said Premier notified her office of the problem some years back, and she simply included the work-around steps into the department's written procedures.

Apparently, nothing like that happened in Humboldt County.

Lindsey McWilliams was the elections manager for Humboldt County when the programming error was discovered by Premier. He has since moved on to become the assistant registrar of voters for Solano County.

He said he did receive the e-mail from Premier identifying the problem in its software and how to work around it. But he never included the work-around steps into the county's detailed written elections procedures nor apparently did he inform Crnich, then his boss, of the issue, even as he left the Election's Office last year to head to Solano County.

”There really wasn't any schooling anyone to take over (my position) because I had all of two and a half weeks of transition between (Solano County) and (Humboldt County), and there wasn't an election in process, so there was not a complete transfer of knowledge,” McWilliams said.

Back at Premier, Riggall said that part of his company's job is to communicate well with its customers, specifically surrounding the operations of its systems and potential problems.

Asked why when McWilliams left, the company didn't make sure to inform his replacement of the software problem, Riggall said he didn't know.

”I certainly would accept the fact that our job, as always, is to try to make sure we're communicating well,” he said.

Pressed as to why the company didn't do more to ensure the software problem didn't affect any elections -- either by recalling the software entirely and correcting the problem or, at least, issuing new operations manuals with the work-around procedure included -- Riggall said federal and state certification processes, which can take years, made that impractical.

”It's one of the real obstacles in our business that when we identify an issue, getting that enhancement into the field so that issue can be corrected is a very lengthy, laborious, expensive and time-consuming process,” Riggall said. “When you're not able to do that, you have to rely more on work-arounds and the guidance of your customers.”

Since 2004, Riggall said the company has also revised its “product advisory notice” process so that the Secretary of State's Office is made aware of any software or equipment issues as soon as counties are.

But all this just seems to beg the questions that some have been asking for years: Are our elections too important to be subject to the same cost-benefit analysis of other private businesses? Should there be fail-safe ways to ensure elections are conducted properly, regardless of the turnover in a given elections office? Should there be a level of transparency to the extent that everyone knows how vote-counting software works? And, should every election be audited to ensure that every vote is counted?

Crnich has answered the last question, at least locally, through the creation of the Humboldt County Election Transparency Project. On the surface, the project is pretty simple: Every ballot cast in an election is passed through an optical scanner after being officially counted and the images are then placed online and made available for download.

Open-source software, created by Trachtenberg, then allows viewers to sort the ballots by precinct and conduct recounts or scrutinize the vote as they see fit.

In this, the first election in which the project was fully up and running, it uncovered a software glitch that otherwise would have gone completely unnoticed and potentially could have changed the election's outcome.

The Secretary of State's Office certainly thinks Crnich deserves a proverbial pat on the back for catching the discrepancy, and consequently notifying Bowen's office of the problem in Premier's software.

”Carolyn Crnich deserves kudos for her dedication to election integrity and for alerting Secretary Bowen immediately when Crnich uncovered the problem,” Folmar said.

Thadeus Greenson can be reached at 441-0509 or tgreenson@times-standard.com.

Source: Eureka Times-Standard]]> General http://truevote.us/nucleus/index.php?itemid=977 Sat, 13 Dec 2008 15:41:53 -0500 http://truevote.us/nucleus/index.php?itemid=976 December 12 2008

TALLINN, Estonia -- Parliament has approved a law making Estonia the first country to allow voting by mobile phone.

Lawmakers approved a measure Thursday allowing citizens to vote by mobile phone in the next parliamentary elections in 2011.
Estonians were allowed to cast Internet ballots in last year's parliamentary vote.

The mobile-voting system, which has already been tested, requires that voters obtain free, authorized chips for their phones, said Raul Kaidro, spokesman of the SK Certification Center, which issues personal ID cards in Estonia.

The chip will verify the voter's identity and authorize participation in the electronic voting system, he said.

The system and software have proven effective and reliable in an independent security audit, Kaidro said. He dismissed security concerns, claiming the system "is the most secure way to authenticate digital signatures."

Kaidro said he expects the 2011 vote to be the first of its kind, though he said neighboring Finland and Sweden possess the software and technical capabilities to conduct a similar "cellular election."

Estonian officials said the Internet voting system in 2007 proved secure despite worries about hacker attacks, identity fraud and vote count manipulation.

Source: Associated Press]]> General http://truevote.us/nucleus/index.php?itemid=976 Sat, 13 Dec 2008 15:20:37 -0500