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Next Step to Put Paper Ballot Plank in ALL Party Platforms


Media Release

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
August 18, 2008 — SAN FRANCISCO

Multi-Partisan Effort Calls for Verifiable Elections Plank
in ALL 2008 National Party Platforms!

Contacts:

Dale Axelrod
Phone: 415-824-1549
E-Mail: dalea@sonic.net [1]
Web site: www.PaperBallot.info [2]

Dan Ashby
Phone: 510-233-2144
E-Mail: info@ElectionDefenseAlliance.org [3]
Web site: www.ElectionDefenseAlliance.org [4]

Election integrity activists were gratified this spring at the California State Democratic Party Convention in San Jose, CA to help get an amendment passed to the State Platform's Political Reform section, striking the words "paper trail" and substituting instead the words "a paper ballot as the ballot of record."

This is a very important distinction that MUST be put into every NATIONAL Party Platform for 2008. Only with a tangible, paper ballot can a voter have confidence that there is something to count.

We now urge concerned members of all politically affiliated organizations (i.e,, local clubs, County Central Committees, etc., and especially if you will be participating in the Republican Party’s Historic Online platform drafting process (link: http://www.gopplatform2008.com/rpc_faq.aspx [5] --- submissions will be reviewed starting on Tuesday, August 26th) to push for the adoption of the following resolution as a plank of your national party platform:

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Proposed Paper Ballot Platform Plank --- Verified Elections:

“Be it resolved that we shall demand, actively work for, and support reliable, fraud-free elections by requiring that all voting systems shall provide a paper ballot, marked and verified by the voter, as the ballot of record.”

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Please feel free to call or email for more information on this MULTI-PARTISAN appeal TO DEMAND transparent and trustworthy election standards.

For relevant links and updates please visit:

http://www.PaperBallot.info [6]



Put a Paper Ballot Plank in All Party Platforms

MEDIA ADVISORY For Continuous Release July 19 - 27, 2008
Subject: Calling All Political Parties to Endorse a PAPER BALLOT Platform Plank in their National Party Platform

Reporter Resource Links Below

Contacts:

Dale Axelrod
Phone: 415-824-1549
E-Mail: dalea@sonic.net [7]
Web site: www.PaperBallot.info [8]

Dan Ashby
Phone: 510-233-2144
E-Mail: Info@ElectionDefenseAlliance.org [9]
Web site: www.ElectionDefenseAlliance.org/paper_ballot_plank [10]

=======================================================

Resolution to Include in 2008 National Political Party Platforms

"All Voting Systems Shall Provide a Paper Ballot as the Ballot of Record."

========================================================

Concerned Members of ALL Political Parties,

Election Integrity activists at the California State Democratic Party Convention were successful in amending the Political Reform section

of the state party platform, striking the words "paper trail" and substituting instead the words "a paper ballot as the ballot of record."

This is a very important distinction that must be put into every national political party platform for 2008.

Only with a tangible paper ballot can a voter have confidence that there is something to count.

We urge concerned members of ALL political party affiliated organizations, such as local clubs, assembly, senate, and county central committees,

and especially those participating in "Listening to America" Platform Meetings announced by the Obama campaign across America

from July 19 to 27, to push for adoption of the following resolution as a plank in your national party platform:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Proposed PAPER BALLOT Platform Plank for Verifiable Elections:

"Be it resolved that we shall demand, actively work for, and support reliable, fraud-free elections

by requiring that all voting systems shall provide a paper ballot, marked and verified by the voter,

as the ballot of record."

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Resource Links:

Paper Ballot Platform Plank
http://www.paperballot.info/ [11]

Obama Campaign's "Listening to America—Help Shape the Democratic Party's Platform for Change"
http://my.barackobama.com/listening [12]

2008 California State Democratic Party Platform
(p.10,Political Reform,paragraph 8):
http://www.cadem.org/site/c.jrLZK2PyHmF/b.1193757/k.A452/Political_Refor... [13]

Tangible Ballot Initiative: http://www.TangibleBallot.org/ [14]

Election Defense Alliance: http://www.ElectionDefenseAlliance.org/ [15]

Verifygra: http://www.verifygra.com/ [16]

--30--

This Media Advisory distributed by Election Defense Alliance.org

Election Defense Alliance is a program of International Humanities Center,
a nonprofit organization under Section 501(c)(3) of the IRS Code.



CLICK to DOWNLOAD a PDF of the illustrated Media Advisory [17]


CLICK to DOWNLOAD a copy of the Paper Ballot Platform Plank print flyer [18]







Summary Judgment Hearing in GA Suit to Ban E-Voting

Media Advisory
For Immediate Release Sept. 5, 2008

Hearing on Motion to Ban Current Voting Machines

Media Contact:
Garland Favorito (404) 664-4044

Motions & Other Information:
http://www.voterga.org [19]

WHO: Voters Organized for Trusted Election Results in Georgia, VoterGA, is a diverse, non-partisan coalition of Georgia voters and organizations who filed a voting rights lawsuit against the current method of Georgia electronic voting that they contend cannot be properly verified, audited or recounted

WHEN: Monday Sept. 8, 2008, 2:30 p.m. to approx. 4 p.m.

WHERE: Fulton Co. Superior Court
Courtroom 8B - Judge Johnson
185 Central Ave
Atlanta, GA

WHAT: Attorneys for the plaintiffs will make an oral argument in support of their motion for Summary Judgment to remove unverifiable voting machines throughout Georgia. The Defendants will argue their motion to dismiss all counts of the lawsuit.

BACKGROUND: The motion for Summary Judgment seeks to ban:

· Current Diebold AccuVote TS-R6 voting machines used in Georgia on grounds that sole reliance on its unverifiable electronic ballots cannot provide protection equal to that of verifiable absentee paper ballots also used in Georgia.

· Current Diebold GEMS servers used to count both electronic and optical scan votes in Georgia on grounds the state has already admitted that they cannot detect fraudulent manipulation of the vote and thereby, abridge the right to vote.

· Diebold AccuVote TSX machines piloted in 2006 by Georgia on grounds that their sequentially rolled election results jeopardize secrecy of the ballot as required by the Georgia Constitution, a point plaintiffs contend was already admitted in a 2007 report from the office of the Secretary of State.

Alternatives to Forced E-Voting Proposed in US Justice v. NY State HAVA Suit

FOR RELEASE ON OR AFTER: DECEMBER 15, 2007

Amicus Filed in Federal - NY State Lawsuit Over Voting Machines

Two Dozen Election Integrity Groups Back Brief to Bar E-voting


[ALBANY, NY, Dec. 15] Seeking to avert a federal Justice Department takeover of New York's 2008 federal election, and a possible court-ordered purchase of computerized voting machines, attorneys Andrea Novick and Jonathan Simon of Election Defense Alliance (EDA) on Friday filed an amicus brief in United States v New York State Board of Elections [20] (Case # 1:06-cv-263). The case is scheduled for argument in United States Federal Court in Albany on December 20.

The Voting Rights division of the Justice Department is suing the state board of elections for its alleged failure to comply with Help America Vote Act (HAVA) requirements for voting systems that assist voters overcoming physical or linguistic barriers to voting. The Justice Department is seeking to compel New York to deploy computerized voting systems to address HAVA requirements.

The amicus brief, filed on behalf of 32 election integrity groups and individuals, argues that hand-counting the two federal races in New York in 2008, combined with the addition of accessible ballot marking devices at every polling site, is consistent with the essential requirements for democratic elections and will bring the state fully into compliance with HAVA, as sought by the Department of Justice.

Novick, who practices in New York state, recognized that the federal-state legal standoff over HAVA presented what co-counsel Simon called "an opportunity to offer an alternative solution that moves away from other states' disastrous experience using secret, computerized vote-counting equipment."

"Hand-counted paper ballots satisfy the requirements of HAVA, and fulfill the democratic requirement for transparent verification that computerized systems cannot," Novick said.

As remedy, the brief recommends that the federal court order hand-counting of ballots for the two federal races (president and congress) on New York's ballot next November. The federal HAVA requirements at issue apply only to federal elections.

The brief cites multiple New York state legal precedents defining the right to vote as not merely casting a ballot, but including rights to observe and confirm that ballots are received and accurately counted as cast.

The brief also argues that New York's currently-used mechanical lever voting machines are legal under the federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA), if supplemented by an accessible ballot marking device at every polling site to accommodate voters with special needs.

More than 200 pages of supporting documentation were filed with the brief--including overwhelming evidence that electronic voting systems are not only error and manipulation-prone, but also unconstitutional in their secrecy of operation and lack of transparent means to verify the vote count.

The documentation also includes detailed procedural guides and cost and time estimates for hand counting ballots, prepared and submitted by election integrity groups and individuals who signed on to the brief.

Novick saluted the "cooperation and enthusiasm displayed by our colleagues across the election integrity spectrum" in preparing these critically important documents for the court.

For further information and updates on scheduling please contact Sally Castleman at SallyC[at]ElectionDefenseAlliance[dot]org [21] (781-454-8700) or Jonathan Simon at VerifiedVote2004[at]aol[dot]com [22] (617-538-6012).

For further case details, news, and links to court documents, see

http://www.electiondefensealliance.org/projects/DOJ_v_NY_HAVA_complaint [23]

AZ SoS Brewer Opposes Pima Reforms; Advocates Respond


PRESS RELEASE
For Immediate Release June 12th 2008

Contacts:
John R. Brakey, AUDIT-AZ (520) 250-2360
Jim March, BlackBoxVoting.org, 916-370-0347

Additional Background Resources Linked Below

Brewing Up Election Trouble:
Activists Respond To AZ Sec. of State Brewer’s 11-Page Letter

On 6/6/08 Arizona Secretary of State (SOS) Jan Brewer wrote an 11-page letter outlining objections to the election integrity process in Pima County.  The letter followed a June 4th vote by the Pima County Board of Supervisors not to appeal a court decision establishing that computerized election databases are public records that must be released to political parties according to state law after each election.

Beginning in 2004, Pima County citizen election integrity advocates working with and within the Pima County Democratic Party were able to cooperate with the county government to achieve significantly improved election transparency and security measures that make Pima County a model for fair elections in the state and nation. With the lawsuit over, that cooperation is now picking back up.

Brewer is intent on blocking this progress. Her press release and letter reprimanding county officials (see links at the end of this document) make clear her objections to any current and future security measures. The letter is filled with misstatements and inaccuracies that echo talking points by voting machine vendors.

Brewer maintains that most of the increased election security procedures created by Pima County in cooperation are superfluous, since the state’s “statutory and procedural security, educational and
accountability requirements” assure fair and honest elections.

Her assertions don’t stand up to scrutiny.

Brewer maintains that voting equipment is vigorously tested and certified at the federal and state levels. The state’s testing and certification process amounts to little more than an ineffective “kicking the tires” of the voting equipment.  The state does no “red team” type security analysis, in which qualified security professionals take a complete voting system and, acting as both voters and elections staff in separate scenarios, attempt to subvert a test election.
When “red team” testing was performed in California, every voting system failed miserably.

Brewer objects to the disabling of modems that could allow outside tampering to anyone who knows the phone number.
Brewer maintains that touch screen voting machines help disabled voters. Diebold and other providers of touch screen machines have long used the ploy of helping disabled voters to get their machines into polling places, while providing seriously substandard access. Brewer’s view of “accessibility” involves twisting disabled grandmothers into pretzels as shown.

Brewer adamantly opposes the county’s proposal to graphically scan ballots and upload them to the Internet.  Brewer vastly exaggerates the cost of this “security patch” which would cost under $150,000 in Pima County. This security measure was recommended by election integrity advocates working with the Pima Democrats as a check on Diebold products, declared “fatally flawed” along with every other Brewer-approved system in open court by Pima County’s own experts. Brewer has no trouble with spending $3 million to $6 million to replace the Diebold equipment with another vendor’s garbage, making her objections based on cost ring hollow.

The Need for Election Transparency

The concerns above and many more raised by Secretary of State Jan Brewer’s letter are discussed in greater detail in our full-length report, "Brewing Trouble [24]," linked below, but the point is clear. Brewer’s thinking does not include the concept of election transparency, where every phase of the election is open to the legally proscribed oversight by Arizona’s political parties. She apparently believes the voters should trust the state and counties to conduct fair elections. The Pima County Democratic and Libertarian Parties and Pima County’s officials are working together to create a transparent secure system – those are not opposites, they are hand-in-hand partners to a truly Democratic process.

The continuing efforts by Secretary of State Jan Brewer to impede our progress and to keep the process of counting votes a hidden and mysterious process makes us question her commitment to fair elections in Arizona.
                                                                                 

Read Our Full-length, Point-by-point Rebuttal:
http://www.electiondefensealliance.org/files/BREWING_TROUBLE.pdf [25]

Secretary Brewer’s June 5 Press Release:
http://www.azsos.gov/releases/2008/pressrelease14.htm [26]

Secretary Brewer’s June 5 11-page letter to Pima County:
http://www.azsos.gov/releases/2008/14_files/SECURITY_LETTER_PIMA_6-5-2008.pdf [27]

For Additional Context on the Pima County Election Security Lawsuit, see:
http://www.electiondefensealliance.org/pima_election_database_release_ruling [28]

- 30 -

This press release circulated by Election Defense Alliance

Election Defense Alliance is a sponsored project of International Humanities Center



Major Miscount of Vote in 2006 Election

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE


Major Miscount of Vote in 2006 Election:

Reported Results Skewed Toward Republicans by 4 percent, 3 million votes

Election Defense Alliance Calls for Investigation

BOSTON, MA - November 16, 2006
CONTACT: Jonathan Simon 617.538.6012

Election Defense Alliance, a national election integrity organization, issued an urgent call for further investigation into the 2006 election results and a moratorium on deployment of all electronic election equipment, after analysis of national exit polling data indicated a major undercount of Democratic votes and an overcount of Republican votes in U.S. House and Senate races across the country. “These findings raise urgent questions about the electoral machinery and vote counting systems used in the United States,” according to Sally Castleman, National Chair of EDA. "This is a national indictment of the vote counting process in the United States!"

As in 2004, the exit polling data and the reported election results don’t add up. “But this time there is an objective yardstick in the methodology which establishes the validity of the Exit Poll and challenges the accuracy of the election returns,” said Jonathan Simon, co-founder of Election Defense Alliance. The Exit Poll findings [29] are detailed in a paper published today on the EDA website. [Note: The preceding link is to the original report; an updated version issued Jan. 17, 2007 is available here.] [30]

The 2006 Edison-Mitofsky Exit Poll was commissioned by a consortium of major news organizations. Its conclusions were based on the responses of a very large sample, of more than 10,000 voters nationwide*, and posted at 7:07 p.m. Election Night [31], on the CNN website. That Exit Poll showed Democratic House candidates had out-polled Republicans by 55.0 percent to 43.5 percent – an 11.5 percent margin – in the total vote for the U.S. House, sometimes referred to as the “generic” vote.

By contrast, the election results showed Democratic House candidates won 52.7 percent of the vote to 45.1 percent for Republican candidates, producing a 7.6 percent margin in the total vote for the U.S. House — 3.9 percent less than the Edison-Mitofsky poll. This discrepancy, far beyond the poll’s +/- 1 percent margin of error, has less than a one in 10,000 likelihood of occurring by chance.

By Wednesday afternoon the Edison-Mitofsky poll had been adjusted, by a process known as “forcing,” to match the reported vote totals for the election. This forcing process is done to supply data for future demographic analysis, the main purpose of the Exit Poll. It involved re-weighting every response so that the sum of those responses matched the reported election results. The final result, posted at 1:00 p.m. November 8 [32], showed the adjusted Democratic vote at 52.6 percent and the Republican vote at 45.0 percent, a 7.6 percent margin exactly mirroring the reported vote totals.

The forcing process in this instance reveals a great deal. The political party affiliation of the respondents in the original 7:07 p.m. election night Exit Poll closely reflected the 2004 Bush-Kerry election margin. After the forcing process, 49-percent of respondents reported voting for Republican George W. Bush in 2004, while only 43-percent reported voting for Democrat John Kerry. This 6-percent gap is more than twice the size of the actual 2004 Bush margin of 2.8 percent, and a clear distortion of the 2006 electorate. There is a significant over-sampling of Republican voters in the adjusted 2006 Exit Poll. It simply does not reflect the actual turnout on Election Day 2006.

EDA’s Simon says, “It required some incredible distortions of the demographic data within the poll to bring about the match with reported vote totals. It not only makes the adjusted Exit Poll inaccurate, it also reveals the corresponding inaccuracy of the reported election returns which it was forced to equal. The Democratic margin of victory in U.S. House races was substantially larger than indicated by the election returns.”

“Many will fall into the trap of using this adjusted poll to justify inaccurate official vote counts, and vice versa,” adds Bruce O’Dell, EDA’s Data Analysis Coordinator, “but that’s just arguing in circles. The adjusted exit poll is a statistical illusion. The weighted but unadjusted 7 pm exit poll, which sampled the correct proportion of Kerry and Bush voters and also indicated a much larger Democratic margin, got it right.” O’Dell and Simon’s paper, [33] detailing their analysis of the exit polls and related data, is now posted on the EDA website.

[Ed. note: The original Landslide report (link above) released on 11/17/06 has since been updated to address questions EDA received in response to the original publication. The updated version of 01/17/07 can be downloaded here [34].]

Election Defense Alliance continues to work with other election integrity groups around the country to analyze the results of specific House and Senate races. [35] That data and any evidence of election fraud, malicious attacks on election systems, or other malfunctions that may shed more light on the discrepancy between exit polls and election results will be reported on EDA’s website.

This controversy comes amid growing public concern about the security and accuracy of electronic voting machines, used to count approximately 80 percent of the votes cast in the 2006 election. The Princeton University Center for Information Technology Policy, in a September 2006 study, was the latest respected institution to expose significant flaws in the design and software of one of the most popular electronic touch-screen voting machines, the AccuVote-TS, manufactured by Diebold, Inc. The Princeton report [36] described the machine as “vulnerable to a number of extremely serious attacks that undermine the accuracy and credibility of the vote counts it produces.” These particular machines were used to count an estimated 10 percent of votes on Election Day 2006.

A separate “Security Assessment of the Diebold Optical Scan Voting Terminal,” [37] released by the University of Connecticut VoTeR Center and Department of Computer Science and Engineering last month, concluded that Diebold’s Accuvote-OS machines, optical scanners which tabulate votes cast on paper ballots, are also vulnerable to “a devastating array of attacks.” Accuvote-OS machines are even more widely used than the AccuVote-TS.

Similar vulnerabilities affect other voting equipment manufacturers, as revealed last summer in a study by the Brennan Center [38] at New York University which noted all of America’s computerized voting systems “have significant security and reliability vulnerabilities, which pose a real danger to the integrity of national, state, and local elections.”

The most prudent response to this controversy is a moratorium on the further implementation of computerized voting systems. EDA’s O’Dell cautioned, “It is so abundantly clear that these machines are not secure, there’s no justification for blind confidence in the election system given such dramatic indications of problems with the official vote tally.” And EDA’s Simon summarized, “There has been a rush by some to celebrate 2006 as a fair election, but a Democratic victory does not equate with a fair election. It’s wishful thinking at best to believe that the danger of massive election rigging is somehow past.”

EDA continues to call for a moratorium on the deployment of electronic voting machines in U.S. elections; passage of H.R. 6200 [39], which would require hand-counted paper ballots for presidential elections beginning in 2008; and adoption of the Universal Precinct Sample (UPS) handcount sampling protocol [40] for verification of federal elections as long as electronic election equipment remains in use.

The Exit Poll analysis is a part of Election Defense Alliance’s six-point strategy [41] to defend the accuracy and transparency of the 2006 elections. In addition to extensive analysis of polling data, EDA has been engaged in independent exit polling, election monitoring, legal interventions, and documentation of election irregularities.

*The sample was a national sample of all voters who voted in House races. It was drawn just like the 2004 sample of the presidential popular vote. That is, precincts were chosen to yield a representative (once stratified) sample of all voters wherever they lived/voted--including early and absentee voters and voters in districts where House candidates ran unopposed but were listed on the ballot and therefore could receive votes. As such, the national sample EDA worked with is exactly comparable to the total aggregate vote for the House that we derived from reported vote totals and from close estimates in cases of the few unopposed candidates where 2006 figures were unavailable but prior elections could be used as proxy. It is a very large sampling of the national total, with a correspondingly small (+/-1%) MOE. There were four individual districts sampled for reasons known only to Edison/Mitofsky

ABOUT ELECTION DEFENSE ALLIANCE
The purpose of EDA is to develop a comprehensive national strategy for the election integrity movement, in order to regain public control of the voting process in the United States. Its goal is to insure that the election process is transparent, secure, verifiable, and worthy of the public trust. EDA fosters coordination, resource-sharing, and cohesive strategic planning for a nationwide grassroots network of citizen election integrity advocates.

Jonathan Simon, Co-founder, Election Defense Alliance. He is an attorney who prior work as a polling analyst with Peter D. Hart Research Associates helped persuade him of the importance of an exit poll-based election “alarm system.” Jonathan[at]ElectionDefenseAlliance[dot]org 617.538.6012

Bruce O'Dell is head of the Election Defense Alliance Data Analysis Team. His expertise is in the design of large-scale secure computer and auditing systems for major financial institutions. Bruce[at]ElectionDefenseAlliance[dot]org 612.309.1330

Sally Castleman, Co-founder and National Chairperson, Election Defense Alliance. She lends her skills in conceptualizing, designing, implementing and managing programs as well as her experience as a strategist. She has a long career in grassroots political activism. SallyC[at]ElectionDefenseAlliance[dot]org 781.454.8700

Open Letter to Riverside County Registrar and Supervisors

To the Riverside County Board of Supervisors, Registrar of Voters, Media, and Others

by Tom Courbat, Executive Director, SAVE R VOTE

Just to let everyone know, I have been trying to keep the issue of the proposed security testing of the election system (the hack that Supervisor Stone proposed) on a professional level. I will continue to do so, and obviously cannot control (nor would I attempt to control) the bloggers out there. Mr. Friedman has taken a keen interest in this issue in Riverside, along with election integrity issues throughout the United States, and often makes pokes at those he believes are not moving fast enough in the right direction, or whom he deems to be “waffling” on important election integrity opportunities. His story today on Jeff Stone follows the story on the conviction and imprisonment of Republican Ohio Congressman Bob Ney, who, in conjunction with Jack Abramoff, drafted HAVA ($4 billion for e-voting vendors) and refused to allow any changes/improvements to it in subsequent years. See these two stories below this email.

I continue to urge Mr. Stone and this Board to support a realistic security examination of the election system under the conditions that ANYONE would have available to them before, during and after the election. To establish the very limiting parameters on conducting a security test is like a jewelry store owner leaving the back door and the safe open and telling a security company he wants them to test the security of his facility, but they can ONLY come in the front door, they can ONLY stand in front of the locked glass jewelry case for 15 minutes, they can’t reach around the back, and they can’t bring in any tools, and they can’t study the facility or talk to employees before making the attempt. He goes on to tell them that if they can’t steal jewelry (undetected) in THAT 15 minute period, he concludes that his entire facility is completely safe. Come on Mr. Stone, does the county REALLY believe the election system is tamper-proof? If you don’t remove the new restrictions you added long after making the initial open offer, then the public and media can only conclude you really DON’T believe the election system is tamper-proof, thus telling everyone their votes MAY or MAY NOT have been counted the way they were cast.

By refusing to meet with SAVE R VOTE to discuss potential ground rules, notwithstanding a response from the Secretary of State’s office, Mr. Stone is making it incredibly difficult to establish meaningful dialog on what makes sense, and forces us to communicate via the media. We have elected to provide the media with as much information on this issue as possible since we really have no other method to communicate with Mr. Stone and the Board, other than the 3 minutes allotted to each of us at the Board meetings each week, in which the Board members either ignore our comments and recommendations, or make defensive or derogatory comments as the “last word”. There is no open dialog about the issues with the election system, and even the fact that the Blue Ribbon committee will hold its first meeting at 10 a.m. on next Tuesday (conveniently at the same time the BOS is meeting and discussing the Registrar’s report on the November 7th election), SAVE R VOTE was never notified, and in fact, my email inquiry to Chairman Tavaglione regarding the date/time/location of the meeting went unanswered, further perpetuating the sense that the County really doesn’t want participation in the process by election integrity advocates. And since the committee reports directly to Chairman Tavaglione, it would seem that he would be fully apprised of the particulars of the meeting.

Why there has to be such resistance to recommendations to shore up the security of the election system is difficult to fathom. I know the County has spent over $35 million (likely closer to $40 million) on a system that you tout as being “top of the line”, but observations from those without a vested interest show a totally different picture. It is time to move forward with the “hack test”, then conduct a full-blown election system security audit (top to bottom – everything) and implement safeguards to limit the opportunities for manipulation of the system.

And finally, as we have recommended before, a comprehensive audit by a firm with no ties to Riverside County needs to be conducted on two aspects of the ROV – 1) the processes and procedures being used and how/if they comply with the spirit and the letter of the appropriate laws/regulations and how these procedures impact the voter and 2) a financial audit to determine how much was spent before e-voting and how much is now being spent on the system that was supposed to save taxpayers $600,000 per year, and whether those expenditures were made within legal and procedural guidelines (sole-sourcing, certified system at time of purchase commitment, etc.)

My research shows that last year the county spent an unbelievable (astronomical?) unbudgeted amount on elections and has spent more every year since implementing e-voting than they ever did prior to Sequoia coming onto the scene. I will be releasing the specifics of this research next week, with full documentation, and it will be very disturbing, to say the least.

The taxpayers of this county deserve to know the true total cost of this system, just as they deserve the right to watch the votes being counted and results fully posted. So far, none of these has been forthcoming from the County, and SAVE R VOTE has had to take lead on this to make progress on behalf of the citizens/taxpayers/voters in Riverside County. We have been professional, diligent and persistent in our endeavors and we will continue in a like manner. We will continue our appearances at the Board each week, and will be in attendance at the Blue Ribbon committee to provide observations and recommendations.

Tom Courbat
Executive Director
SAVE R VOTE
Riverside County, CA

R. H. Phillips "Witness to a Crime" Fall Tour Events


R. H. Phillips "Witness to a Crime" Fall Tour Events

Scroll Down for Witness to a Crime Fall Tour Schedule Below



Witness to a Crime:

A Citizens' Audit of an American Election

Come hear what really happened in Ohio, 2004

Richard Hayes Phillips has been the leading investigator of the fraudulent 2004 presidential election in Ohio. His work was relied upon by John Conyers in challenging the Ohio electors in Congress, by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. in his article for Rolling Stone magazine, and by Justice Algenon L. Marbley in issuing his federal court order protecting the ballots from destruction. 

Assisted by teams of volunteers equipped with digital cameras, Phillips amassed some 30,000 images of forensic evidence.
Then he analyzed it all himself, examining 126,000 ballots, 127 poll books, and 141 voter signature books from 18 counties in Ohio.

Phillips began investigating the Ohio election when he received an unsolicited e-mail containing obviously erroneous election results from Cleveland.  He quickly found that hundreds of votes in certain precincts had inexplicably shifted from John Kerry to other presidential candidates. 

This made him a witness to a crime, with a duty to investigate further and to present his findings publicly. The result is the book, Witness to a Crime [42].  It is an investigative report and eyewitness history, the document of record for what really happened in Ohio.


PLATE 9. Two of 24 "wild card" absentee ballots found among nine precincts in   Darke County. These ballots have nothing printed on the back side. In these precincts there were 70 extra ballots -- more ballots photographed than the official number of ballots cast, or the number of persons who attempted to vote,or both. These "wild cards" could have been available for use by any county on an "as needed" basis in a scheme of old-fashioned ballot box stuffing. (See pages 276-277).



Schedule source: http://www.witnesstoacrime.com/schedule.htm [43]
Help promote these speaking engagements.
Forward this schedule to others.
Click the "E-mail this page" link at the foot of the page.
Download, print, and hand out the Grand Lake event flyer [44]

Schedule of Events for Richard Hayes Phillips' Fall Tour

WITNESS TO A CRIME: A Citizens' Audit of an American Election


CALIFORNIA

Mon. Sept. 8, 7:00 P.M.
Marin Peace and Justice Coalition
First Methodist Church
9 Ross Valley Road
San Rafael

Tue. Sept. 9, 7:00 P.M.
Election Defense Alliance
Grand Lake Theater
3200 Grand Avenue
Oakland, California

Wed. Sept. 10, 1:00 p.m.
Book Passage
51 Tamal Vista Blvd.
Corte Madera

Thur. Sept. 11, Book signing, Noon to midnight
Election Defense Alliance
Grand Lake Theater
3200 Grand Avenue
Oakland, California

Fri. Sept. 12, 7:00 p.m.
Humboldt County Green Party
Northtown Books
957 H Street
Arcata

Thanks to Radio KKGN "Green 960" for promotional support of the Northern California appearances
What Happened in Ohio?
LISTEN UP [45]

OREGON

Mon. Sept. 15, 6:30 p.m.
Eugene Peace Works
World Café
449 Blair Boulevard
Eugene

Wed. Sept. 17, 7:00-9:00 p.m.
Alliance for Democracy, Portland Chapter
and Democracy Action Group of the First Unitarian Church

Elliot Hall, First Unitarian Church
1011 SW 12th Avenue
Portland

WASHINGTON

Fri. Sept. 19, 7:00 p.m.
Progressive Democrats of Washington and Washington Public Campaigns
Olympic View Community Church
425 NE 95th Street
Spokane

MONTANA

Tue. Sept. 23, 7:00 P.M. Free general admission
University of Montana, Department of Environmental Studies
and Montana League of Women Voters
Gallagher Business Building, Room 106
University of Montana, Missoula

Wed. Sept. 24, Election auditing workshop, 1:00 p.m.
University of Montana, Environmental Studies Program
University of Montana, Missoula
Students and faculty only

Thur. Sept. 25, 6:00 p.m.
Northern Plains Resource Council
Green Building
Corner of South 27th Street and Third Avenue South
Billings

NEW MEXICO

Mon. Sept. 29, 7:00-10:00 p.m.
Unitarian Universalist Church
107 West Barcelona Road
Santa Fe

Tue. Sept. 30, 7:00 p.m.
Albuquerque Center for Peace and Justice
202 Harvard SE
Albuquerque

Wed. Oct. 1, 6:30 p.m.
Food Not Bombs, Taos Peace House and Infoshop
801 Paseo Del Pueblo Norte
Taos

Thur. Oct. 2, Time TBA
Las Vegas Peace and Justice Center and Casa de Cultura
First United Presbyterian Church
1000 Douglas Avenue
Las Vegas, NM

TEXAS

Fri. Oct. 3, 7:00 p.m.
Vote Rescue
Brave New Books
1904 Guadalupe St, Suite B (downstairs)
Austin, Texas

OHIO

Sat. Oct. 11, 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.
Yellow Springs Street Fair
Yellow Springs, Ohio

San Mateo Democratic Party Protests Paper Ballot Shortage in Primary

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE  February 8, 2007
Contacts:

Andrew Byrnes, Chair
San Mateo County Democratic Central Committee
Phone: 650-575-8112

Gail Work, Chair
San Mateo County Democratic Party Election Integrity Committee
Phone: 650-400-9909

Paper Ballots Unavailable at San Mateo County Polls
San Mateo County Democratic Party Calls for Investigation into Election Day Ballot Shortages

[San Mateo County, CA]  -- By 10:00 a.m. on election day, February 5th, San Mateo County election observers saw that paper ballots were in very short supply at numerous polls.

Requests for more paper ballots from many polls workers across the county were made to the elections office beginning mid-morning.

Despite the county's purchase of onsite equipment to allow printing of paper ballots, poll workers were told to wait until they were "down to a few" ballots before requesting more.

Between the paper ballot request time, the printing time and delivery time, delays were being felt by voters and poll workers throughout the
day at many polls.

With record voter turnout, this was frustrating for voters who were directed to electronic voting with the lack of paper ballots at many of the polls.

"I observed that many polling places in the county kept running out of paper ballots", stated Gail Work, San Mateo County Democratic Party Election Integrity Chair.

"Our team of volunteer election observers saw that no new ballots would be ordered for delivery until they were down to as few as two ballots at a polling place. This caused delays in voters being processed and therefore discouraged people from voting at all or from voting on paper," Work continued.

"I'm concerned that paper ballots are being discouraged in polling places because it's more convenient for election office internal operations and reports results faster.

We should not permit fast election reporting to take precedence over absolute assurance of accurate election results. Many voters prefer to
use paper, especially after the Secretary of State Debra Bowen's top-to-bottom review of security on these machines," Work said.

Official election observers for the San Mateo County Democratic Central Committee saw poll worker preference for electronic voting when paper ballots ran short, despite voter preferences.

Paper ballots were short or ran out at an estimated 40-50 polls with wait times of 4-5 hours to get more ballots. Some polls never received refills and waited for as long as five hours.

At one East Palo Alto poll, a voter there requested a paper ballot three times and then was finally discouraged from using that paper ballot entirely.

The procedure is supposed to be that voters are offered paper ballots when they arrive at the polls.

On February 5th, voters had to request, sometimes repeatedly, a paper ballot.

This discouragement of paper ballots deprives voters of their right to be fully informed of their options and to choose the paper option for voting.

Paper ballots must be made available to voters who do not choose to use electronic voting machines.

The San Mateo County Democratic Party supports further investigation into the cause and effect of the shortage of paper ballots for the Presidential primary election.

Voters who were declined a paper ballot at their polling place are requested to file a Voter Complaint Form to the Secretary of State's office.

Find this form online at:  http://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/elections_fraud.htm [46]

Three Candidates Join VoterGA Lawsuit as Plaintiffs

Press Release
Tue. Nov. 21, 2006

2006 Election Candidates Join E-Voting Rights Suit

ATLANTA, GA – VoterGa, a diverse non-partisan coalition that organized an E-Voting rights lawsuit filed in Georgia during July of this year, announced today its intent to enjoin three 2006 election candidates as plaintiffs to the suit. Included are a Democrat, Republican and an independent write-in candidate who are questioning the 2006 primaries, run-off and general election, respectively.

Mary Wilhite, a Republican who took first in a House District 22 primary but was edged in a run-off by 35 votes, stated she was offered a recount that could not truly be performed. “Our Cherokee County Elections Director agreed to a recount because the victory margin was only 1% but state procedures simply re-accumulate previous totals. No ballots were ever recounted because no ballots actually exist. The process was completed in about a half hour with no change in results.”

Woody Holmes, independent write-in candidate for Georgia House District 65, stated that on the day his election was certified, Fulton County reported he had only two votes. After he questioned the results, the next day the county changed the total to 217 but Holmes believes he got that many votes in a single precinct. He explained: "Our campaign went door-to-door and collected signatures of support from over 800 voters, we distributed 250 yard signs, mailed 4000 campaign pieces to homes in the district, operated a phone bank to get out the vote as well as using automated phone calling to reach out to voters. My message was grounded on issues important to the voters in the district, noting the differences between me and my opponent who was the only named candidate on the ballot."

Former Democratic State Senator, Donzella James, who ran for the 13th U.S. Congressional District, questioned the results of her primary. “There is no way for candidates to truly determine if they won or lost. We must insist on machines and procedures to ensure that every vote is recorded accurately just as it was cast. Even if there is little that can be done about our races this year, all Georgia voters and future candidates will benefit from restoring accountability to our elections.”

The landmark lawsuit challenges the legality and constitutionality of Georgia’s current voting method including the audit trail pilot. It charges that recounts are not currently possible, ballots and people were unconstitutionally removed from elections, electronic voters are not afforded the equal protection given absentee voters and that machine accuracy cannot be determined on Election Day with or without the pilot. The lawsuit can be viewed at the web site, www.voterga.org [47].

Media Contacts: Garland Favorito (404) 664-4044

An End to "Faith-Based" Voting: Simple, Powerful, UBS Method (Universal Ballot Sampling) Compared to HR 811 Audit Standards


Report Updated June 17, 2007
Original PRESS RELEASE
September 8, 2006
For Immediate Release
Attn: Political assignments


Download a PDF of this original press release here [48]
Download a PDF of the original full report based on HR 550 audits here [49].

NEW! Updated version, "Universal Ballot Sampling" (UBS). [50]
Calculations and report revised to test audit standards proposed in H.R. 811.


Contacts:
Jonathan Simon, Election Defense Alliance
jonathan[at]electiondefensealliance[dot]org
617.538.6012

Bruce O'Dell, Election Defense Alliance
bodell[at]electiondefensealliance[dot]org
612.309.1330


AN END TO "FAITH-BASED" VOTING:
Computer Security and Statistical Analysts Describe a Simple and Powerful alternative

Summary

Today the Election Defense Alliance released a report describing the practical implementation details of a simple, unimpeachable method for ensuring the accuracy of electronic voting systems by a public handcount of paper ballot records. This “Universal Precinct-Based Handcount Sample” (UPS) is a simple, feasible method of hand-counting a sample of paper ballot records in-precinct, on election night, by citizens themselves. It not only returns oversight of elections to the American people, where it rightfully belongs, the UPS is also far more accurate than alternative election audit proposals—where only a few percent of precincts are hand-counted, often in secret, and always after the fact. (Download the full report at www.electiondefensealliance.org/UPS.pdf [51] )

The simple, practical UPS validation approach detects fraud or error from any source altering the electronic tally by as little as one percent (1%) with a minimum ninety-nine percent (99%) level of confidence.

In our current political climate, any challenge to a corrupt election must be timely and have very strong justification, or candidates risk being labeled “sore losers” and accompanying ridicule. The UPS validation, by virtue of being accurate to such a high degree of confidence, enables any candidate of any party to contest any Outcome-altering problems with the electronic tally. And since the UPS hand count is done in-precinct on election night, its findings would be available on election night, enabling candidates in federal or statewide elections to challenge a corrupted tally before the election’s outcome becomes a foregone conclusion in the mind of the public, and before the results are officially certified.

The report describes the specific means of effectively conducting a public hand count of 10% of the paper ballot records in 100% of the precincts in federal and statewide races. The UPS is to be conducted “in-precinct” on election night, by citizens representing all concerned political parties, and open to general public observation. Because it is conducted in-precinct, the UPS avoids the difficult task of protecting the chain of custody of paper ballot records in 180,000 U.S. precincts. In fact, all the alternative after-the-fact “spot-audit” schemes (such as HR 550, often referred to as the Holt bill) impose this monumental burden – since in all those protocols, all precincts must safeguard ballot records until just a few percent are “randomly chosen” some time after the election. Integrity of the chain of custody will be especially suspect, of course, in just those suspect elections which such audits are proposed to safeguard. Since a 10% hand-count sample would be drawn in 100% of precincts on election night, the UPS also eases the transition to decentralized, citizen-monitored hand-count verifications of elections, placing responsibility for the integrity of the vote count in the hands of the American people, where it rightfully belongs.

Most importantly, the UPS is inherently resistant to manipulation. The report describes how any attempt to systematically manipulate the UPS audit would be extraordinarily difficult to conduct and to conceal. Not only would it require a very large number of participants, any effort to skew the 10% paper hand count in favor of a candidate would be very likely to increase the overall discrepancy, not decrease it. The UPS provides a simple, effective, and vastly more powerful alternative for election validation than does the proposed HR 550 audit, and all such “spot-audit” proposals. The UPS provides a decentralized hand count, reduces chain of custody concerns and provides citizens and candidates a clear and timely warning of fraud or error. Therefore Election Defense Alliance recommends UPS as an alternative to the HR 550 audit.

In order to restore and maintain citizen trust in the integrity of American democracy, it is critical that wherever electronic vote tallying is performed, paper ballot records must always be produced and must always be checked by the best possible “security mechanism” – the American people, working together in public.

Background

Despite credible reports of widespread error-prone programming and severe, inherent security vulnerabilities, millions of votes in America are now tallied by machines that lack any independent means of verifying that they tallied the vote accurately. (For example see the recent Brennan Justice Center Report [52].) Even where such means exist, they are most often not employed, or not employed properly. (A well-known but by no means isolated example is the Ohio 2004 “recount,” where precincts were cherry-picked rather than being chosen at random, as required by law, and where vendors introduced “cheat sheets” to avoid triggering full hand recounts, the result being that of Ohio’s 88 counties, only one proceeded to a full recount.)

In response to this unacceptable risk, Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ) recently re-introduced HR 550, “The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2005”—a pending bill to require creation and auditing of a fraction of the paper record of all electronic votes cast in federal elections. According to Representative Holt, HR 550 has received “bipartisan endorsement from one-third of the members of the House of Representatives, and has been endorsed by good-government groups as the ‘gold standard’ in [election] verifiability legislation.” (See Rep. Holt's press release dated June 12, 2006.)

A study released August 16, 2006, sponsored by the Election Defense Alliance, revealed that, despite its good intentions, the proposed election audit mechanism in HR 550 – far from protecting America’s elections – would in practice actually leave the US House of Representatives elections wide open to undetected programming error or deliberate fraud. The problems with HR 550 are so fundamental they cannot be remedied simply by auditing more precincts.

About the authors

, Coordinator of Data Analysis, Election Defense Alliance. O’Dell is an information technology consultant with 25 years experience who applies his expertise to analysis of the technical security and integrity of voting systems. His current consulting practice centers on e-Commerce security and the performance and design of very large-scale computer systems for Fortune 100 clients - recently as the chief technical architect in a company-wide security project at one of the top twenty public companies in America.

, JD, co-founder of the Election Defense Alliance. Simon is a graduate of Harvard College and New York University School of Law and is a member of the Bar of Massachusetts. He applies his prior experience as a political survey research analyst for Peter D. Hart Research Associates to studies of the accuracy of exit polls and other election integrity mechanisms. He has collaborated on several studies assessing the accuracy of the 2004 presidential exit polls.

About Election Defense Alliance
, founded July 4, 2006, is a coalition of election integrity activists working at the state and local levels across the nation to detect and counter covert, antidemocratic manipulation of voter registration databases and all electronic voting systems; to regain public control of the voting process in the United States; and to insure that the process is honest, transparent, secure, subject to unambiguous verification, and worthy of the public trust.

EDA Contacts

Jonathan Simon (617-538-6012) jonathan[at]electiondefensealliance[dot]org
Sally Castleman sallyc[at]electiondefensealliance[dot]org
Dan Ashby (510-233-2144) dan[at]electiondefensealliance[dot]org


Download a PDF of this press release here [53]
Download a PDF of the original full report pertaining to H.R. 550 audit standards here [54]

Download a PDF of the NEW revised report pertaining to H.R. 811 audit standards here [55]

Asking for Election Results is a Criminal Offense in Cuyahoga

November 6th, 2006

Victoria Lovegren may be arrested on criminal charges for seeking to see precinct-level election results in Cuyahoga County!

Cuyahoga County is filing criminal charges against me because I asked some volunteers for the Vote Count Protection Project to call some of the Election Day Technicians, and ask them if they would be willing to write down some of the Voting Unit election results on a data-collection form, to used for vote-count verification purposes.

We were doing this because Blackwell’s directive on 11/1 said that we could not add any more “Observers” to the list of observers, so we could not get “inside access.”

We were doing this because Cuyahoga County was NOT going to post results for the public to see.

We were doing this because of Cuyahoga Board of Elections' dismal record of the May Election debacle, secrecy and law-breaking,, and, in general, 92% of the public distrusts electronic voting!

We were doing this because the proposed post-election “audit” being paid for by the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections is a total SHAM! The audit will NOT be counting actual ballots, but subtotals of ballot counts, and will not be counting all precincts, but a subset of the precincts. Their proposed “audit” is nothing of the sort!

The people want to “see” the precinct-level election results, and the CCBOE is refusing to let us see them. From the calling that volunteers made yesterday, we learned that Election Day Technicians were told, during training, that they could NOT read aloud the totals on the Summary Totals report, they, in fact, could not even LOOK at the totals on the report, and, obviously could not let anyone ELSE look at them.

The CCBOE continues to operate in secrecy, and are now trying to intimidate anyone who seeks transparency in the election process. They are making an example of me because I am getting too close. How dare we ask to see precinct-level results?

They told me that I could get counsel and then report to a hearing tomorrow at 1:30pm—election day. They have nothing better to do, on election day, than to stop this dangerous middle-aged woman!

If you would like to support me tomorrow as they throw the book at me—they said I was being charged with criminal “obstruction of business” ORC 2921.31—please come to the Cuyahoga Board of Elections at 1:30pm.

Thanks so much,

Victoria Lovegren, Ph.D.

Cuyahoga Board of Elections
30th and Euclid Avenue
Cleveland, OH
216-443-3200

EDA Affiliate Shows Chicago Voter Database Open to Attack





RELEASE: October 23, 2006

Contact Bob Wilson - (847) 644-2654

CHICAGO VOTER REGISTRATION BASE FLAWED -

VOTERS' KEY PERSONAL INFORMATION AVAILABLE ON THE INTERNET

Chicago, October 24, 2006. A serious security vulnerability
was discovered in the City of Chicago online voter registration
database that would allow an identity pirate to obtain the names,
addresses, birth dates and Social Security numbers of more than 1.5
million Chicago voters.

According to Bob Wilson, Cook County chair of Illinois Ballot
Integrity Project, a malicious hacker could have readily change the
voter registration status of individual voters or groups of voters.
"For example, you could change the status of all the voters in a
precinct to inactive after the registration deadline so that when one
of those voters checked their online status they might believe they
were ineligible and wouldn't attempt to vote," said Wilson. "Or, you
could change their polling place information so they would show up at
the wrong precinct on election day . . . the possibilities are nearly
endless and could cause election day havoc," he added.

IBIP notified staff at the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners
several weeks ago about the vulnerability but no action was taken. "We
had hoped that the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners would take
quick action to plug this hole, but apparently that's not the case,"
said Illinois Ballot Integrity Project member, Peter Zelchenko. He
estimates it would take little more than five minutes to fix the
problem. Late last week, IBIP and Zelchenko became aware that the
security breach was significantly more severe than first thought. The
Board was immediately notified and began taking action to alleviate the
threat last Friday and began installing a new web interface over the
weeekend

Peter Zelchenko, 43rd Ward Aldermanic Candidate with more than 30
years of computer programming and database design and management
experience, discovered the flaw during what he described as a "what if"
session. Zelchenko said, "This situation shows how vulnerable the
entire electronic voting system is. Identity theft is only one possible
outcome. Election theft is another very real possibility." According to
Zelchenko, "This was a very serious vulnerability. Here we have an
online database that can be accessed by millions of PCs throughout the
world. Clearly, this indicates that the whole system is inherently
insecure."

"Problems of this type occur when systems and personnel are strained
to the limit," said Wilson, continuing, "an apt analogy is that of a
balloon - it only takes a small hole to let all the air out. In this
case, a small hole could have let out the personal information of 2.2
million Chicagoans.

"Identity theft is a crime that everyone is concerned about," said
Clare Tobin, chair of the Chicago Chapter of IBIP. "We need to be
equally concerned about the theft of one of our most precious rights -
the right to vote," concluded Tobin.

The Illinois Ballot Integrity Project is a not-for-profit,
non-partisan civic organization dedicated to the correction of election
system deficiencies and to ensuring fair, accurate, and completely
transparent elections. IBIP sees paper ballots as fundamental to this
quest. "It takes a lot of time, effort and people to change 10,000
paper ballots, but only a few keystrokes to change 10,000 computer
votes," said Wilson. We do not oppose the use of technology in the
election process, but it's obvious that today's electronic voting
systems fall far short of minimum acceptable standards," he continued.

"Each of the complex steps in the voting process requires the
translation of the voter's intent from one form of media to another,"
said Zelchenko. Every time that translation occurs, there's an
opportunity for error or deliberate manipulation. A paper ballot offers
one simple step that's nearly impossible to misinterpret and very
difficult to hack," he concluded.

_________________________________________________

The Mission of the Illinois Ballot Integrity Project [56] [2]
is to inform and educate the public, media and government officials
about important election integrity issues and to promote the adoption
of legislation and policies designed to secure the democratic process.
IBIP believes that fundamental to election integrity is the inscribing
of all votes (whether by hand or by machine) on durable paper ballots
which are easily handled and verified by the individual voter. The
voter's paper ballot should be the only official ballot for purposes of
casting, tallying, counting, audit and recount.

###


Click here [57] to print.


National Election Day Vote Vigil Poster

Take ID to the Polls Just to Be Sure
Read why. . . [58]

Got Democracy? Prove It or Lose It

Download the poster at the bottom of this post, under the heading "ATTACHMENT."

Customize it with local event announcements in the "How to Connect" text area.

We suggest gathering at county election centers tonight [59] as soon as polls close and vigil as the votes come in.

Other Election Defense Actions:

Everyone can participate in Precinct Tally Capture and collecting county tabulator results.

Go to http://electiondefense.net [60] for instructions and data forms to collect live vote data today and tonight and upload it to the

Election Defense Alliance Election Data Analysis Project

Click Here to See What We Are Doing to Defend the Midterm 2006 Elections [61]

Our work will not end on midnight, November 7. We will need to publicize findings of our Data Analysis Project, and mobilize public response to suspect and unverifiable election returns.
We may need to take legal action to contest fraud and malfeasance in the conduct of the elections. All of this will require available contingency funds.

Please Donate NOW! [62]

Click Here to See What Else We Can Still Do With Your Help Nov. 7 and After [63]

Pima Democratic Party Wins Lawsuit Releasing E-voting Databases

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – MAY 23rd, 2008
Media Contact: Vince Rabago, Chair, Pima County Democratic Party
________________________________________

“A national victory for open government and transparency”

Democratic Party Wins Lawsuit to Obtain Past and Future Electronic Voting Records

Tucson, AZ (5/23/08) Today a judge ordered the release of past and future electronic electiondata in a public records lawsuit by the Pima County Democratic Party againstthe Pima County Board of Supervisors. The judge found no proof of any security risk to future elections byreleasing the records.

Vince Rabago, Chairman of the Pima County Democratic Party,applauded the decision. “This is a national victory for open government and transparency in elections,” declared Rabago. “If you are going to have electronic voting and election records, you need to have electronicoversight. This is an important win for accountability, oversight, and transparency in our democracy.”

Since late 2006, the Democratic Party had fought for release of public records to conduct its statutory oversight role, after finding anomalies in a post-election review of audit log data. Pima County refused to release the records and forced the Party to file a public records lawsuit.

After a four-day trial in early December, the judge ordered the release of 2006 primary and general election databases. On January 8, 2008, the Pima County Board of Supervisors was met with public pressure from citizens and activists, including representatives from the Democratic, Republican and Libertarian parties, and agreed to go beyond the judge’s initial ruling by releasing records for the 2006 Regional Transportation Authority election, after a motion for reconsideration by Chairman Richard Elias.

A week later, Supervisors Bronson, Valadez, and Day reversed course and decided to continue fighting to keep past and future election records secret.

On May 5, 2008, the Democratic Party went back to courtseeking election records dating back to 1998 and the ability to obtain recordsin future elections. The Party presented testimony from national experts who concluded there was no security risk fromreleasing the databases.

Today’s ruling orders the release of past election records and allows for future election records to be released immediately after the official results of an election are released. The timing of the release is important because Arizona law has a 5-day period to challenge election results after the official results are released.

Rabago commented on the review of election records in the future, noting that consultants working for the Party have designed and are developing a software program to allow for rapid review of electronic election data for any given election to check for tampering or even electronic glitches that could affect the outcome of an election.

“The software code for this analysis tool will be ‘open source,’ which means the software will be open to review or use by anybody and will not be subject to any proprietary or trade secret restrictions. This is how election software should be, but isn’t yet.”
* * * * * * * * *
Click here for news article and court ruling [64]


Tri-partisan Coalition Denounces Illegal Vote-Counting in Maricopa County

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Monday, February 4, 2008

Contacts:

Sen. Karen Johnson 602.926.3160 kjohnson[at]azleg[dot]gov fax: 602.926.3429

John R. Brakey 520. 250.2360 AUDITAZ[at]cox[dot]net

Jim March 916.370.0347 1.jim.march[at]gmail[dot]com

Tri-partisan Coalition Denounces Illegal Vote-Counting in Maricopa County

Democrats, Republicans, and Libertarians Unite for Citizen Oversight of Elections

[ PHOENIX, AZ] -- Several Arizona Legislators and a tri-partisan citizens’ coalition will present an official complaint alleging use of illegal vote-counting software and obstruction of citizen observation rights by the Maricopa Elections Department in a press conference Monday, February 4th, at 12:30 pm on the Arizona Senate lawn.

The Arizona Election Transparency Project will support allegations that the Maricopa Elections Department and vendor Sequoia Voting Systems have illegally been using uncertified ballot programming software to conduct county elections with legal and technical investigatory documentation distributed to the press.

Copies of a sweeping public records request to be served on the Maricopa County Elections Department today will also be distributed to the press, political parties, and the public.

Sequoia Voting Systems is the manufacturer of the computerized election equipment used in Maricopa. Recent revelations by a former Sequoia employee, corroborated by technical examination reports commissioned by the States of California and Pennsylvania, show that an entire subsection of the Sequoia product line known as the Ballot Preparation Software (“BPS”) essential to program ballot definitions in elections, was fraudulently withheld from mandatory certification review at the federal and state levels.

According to Sequoia’s own product manuals, the BPS ballot preparation software tool can take total control over a computerized election database – and therefore over the recording of the votes. The BPS software application is integral and necessary to the operation of the entire Sequoia voting system.

Federal and state law requires that computer voting machine systems be subject to certification review. The documented failure to subject the Sequoia BPS software application to certification review renders the entire Maricopa County computerized voting system illegal according to the federal Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA), which authorized the purchase of the voting equipment.

The integrity of the federal voting system certification process is itself in question, following delayed public disclosure last year by the federal Election Assistance Commission that two of the three private test labs it had contracted to perform certification testing of the nation’s computerized voting systems were subsequently disqualified for failure to perform the required testing. All of the computer voting systems currently in use in Arizona were certified by these now debarred test labs.

The coalition presenting today’s press conference also condemn the Maricopa County Elections Department for obstructing citizen rights to election observation and oversight. The County has recently denied computer specialist Jim March and election activist John Brakey credentials as official public observers of pre-election logic and accuracy testing of the county’s electronic voting system.

Brakey and March were the lead investigators in a recent successful public records lawsuit against the Pima County Elections Department which resulted the release of 300 election databases, the largest release of raw election data in the history of electronic voting. Brakey and March are supported in their insistence that “voting is secret, but the counting is public” by Arizona Revised Statute 16-601 which states, “The count shall be public, in the presence of bystanders.”

The coalition of citizens and legislators convening today’s press conference declare that the County's refusal to allow technically qualified citizen observation of elections compounds their violation of election law by the continued use of uncertified and therefore unlawful vote-counting software in the conduct of public elections.

For the The Arizona Election Transparency Project:

John R. Brakey, Democrat, Tucson

Randy Graf, Republican, Tucson

Dan Gutenkauf, Republican, Tempe

Michael Shelby, Democrat, Phoenix

Jim March, Libertarian, Tucson

–30–


This Press Release Distributed by Election Defense Alliance.org




UNCOUNTED Press Kit Download

The producers of UNCOUNTED have prepared a 25-page guide to the film, downloadable as an MS Word document.

Click to download: http://www.electiondefensealliance.org/files/Uncounted_PressKit.doc [65]

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Synopsis & Film Specs 3

Film Description 4

Credits 5 – 6

About the Production 7

About the Filmmaker 8

Interview with Filmmaker 9 – 10

The Issues 11 – 17

The Heroes 18 – 20

Resources 21

"UNCOUNTED" West Coast Premiere Jan. 15 in Sacramento

The documentary film UNCOUNTED exposes how Americans were cheated during the 2004 and 2006 elections – and how “enraged” voters have turned their anger into citizen activism – to safeguard the vote. Eyewitness accounts from whistleblowers are backed up by election experts in revealing how Jim Crow tactics, electronic voting machine security breaches, vote count manipulation, and illegal behavior by a major voting machine manufacturer all threaten the very core of our democracy – the vote. Democrats, Republicans, business leaders, elected officials, and rank and file voters are all part of a growing movement in America to correct an election system gone bad.


FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

ELECTION IRREGULARITIES EXPOSED:
“Uncounted” West Coast Premiere Jan. 15 at Sacramento Film & Music Festival

CONTACTS:

Glenna Johnson, 615.327.0600 glenna [at] ep-video[dot]com [66] “Uncounted” Co-Producer

Anthony Sheppard, 916.705.3165 tony [at] csus[dot]edu> [67] Co-Director, Sacramento Film & Music Festival

NASHVILLE, TN (January 4, 2008)—The West Coast theatrical premiere of the new film the nation is talking about, UNCOUNTED: The New Math of American Elections, occurs January 15 as an Official Gold Circle Screening of the Sacramento Film & Music Festival.

UNCOUNTED is a feature-length documentary that exposes the threat to the core of our democracy – our right to vote.

"We've always had an eye for topical political and social impact documentaries", said Sacramento Film and Music Festival Co-Director, Anthony Sheppard, Ph.D. "So a well researched and produced documentary about the integrity of the voting system, just as we're going into an election year, was a perfect opportunity for our off-season screening series. We're proud to bring it to Sacramento where this has been such a debated issue."

UNCOUNTED, which drew a sellout crowd to a theatrical premiere in Nashville, is written, produced, and directed by multiple Emmy award-winner David Earnhardt. The film examines how the fraud that changed the outcome of the 2004 election led to even greater election fraud in 2006 and now looms as an unbridled threat in 2008. In factual and logical ways, a variety of computer, statistical, and election experts show how the unethical and illegal manipulation of the vote can change the outcome of every election – whether on a local, state, or national level.

“California is a critical part of the UNCOUNTED story,” says Earnhardt. “California is where one man with everything to lose blew the whistle on the illegal activities of Diebold, one of the biggest makers of voting machines in America.” In UNCOUNTED that man, Steve Heller, describes the heavy price he paid just for telling the truth. Former Oakland Tribune investigative reporter Ian Hoffman helped Heller make his story public. Eventually, the California Secretary of State took Diebold to task for using illegal and unsecured software in voting machines.

The West Coast premiere of UNCOUNTED is sponsored by KSAC 1240AM, The Peter B. Collins Show, and the Crest Theatre. Additional support comes from Sacramento for Democracy, a group committed to free, fair and open elections. The organization’s Communication Director, Bill Lackemacher, says the approaching February 5 primaries make the theatrical premiere timely. “With the California presidential primaries just around the corner, now is the time for the average citizen to learn about the vulnerabilities with our voting systems and what they can do to safeguard our democracy.” Lackemacher enthusiastically adds, “This film is a must-see for anyone who believes that the core of our democracy is the right to vote and have that vote counted as cast."

The West Coast premiere screenings are on Tuesday, January 15 at the Crest Theatre, 1013 K Street in Downtown Sacramento. Show times are 5:30 and 8PM. Tickets for the Sacramento screenings can be purchased online at http://www.tickets.com/browseother.cgi?minpid=6145879 [68] and at the Crest Theatre box office. A question and answer session featuring filmmaker David Earnhardt, along with Brad Friedman of Bradblog.com and other special guests will follow both screenings.

David Earnhardt is a producer/director of 30 years and a former broadcast executive. He is a winner of both Emmy and Iris awards. A national documentary on children’s rights, a biographical documentary about jazz legend Helen Humes, and a comedy special featuring an up-and-coming Jay Leno are among Earnhardt’s many credits.

PRESS KIT: http://UncountedTheMovie.com/press.html [69]

PROMOTIONAL TRAILER: http://UncountedTheMovie.com/trailer.html [70]

CONTACT FILMMAKER: David[at]ep-video[dot]com [71]

For more information about the Sacramento Film and Music Festival go to http://www.sacfilm.com [72].

To learn more about the Peter B. Collins Show, visit http://www.PeterBCollins.com [73].

And to find out about Sacramento for Democracy, visit http://www.sacramentofordemocracy.org [74].

Ballot Evidence of Election Tampering to Be Destroyed

REPORTERS: Links and attachments from this page provide original source documents on the RTA election ballot tampering story, including:

* Ballot destruction memo [75]
* Sworn affidavit re: ballot tampering*
* Background facts on the RTA election* [76]
* Pima County election integrity lawsuit [77]

The lawsuit resulted in a court-ordered release of Pima County election database records (the computerized record of votes) corresponding to the actual paper ballots, about to be destroyed.

Scroll down for Press Release, Ballot Destruction Memo, and Affidavit attesting to confession of election fixing in the RTA election by an elections department employee at the direction of senior county officials.


FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE July 9, 2008

Contact:
Bill Risner, Esq. / AUDITAZ
520- 622-7494

EVIDENCE OF RTA ELECTION TAMPERING TO BE DESTROYED BY PIMA COUNTY

SWORN TESTIMONY OF CONFESSION OF TAMPERING

Where: Valdez Main Library Downtown, downstairs meeting room

When: July 9, 2008,

Time: 1:30 p.m. promptly

New information about the planned destruction of the actual paper ballots from the RTA (Regional

Transportation Authority) and tax increase election has come to light this week. These ballots are

scheduled for destruction by Pima County Treasurer Beth Ford unless immediate action is taken by

Attorney General Terry Goddard’s office to preserve this important evidence.

Up to this point, the so-called investigation by Attorney General Goddard’s office has been generally

described by election integrity groups as “a sham.”

Among the irregularities in that investigation was an untrue claim that the Tucson election reform

community approved of the attorney general’s decision to deny a hand count of the ballots from the RTA

election.

BREAKING NEWS: Further evidence of tampering with the RTA results has been exposed by a former

county employee. He will testify, under oath, that Bryan Crane, election computer operator, feared

discovery of the fact that he, at the direction of Elections Director Brad Nelson, had tampered with

the data from the RTA election, materially “fixing” the election to approve rather than reject the RTA.

On behalf of the public and election integrity activists, AUDIT AZ demands a complete re-investigation

of the RTA election by Attorney General Terry Goddard’s office, including:

1. Preservation of the actual ballots

2. A full hand count of all the ballots, with witnesses.

3. Determination whether there are criminal acts to be prosecuted.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

Ballot destruction memo and background facts on the RTA election and court ordered release of election

database are available for download at: http://www.ElectionDefenseAlliance.org/RTA_evidence [78]

Sworn affidavit to be released at 2:30 p.m. July 9, same location.

-30-

Press Release by AUDIT-AZ (Americans United for Democracy, Integrity, and Transparency in Elections, Arizona) distributed by Election Defense Alliance

Election Defense Alliance is a program of International Humanities Center, a nonprofit organization under Section 501(c)(3) of the IRS Code.





Some Facts Related to the RTA Election


Click to download PDF [79]

1. The RTA passed by a surprisingly large margin. Polls taken before the election showed it losing. Sales tax increases for roads had lost badly in four previous elections.

2. Election Division staff printed unauthorized vote total summary reports after the first day of RTA early ballot scanning.

3. Before the second day of RTA early ballot scanning, Election Division staff erased the first day’s database backup by over-writing it. This required responding to two warning messages, one from GEMS and one from Windows.

4. Election systems expert Michael Shamos of Carnegie Mellon advised the AG investigator of possible RTA fraud to hand count ballots, echoing advice from local election activists.

5. The AG Investigator lied to Shamos in an email, saying that “local naysayers” were onboard with not looking at ballots. The opposite was true and the investigator knew it, because he had engaged in a shouting argument with local naysayers about this issue.

6. IBeta tests [80] conducted under contract with the AG investigator of the RTA election should have included looking for possible swapping of yes and no votes, but did not.

7. County staff directed all aspects of the IBeta testing [81], and led the testers to look at irrelevant items and to disregard potentially important items.

8. A whistleblower has come forward saying in a sworn affidavit that Bryan Crane told him privately that he had “fixed” the RTA election, under direction from his bosses.

9. The County Treasurer has announced a plan to destroy the RTA ballots ASAP.

10. A Microsoft Access manual was seen and photographed in the vote tabulation room on election night. Use of MS Access on an election computer was and is illegal.

11. Democratic Party observers were prevented from investigating cables connected to the tabulation computer after the RTA on the pretext that it was a non-partisan election.

12. A tape of ballot layout held by the Secretary of State for use by the Attorney General in any fraud investigation was never examined during the RTA fraud investigation where it was potentially key evidence. Instead it was returned to the suspects, who “lost” it.

13. The Pima County Board of Supervisors, through their lawyers, claimed there was a substantial risk that all election employees handling the election computer would “take the fifth” and refuse to answer questions based on a fear of criminal prosecution.

14. The Pima County Board of Supervisors has never requested an internal investigation of the Election Division.

15. Neither Brad Nelson nor Bryan Crane nor any Election Division employee has been reprimanded for any violations of rules or procedures.

16. At the end of the RTA Election Day, the database was NOT backed up, as it has been in virtually every other election. The database was not backed up until three days later, after all results had been published.

17. The Pima County Election Division purchased a “crop scanner” computer-hacking tool ten months before the RTA election. This tool had no other purpose in the Election Division than to illegally alter the programming of precinct voting machines.

18. Jim Berry retired from his job as the County Administrator’s assistant in early 2005 and was immediately hired by the County to do a precinct by precinct study of how Pima voters had voted in bond elections, and “other duties” as assigned. Mr. Berry collected $75,000 from the County for this contract, while at the same time collecting $12,000 from a pro-RTA group for helping them with the RTA campaign.

--Bill Risner, Esq. and Mickey Duniho, AUDITAZ


CA Sec. of State Sues ES&S for Unauthorized Sales

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Nicole Winger
November 19, 2007 (916) 653-6575


CA Secretary of State Debra Bowen Sues ES&S
Over Sale of Unauthorized Equipment to California Counties

Secretary seeks at least $15 million in penalties and reimbursement for counties

SACRAMENTO – Secretary of State Debra Bowen today filed suit against Election Systems & Software, Inc. (ES&S) for nearly $15 million after a four-month investigation revealed the company had repeatedly violated state law.

Secretary Bowen is suing ES&S for $9.72 million in penalties for selling 972 machines that contained hardware changes that were never submitted to, or reviewed by, the Secretary of State. Furthermore, she is seeking nearly $5 million to reimburse the five counties that bought the machines believing they were buying certified voting equipment.

“ES&S ignored the law over and over and over again, and it got caught,” said Bowen, the state’s top elections officer. “California law is very clear on this issue. I am not going to stand on the sidelines and watch a voting system vendor come into this state, ignore the laws, and make millions of dollars from California’s taxpayers in the process.”

The sales in question involve ES&S’s AutoMARK ballot-marking devices that 14 California counties use to comply with the federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA) requirement that voters with disabilities have a way to cast ballots privately and independently. Unlike direct recording electronic (DRE) devices, the AutoMARK prints a voted ballot that is counted by an optical scanner along with other paper ballots.

In July 2007, Secretary Bowen learned that ES&S had sold AutoMARK A200s – a version of the AutoMARK A100 that had been altered without authorization from the Secretary of State – to five counties in 2006. The counties collectively spent about $5 million for the equipment: Colusa bought 20 machines, Marin bought 130, Merced bought 104, San Francisco bought 558, and Solano bought 160.

Elections officials in the five counties believed they were purchasing the certified AutoMARK A100s when, in fact, they had purchased AutoMARK A200s. At least some of the five counties used the AutoMARK A200s in elections.

Under California law, no voting system or part of a voting system can be sold or used in the state until it is fully tested and certified by the Secretary of State. Vendors also are required by law to get the Secretary’s approval of any changes to a certified voting system. However, ES&S failed to notify, or receive approval from, the Secretary of State before making changes to the AutoMARK A100 and selling the 972 AutoMARK A200 machines that contained the unauthorized changes to the five counties.

The Secretary of State’s office held a public hearing on the matter on October 15, 2007. At that hearing, ES&S asserted the Secretary of State was notified about changes to the AutoMARK. However, ES&S provided no evidence before, during, or after the hearing to substantiate its claim. The company also contended the changes to the AutoMARK A100 were so minor that ES&S was not required to submit them to the Secretary of State for review. However, Elections Code section 19213 states unequivocally that it is the Secretary of State, not a voting system vendor, who decides whether any proposed changes require the Secretary to re-examine the system.
In August 2005, the prior California Secretary of State conditionally certified the ES&S AutoMARK A100 for use in California. One of the conditions of certification was that “[n]o substitution or modification of the voting systems shall be made with respect to any component of the voting systems… until the Secretary of State has been notified in writing and has determined that the proposed change or modification does not impair the accuracy and efficiency of the voting systems sufficient to require a re-examination and approval.” This condition echoes Elections Code sections 19214.5 and 18564.5, which require notice to, and approval by, the Secretary of State for any changes to a certified voting system.

Secretary Bowen issued her official findings and decision in the matter this morning. The Attorney General, who is representing the Secretary of State in the case, filed the complaint on the Secretary’s behalf in San Francisco Superior Court today. Both documents are available at:

http://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/ess_automark_hearing.htm [82]

Secretary Bowen is seeking the following penalties under California Elections Code sections 18564.5 and 19214.5:

§ Damages of $10,000 per violation, totaling an estimated $9.72 million for the 972 machines sold in California. Half would go to the counties where the violations occurred and the other half would go to the Secretary of State for use in bolstering voting system security efforts.

§ A refund of approximately $5 million to the five counties for what they paid to ES&S, regardless of whether the voting system was used in an election.

§ Penalties of $50,000 per act for the unauthorized insertion of uncertified hardware into a voting machine.

§ Penalties of $50,000 per act for failing to notify the Secretary of State before changing a voting system certified for use in California.


EDA Study Finds Major Flaws in HR 550 Election Audit Proposal


PRESS RELEASE
August 17, 2006
For Immediate Release
Attn: Political assignments

Download a PDF of this press release here. [83]
Download a PDF of the full report here [84].


Contact:
Jonathan Simon, Election Defense Alliance, 617.538.6012
jonathan[at]electiondefensealliance[dot]org [85]

STUDY PROVES FLAWS IN HR 550 AUDIT LEAVE CONGRESSIONAL ELECTIONS FULLY EXPOSED TO OUTCOME-ALTERING FRAUD AND ERROR

Statistical Analysts Propose Effective and Powerful Alternative

Summary

Today a group of computer security and statistical analysts released a study proving that the election audit procedure set forth in HR 550, popularly known as the Holt Bill, would in practice leave elections for the US House of Representatives completely exposed to undetected programming errors and deliberate fraud. (Read the Abstract or Download the full report at http://electiondefensealliance.org/hr550auditflaws [86])

The study demonstrates that the HR 550 audit is so ineffective that in 40% of races examined, the audit would completely fail to detect fraud or error affecting 10% of precincts in an average US House race. Fraud or error on this scale could easily alter the election outcome if left undetected.

Statistical experts and mathematicians associated with Election Defense Alliance (EDA) (www.ElectionDefenseAlliance.org [87]) propose an effective alternative approach in their report issued today. Their validation approach detects fraud or error affecting as little as one percent (1%) of the electronic tally with a ninety-nine percent (99%) level of confidence.

EDA urgently recommends replacing the audit proposed in HR 550 with this alternative approach. The EDA study first tested the HR 550 audit by applying its protocol in 10,000 simulated congressional elections. The simulation revealed serious flaws in the HR 550 audit design that cannot be remedied by typical quantitative means, such as by selecting larger samples.

To avoid this intrinsic flaw, the report then presents and tests an alternate validation protocol that can immediately achieve 99% confidence of detection of manipulation of even 1% of the total vote. The alternative protocol calls for a hand count of 10% of the paper ballot records in a U.S. Congressional District race in 100% of the precincts. EDA will present this Universal Precinct-based Sampling (UPS) in a full report soon to be released.

Besides its extraordinary accuracy, UPS has the additional advantage of simplicity. It may be conducted "in-precinct" on election night, by public volunteers representing all concerned political parties. If conducted in-precinct, the UPS also avoids the difficult task of protecting the chain of custody of paper ballot records in 180,000 U.S. precincts.

The HR 550 audit protocol demands this monumental task as currently written. Since a 10% hand-count sample could be drawn in 100% of precincts on election night, the UPS also eases the transition to decentralized, citizen-monitored hand-count verifications of elections, placing responsibility for the integrity of the vote count in the hands of the American people, where it rightfully belongs.

The EDA study also exposes the compromising position in which the HR 550 audit leaves candidates and concerned citizens. Even if fraud or error is detected by an HR 550 audit, candidates and citizens would still lack any means by which to determine how many votes were affected by the problem. Candidates and citizens would therefore lack a preliminary basis for challenging a potentially corrupted election in a timely manner. Regrettably, HR 550 is silent on when and how candidates or election officials should act when discrepancies are caught by the HR 550 procedure.

The UPS, to be more fully described in EDA's next report, provides a simple, effective, and vastly more powerful alternative for election validation than does the proposed HR 550 audit. The UPS provides a decentralized hand count, reduces chain of custody concerns, and provides citizens a clear and timely alarm for fraud or error. Therefore Election Defense Alliance recommends UPS as an alternative to the HR 550 audit.

Background

Despite credible reports of widespread error-prone programming and severe, inherent security vulnerabilities, electronic voting systems now tally more than 95% of votes in America.
(For example, see the recent Brennan Report [88].

The majority of elections conducted on these systems are unverified. Therefore there is no independent procedure to prove the machine vote tally is accurate. Even where such procedures do exist on the books, officials frequently do not conduct them properly, or at all. A well-known but by no means isolated example is the Ohio 2004 "recount." In that case, officials cherry-picked precincts to recount rather than choosing them at random, as required by law. Election system vendors provided "cheat sheets" to help officials avoid triggering full hand recounts of the selected precincts. As a result, only one of Ohio's 88 counties faced a full recount.

In response to this unacceptable risk, Rep. Rush Holt(D-NJ) recently re-introduced HR 550, "The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2005." HR 550 is a bill currently pending in Congress that mandates a paper record for each vote and also calls for an audit of a fraction of the paper records of all electronic votes cast in federal elections. According to Representative Holt, HR 550 has received "bipartisan endorsement from one-third of the members of the House of Representatives, and has been endorsed by good-government groups as the 'gold standard' in [election] verifiability legislation."
(See June 12 press release at http://holt.house.gov/list/press/nj12_holt/061206.html [89])

The authors of this HR550 audit critique, and of the UPS alternative, believe otherwise.

About the Authors

Bruce O'Dell, Coordinator of Data Analysis, Election Defense Alliance. O'Dell is an information technology consultant with 25 years' experience who applies his expertise to analysis of the technical security and integrity of voting systems. His current consulting practice centers on e-Commerce security and the performance and design of very large-scale computer systems for Fortune 100 clients, most recently as the chief technical architect in a company-wide security project at one of the top t20 public companies in America.
http://www.digitalagility.com/Odell_home_page.htm [90]

Jonathan Simon, JD, Co-founder of Election Defense Alliance. Simon is a graduate of Harvard College and New York University School of Law and is a member of the Bar of Massachusetts. He applies his prior experience as a political survey research analyst for Peter D. Hart Research Associates to studies of the accuracy of exit polls and other election integrity mechanisms. He collaborated on several studies assessing the accuracy of the 2004 presidential exit polls.
http://www.electiondefensealliance.org/jonathan_simon [91]

Josh Mitteldorf, PhD, is affiliated with the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Arizona, and is currently specializing in computer simulations that demonstrate how natural selection can act on groups and communities. He has taught physics, mathematics, astronomy, and evolution at Harvard, Berkeley, Temple, the University of Pennsylvania, LaSalle and Bryn Mawr. Since the 2004 presidential election, he has been part of a coalition of statisticians who analyze voting patterns for evidence of errors or fraud.
http://www.u.arizona.edu/~jmitteld [92]

Steven Freeman holds a Ph.D. from MIT's Sloan School of Management and an M.S. in Social System Science from the University of Pennsylvaniaís Wharton School. Since 2000, he has held several academic positions at the University of Pennsylvania, where he currently serves as Visiting Scholar and a member of the teaching faculty of the Graduate Program of Organizational Dynamics in the School of Arts and Sciences. His election research has won an award from Project Censored as one of the three most important ìcensoredî stories of 2005. He is the author, with Joel Bleifuss, of Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count (New York: Seven Stories Press 2006).
http://www.phil.upenn.edu/faculty/freeman/CV.pdf [93]

About Election Defense Alliance

Election Defense Alliance (http://www.ElectionDefenseAlliance.org [94]), founded July 4, 2006, is a coalition of election integrity activists working at the state and local levels across the nation to detect and counter covert, antidemocratic manipulation of voter registration databases and all electronic voting systems, and to promote honest, secure and transparent elections in which every vote is counted as cast so that our official election outcomes are truly worthy of the public trust.

EDA Contacts:

Jonathan Simon, 617-538-6012
jonathan [at] electiondefensealliance [dot] org

Sally Castleman
sallyc [at] electiondefensealliance [dot] org

Dan Ashby, 510.275.5723 [voicemail] 510.740.0572 [fax]
dan [at] electiondefensealliance [dot] org

Election Defense Alliance Partners in Independent Exit Poll Project

October 21, 2006

The Warren Poll, Steven Freeman, and Election Defense Alliance Join Forces as Vote Count Protection Project

By Stephanie Frank Singer

With increased consciousness of the dangers of electronic vote-counting technology, there is increasing grassroots pressure for independent election verification. In elections around the world, public-domain exit polls are central to such efforts. Unfortunately, US media consortium exit pollsters have announced that they will no longer release any data even to their media clients until they can "correct" their numbers so as to make them conform to the official count. In other words, what they report is no longer exit poll data at all, but rather a meaningless affirmation of official numbers.

To obtain an honest assessment of how people voted and whether or not machines are recording votes accurately, groups around the nation have developed plans to conduct exit polls. We are pleased to announce that several groups at the forefront of the national election integrity movement groups pushing for independent exit polls will be coordinating in this effort under the banner of the Vote Count Protection Project.

The combined exit poll will implemented by Kenneth Warren of The Warren Poll, Steven F. Freeman of the University of Pennsylvania, and Jonathan Simon of Election Defense Alliance. At the same time, election data forensics will be implemented by Stephanie F. Singer of Campaign Scientific and Bruce O'Dell of Election Defense Alliance.

All data and findings will be available for independent analyses.

More information is available on the web:

http://www.electionintegrity.org/vcpp.shtml [95]
http://www.electiondefensealliance.org [96]
http://www.campaignscientific.com [97]

The Vote Count Protection Project is an initiative of the Columbus Institute for Contemporary Journalism, a 501(c)(3) organization. The Election Defense Alliance is a 501(c)(3) organization. All contributions are tax-deductible.

Stephanie Frank Singer is a mathematician, an author, and an entrepreneur. She is co-director of the Vote Count Protection Project.

Originally published at OpEdNews.com [98]

NH Fair Elections Committee Statement on Recount Investigations

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Feb. 20, 2008

New Hampshire Fair Elections Committee Statement Regarding Activist Recount Investigations


Immediately following the New Hampshire Primary, citizens around the nation raised questions about discrepancies in votes counted by hand versus those counted by Diebold electronic vote counting machines. As well, citizens identified apparent discrepancies in numbers of votes counted versus numbers of voters in certain polling places in the state.

These concerns were not unexpected, given the broad range of scientific findings about the rates of failure and ease of tampering with the Diebold Accuvote 1.94W machines used to count more than 80% of New Hampshire's votes.

Both Democratic and Republican candidates requested recounts; the Democratic recount only covered one county, the Republican was statewide. Eight independent national voting integrity organizations sent representatives to New Hampshire to conduct citizen oversight and investigations of the recounts, in part due to the importance of the NH Primary. These groups are all based outside of New Hampshire. They came to New Hampshire as free agents, uninvited by the New Hampshire Fair Elections Committee or, to our knowledge, by any NH activist.

The NH Fair Elections Committee (FEC) greatly values and appreciates these efforts, but it must be made clear that the FEC, a nonpartisan citizens action group focused on election integrity in the Granite State, has not been involved in the recount investigation.

Additionally, the FEC currently maintains a neutral position pending results and data analysis from these citizen investigations.

The FEC supports the petition from GOP candidate Albert Howard to the NH Ballot Law Commission, which appeals the recount on the basis of legal and procedural failures, and which requests investigations and suggests beneficial improvements to NH election procedures.

New Hampshire elections are exemplary in many ways, not the least of which being that 45% of our polling places conduct 100% transparent, open, publicly observable, hand count elections. The FEC has been instrumental in sharing NH hand count methodologies with other states in the nation, and the "NH method", as it has come to be known, is widely regarded among national voting integrity groups as the Gold Standard for conducting honest elections. Other factors in New Hampshire elections, such as grassroots local control, and open recount process, are also considered exemplary.

Nonetheless, a preliminary review of the recount investigation results indicates several areas where existing laws and procedures may have not been followed as well as they could have been, and other areas where new laws and procedures would enhance our election integrity.

The NH Fair Elections Committee has always worked collaboratively with the NH Dept of State and the NH legislature. The FEC has consistently informed state officials and representatives of our concerns that more than 80% of New Hampshire vote counting has been outsourced to private interests, resulting in these votes being counted using corporate controlled, proprietary, secret vote counting technology.

The FEC has testified before the Ballot Law Commission and the state legislature, asking for more responsible decision making regarding the use of privatized, proprietary, computerized vote tabulation machines. The FEC has submitted reasonable and effective legislative and procedural recommendations to mitigate the risks of tampering and failure that is posed by these machines, and to address the use of secret vote counting technology, which is in contradiction to New Hampshire Constitutional requirements for open vote counting, and to the New Hampshire Right to Know law. Although these recommendations have not yet been implemented, the FEC looks forward to continuing to work with the State to improve our election systems.

The work done on our collective behalf by dedicated and honest activists from around the nation will help us all to cure problems in procedures which have not been followed, and to identify areas for improvement where needed.


Public Notice Concerning Selection of New York Voting Machines