Election Protection

Bush Exits with a Bang: Toxic Bailout and Two More Wars?

Heather Wokusch — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 16:53:09 -0400

The Bush administration is heading us towards more disaster with its 'toxic debt' bailout and destabilization of Pakistan and Iran. We can't afford to go down this road again. In this short video, Heather Wokusch provides background, context and ideas for taking action.

Links for sources cited in this video:

Bailout:

Crisis talks over $700B 'toxic debt' rescue plan

Bush: "The American people have got to know that I made this decision along with a lot of experts because it was necessary to protect them."

Pakistan:

Washington is Risking War with Pakistan

The American War Moves to Pakistan

Iran:

Preparing The Battlefield July 07, 2008

Dutch intel: US to strike Iran in coming weeks September 1, 08

Israel asks U.S. for arms, air corridor to attack Iran September 11, 08

U.S. to sell IAF smart bombs for heavily fortified targets September 14, 08

Bush could still attack Iran Sept 17 08

DNC Calls for 'Immediate Firing' of DoJ Voting Chief in Wake of 'Outrageous Comments', 'Outright Attack on Voting Rights'

davidswanson — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 16:33:08 -0400

Says John 'Minorities Die First' Tanner's Recent Remarks 'Underscore the GOP's Utter Disregard for the Integrity of our Nation's Election System'
Statement Issued in Advance of Tomorrow's U.S. House Judicary Hearings Featuring Testimony from Embattled DoJ Voting Rights Chief...
By BradBlog

In advance of tomorrow morning's House Judiciary Committee hearing to feature testimony by DoJ Civil Rights Division Voting Section chief, John "Minorities Die First" Tanner, DNC Chair Howard Dean and Donna Brazile of the DNC Voting Rights Institute have issued a statement calling for Tanner to be "immediately fired."

"In their latest scheme, the Republican Administration has manipulated the mission of the Department of Justice, firing US Attorneys who were unwilling to pursue phony 'voter fraud' cases, and politicized the Civil Rights Division," the statement (posted in full at the end of this article) reads.

The release goes on to decry the politicization of the Bush Department of Justice, and what is described as their "outright assault" on the right to vote.

"Tanner's outrageous comments underscore the GOP's utter disregard for the integrity of our nation's election system and are an affront to the spirit of the Voting Rights Act," Dean and Brazile said, before declaring that the embattled Voting Rights Section chief "should be fired immediately and replaced with someone who will work to make sure that all citizens are able to vote and have their vote counted."

They call on Judge Michael Mukasey, if he is confirmed as the next Attorney General, to "commit to replacing Tanner with someone who will protect our rights, not ignore them for a partisan agenda."

As The BRAD BLOG recently reported, however, Mukasey made clear in his recent Senate Confirmation hearings that he does not object to restrictive polling place Photo ID laws which critics contend may disenfranchise anywhere from 10 to 30 million largely Democratic-leaning voters who do not have such ID.

Previously, Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) and Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) have called for Tanner's firing. Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) wrote Mukasey last week to ask if he will review the matter and consider the termination of Tanner.

Tanner's objectionable comments were made several weeks ago during a panel discussion on Photo ID issues at the National Latino Congreso in Los Angeles. Tanner, who approved a controversial Georgia Photo ID law on behalf of the DoJ against the advice of the majority of the career staffers in the Voting Rights section, admitted the law would disenfranchise some elderly voters and added that while that was a "shame", minorities would somehow be positively effected by such laws since "they don't become elderly. They die first."

(A short clip of Tanner's comments is posted at left.)

The Georgia ID law was later found unconstitutional and overturned by two federal courts who compared the restriction to a modern day Jim Crow-era poll tax.

Paul Kiel at TPM Muck has a few more thoughts in advance of tomorrow's Judiciary Committee hearings.

Though Tanner comments were originally video-taped and reported by The BRAD BLOG. The DNC press release credits Fox News.com (thanks guys!)

The complete DNC statement from Howard Dean and Donna Brazile as just issued, follows below...READ IT at BradBlog

BradBlog Reports: Diebold Goes the Way of Turdblossom

davidswanson — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 14:18:21 -0400

'DIEBOLD ELECTION SYSTEMS, INC.' IS NO MORE!
Election Unit Spins off from Corporate Parent, Becomes 'Premier Election Solutions' After Failure to Find Buyer for Failing Unit!

-- By Brad Friedman from St. Louis, MO
Diebold Elections Systems, Inc. is no more. At least in name.

After a year and a half of conversely trying to dump their failed voting unit and/or lying to customers about the reliability and security of their voting systems, corporate parent Diebold is giving up the ghost of their election business which, according to an analyst in a Reuters report, was "responsible for less than 10 percent of Diebold's revenue, and 100 percent of its bad publicity.

According to a company statement just released, Diebold Elections Systems, Inc. will become Premier Election Solutions as of today. The company president, David Byrd, who has overseen the disastrous election unit for some time, will stay on as President to go down with the ship, apparently.

After a string of disastrous reports on the quality and security of their voting systems, along with plummeting stock prices since last week, it seems clear that Diebold, the once-great, more-than-100-year old company, is doing whatever they can at this point to save the corporate parent. While their stock price (DBD) plummeted at today's opening bell, and is currently down some 5.6% from yesterday, the price has begun to rise again in the last hour or so on news of the sale.

More than anything, however, the move may well be a harbinger of a coming declaration of bankruptcy for Diebold/Premier as we see it. With the unit now spun off from the blue chip Diebold parent, declaring bankruptcy or dissolving the company all together would be less trouble for investors and the main company as a whole...

DEVELOPING HARD...MORE:
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=4962

California Reports: "Are Our Voting Systems Secure, Accurate, Reliable and Accessible?"

Chip — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 17:53:03 -0400

Yesterday, as a result of voting system reviews, Secretary of State Debra Bowen decertified for state use the voting systems of Diebold Election Systems, Inc., and Sequoia Voting Systems. A third vendor, Election Systems and Software (ES&S), declined to participate in the review process mandated by law, and so Secretary Bowen withdrew approval of their Inkavote Plus Precinct Ballot Counting System for use in California. A fourth firm, Hart InterCivic, Inc. chose not to submit the voting system previously used by California voters for examination and certification, and voluntarily withdrew from the certification process. Instead, the company plans to upgrade their county customers to a newer version and submit that version for review and certification by the Secretary of State.

Diebold was in the center of 2004 election controversies pitting its tabulation results against exit polls. Sequoia Voting Systems offers a product called "Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail" (VVPAT) that was reported by the review team to have a series of serious and often undetectable flaws. Their voting software was also found publicly available online in 2003, raising questions about future vote tampering. In 2006, during a Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) review, the company, owned then by 3 Venezuelans, was allowed to withdraw from that review on news of its pending sale.

When California's Secretary of State Bowen was inaugurated January 7, 2007, she announced her intention to conduct a "Top to Bottom" review of voting systems used in California. "The review was designed to restore the public's confidence in the integrity of the electoral process and to ensure that California voters are being asked to cast their ballots on machines that are secure, accurate, reliable, and accessible." The review began two months later, in March, 2007.

In early May, Secretary Bowen outlined the possible outcomes. “This kind of a comprehensive review is essential...One of three things will happen to each voting system that’s being reviewed. The first possibility is that a system will be found to be secure, accurate, reliable and accessible as it stands, so voters can have confidence when they use it on Election Day. Second, a system may be required to use additional safeguards, such as an expanded post-election audit process. The third possibility is that a voting system can’t be made secure, accurate, reliable and accessible even with additional safeguards, so that system may be decertified, which means it could not be used for any election in 2008.”

The need for review of the new voting systems which were mandated by Help America Vote Act and signed by Bush in 2002 became apparent in a series of reported problems at the polls. Two examples cited in a California summary are:

In December 2005, California discovered voting system programming code that escaped the review of federal testers.
On May 2, 2007, a congressional task force voted to investigate anomalies in 2006 election results in Florida’s 13th Congressional District. These are just two examples that have fueled the debate about whether the systems voters are asked to cast their ballots on are trustworthy and whether the testing processes used to certify voting systems are adequate.

The review's urgency is intensified by the fact that California faces 3 statewide elections in 2008. According to the Secretary of State's summary:

Approximately $450 million has been spent or allocated to buy new voting equipment in California over the past few years. The top-to-bottom review will cost approximately $1.8 million and will be paid for by the voting system vendors and federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA) money allocated by the Legislature and the Governor in the 2006-07 budget.

Despite the review's good intentions, there remain reasons to question whether, even after this intensive review, the voting systems meet the standards of security, accuracy, reliability and accessibility.

As Matt Bishop, a principal investigator on one of the review teams noted:

The short time allocated to this study has several implications. The key one is that the results presented in this study should be seen as a “lower bound”; all team members felt that they lacked sufficient time to conduct a thorough examination, and consequently may have missed other serious vulnerabilities. In particular, Abbott’s team reported that it believed it was close to finding several other problems, but stopped in order to prepare and deliver the required reports on time.

And there was ample regard and concern given to the possibility of adding to the numerous and multiple security breaches uncovered, as noted by David Wagner, another principal investigator.

A common, widely accepted practice in the security literature is to describe attacks in sufficient detail to allow others to independently reproduce and evaluate the threat and, ultimately, build systems that better resist attack. Because of the severity of the attacks we found, and because we wanted to avoid making it easy for would-be attackers to subvert elections, we did not follow that practice here.
Instead, in preparing our public reports, we deliberately chose to err on the side of caution. We carefully screened all of the information that we included in our public reports. Our objective was to avoid reducing the amount of access an attacker would require to attack elections. We attempted to accomplish this by omitting details that would have the effect of converting an attack that would require reverse engineering or access to the source code into one that would not. These details were relegated to a confidential appendix provided to the Secretary of State.

The California Secretary of State's site has related documents.

Congress Members to Ask Pelosi for Better Election Reform Bill

davidswanson — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 12:48:59 -0400

Ask your Congress Member to contact Congressman Kucinich to sign onto this letter.

Speaker Pelosi:

We have been made aware of a growing concern with H.R. 811, the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2007.

Many constituencies important to the Democratic Caucus, including but not limited to the National Conference of State Legislatures, the National Association of Counties, VotersUnite.Org, and Election Defense Alliance, have expressed frustration with our offices about the process and current legislative text of the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act.

These constituencies represent a broad range of interests that reflect many of the core values of our party. H.R. 811 now finds opposition from organizations focused on upholding the integrity of our elections and local and states governments. For these constituencies, H.R. 811 falls short of its intended goals to ensure votes are cast and counted as intended by the voters.

Below are representative examples of the negative feedback we are receiving.

VotersUnite.Org statement by founder Ellen Theisen

After more than three years of supporting election reform bills introduced by Representative Rush Holt, I am saddened to see the many severe flaws in the version of HR 811 as it was passed out of committee last month." June 11, 2007

National Association of Counties letter to Congress

County officials welcome federal lawmakers' interest in strengthening the integrity and accessibility of our most basic democratic institution. We look forward to working with you to address the myriad challenges facing county officials in this environment of unprecedented change in election technology rather than exacerbating these challenges by enacting legislation such as H.R. 811. March 14, 2007

Before this bill is scheduled for a vote before the House of Representatives we urge you to ensure the legislative process addresses these very valid concerns and a substitute is developed that has broad, vocal support.

Sincerely,

Member of Congress

Kucinich Insists on Paper Ballots, Drops Support for Holt Bill

davidswanson — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 15:48:13 -0400

BradBlog has the story here:

PETER B. COLLINS: You have recently removed yourself as a co-sponsor of 811, am I correct?

KUCINICH: I have. Rush Holt's a fine person and I really enjoy serving with him. But I have to say, the bill does not address the concerns that Americans have, to do something about electronic voting, and to make sure that we protect ourselves from the kind of manipulation of an election that can occur with the insufficient controls on software and hardware in this era of electronic voting.

That's why I've advocated paper ballots in all federal elections. That's the paper trail. That's that old time religion in politics where at least you had a chance for a fair count. Every American deserves to know that his or her vote counts and is going to be counted.

And you may remember that in the last election, when it came to the Electoral College, I was one of the few members who challenged the election in the Electoral College and voted against certification of the election based on what happened in Ohio. As did, by the way, Senator [Barbara] Boxer [D-CA], she was one of the leaders on that.

PBC: Indeed, yes...

KUCINICH: And so, we have to stand up and be counted. I'm hopeful that Congressman Holt will modify his bill before he pushes for passage of it.

Rep. Holt Says His Bill Will Require Paper Ballots - Probably?

davidswanson — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 17:42:30 -0500

Brad has the story here.

A Proposal for Election REFORM by Coordinated State Ballot Initiatives

thepen — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 11:12:34 -0500

Dear Friends and Activists,

We all worked enormously hard this election for the most progressive candidates we could find, and we had a couple winners. In addition, Ciro Rodriguez is in an upcoming runoff in TX-23 with very excellent prospects. In truth we probably had even more winners but for the election shenanigans we knew would be a handicap and which certainly took place. But the good news is that in spite of them, and thanks to your valiant participation, the people have regained both the House and the Senate. This at least allows us the power and opportunity to fight another day, and it is critically important that we continue to speak out in ever increasing numbers now that we have majorities who are more likely to influenced.

In the meantime, we have put a lot of thought into the next major strategic move. There will be bills in Congress to attempt real election reform, but there is no assurance that anything of substantive impact can survive a veto, assuming we can even pressure its passage. Therefore, we propose opening up a collateral front by putting together as many state ballot initiative campaigns as possible where laws can be passed directly on to the books. What we have in mind are two separate propositions in each such state, with the idea that there is synergy in collecting signatures for two related initiatives at the same time.

1) A paper ballot initiative of some kind

2) A clean money campaign financing measure

PAPER BALLOT REFERENDUM: http://www.usalone.com/paper_ballots.php

Critical to the success of these initiatives will be to establish a consensus of what we should shoot for, and to get everyone on the same page up front, so to speak. We recognize that with the question of paper ballots there are two camps who so far have been working perhaps at cross purposes. Some support H.R. 550 as an attempt to add on some kind of afterthought accountability to the existing electronic voting machines. Some others strongly oppose any variation of that bill because it doesn't go far enough, and are pushing for total elimination of the infernal Accu-Hack machines with their secret proprietary software.

What we are asking you, our participants, to do is to weigh in on what direction you think we should go in. We have set up a special referendum page where we ask if there should be mandatory paper ballots in all elections. Especially if you are one of the movers and shakers in the election protection movement, please email us so we can engage you in the drafting of the actual proposed initiatives.

PAPER BALLOT REFERENDUM: http://www.usalone.com/paper_ballots.php

While it is true that such initiatives cannot be pursued in all states, among the many where they can are most of the key presidential swing states. And by passing parallel state propositions where we can we would hope to build a de facto national standard, adding to the momentum for federal legislation, as in the recent spate of minimum wage increase intiatives, all of which succeeded.

With regards to clean money legislation, initiatives have been successful in AZ and ME to date, although limited to state office candidates only. We think we would like to also see some kind of help for federal candidates from state voters while we are working also to pass federal legislation. The recent measure in CA failed in large part because its supporters did not have the support of most of the unions for whatever reason, with the nurses association alone responsible for most of the votes it did get.

We are very interested in taking another shot at CA in particular with an initiative to public finance political campaigns for candidates, attempting to craft a measure that more people on our side can get behind, and as above to spark plug parallel initiatives in as many other states as possible where that can be done. So again, if you are an interested think tanker in the clean money movement, please email us so we can welcome you on to the team.

We would like to thank each and every one of you again and again for your magnificent and generous contributions, without which some of the candidates we were helping would have had no campaigns at all. And these same former and future candidates will be playing a key role in signature gathering for these upcoming state initiatives as they develop. We have moved the ball down the field and we are not going back.

Please take action NOW, so we can win all victories that are supposed to be ours.

To be added to the list go to http://www.usalone.com/in.htm

Or if you want to cease receiving our messages, just use the function at http://www.usalone.com/out.htm

Major Miscount of Vote in 2006 Election - Reported Results Skewed Toward Repubs by 4 percent

CactusPat — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 04:34:28 -0500

So, the landslide was denied. I guess it's a matter of interpretation, but if accurate, these reports show the Democratic tsunami would have been even bigger than the thirty+ seat gain in the House. Would have been more like fifty-sixty seats... Landslide Denied: Exit Polls vs. Vote Count 2006 - 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 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!
“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 are detailed in a paper published today on the EDA website.

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, 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, 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, detailing their analysis of the exit polls and related data, is now posted on the EDA website.

Election Defense Alliance continues to work with other election integrity groups around the country to analyze the results of specific House and Senate races. 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 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,” 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 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, which would require hand-counted paper ballots for presidential elections beginning in 2008; and adoption of the Universal Precinct Sample (UPS) handcount sampling protocol 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 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.” 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. 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@ElectionDefenseAlliance.org 781.454.8700

You can read the full report - Landslide Denied: Exit Polls vs. Vote Count 2006...

Collect Your Precinct Results for National Vote Audit

Bob Fertik — Sun, 05 Nov 2006 16:03:08 -0500

Election Defense Alliance is on the cutting edge of netroots organizing to fight electronic voting machine fraud.

They will be auditing the "official" election results on Election Night - but they need your help.

We ask every pollworker and monitor who will be working inside the polls when they close -- or will be outside if the totals are posted -- to please capture the precinct tallies for us. We need you to copy the data and enter it into an online form as soon as possible so that those figures will be used in our real-time analysis of "official" outcomes.

What will they do with this data? Find fraud, report it to the media, and empower activists.

We will be using a series of mathematical and statistical computer models to run baseline data (historical election data, demographic and pre-election poll data) against precinct poll tape totals, independent exit poll data, official returns, and any other relevant data we can obtain, in order to flag suspect patterns and anomolous outcome. In real-time! And we will report any significant findings back to the public immediately via website feeds, press releases, and radio interviews. We are hoping that by providing such rapid analysis, we may prevent some premature claims to victory or concessions. As well, the results we produce may influence citizen actions.

This fits in perfectly with our Blue Revolution vigils outside county election offices. Start here:
http://www.electiondefense.net

Print copies of the Form for machine results
Take the printed forms to your polling place when the polls are closing, and write the results on the form (bring a pen and clipboard)
Return home (or visit an internet cafe) to enter the results from each printed form at http://www.electiondefense.net
Join a Blue Revolution vigil outside your county election office

Imagine: a simple, universal data collection form with fields for the most important races across the country, that citizens anywhere can fill in, enter into a webform, and have the data uploaded to a national collection website for real-time analysis all within an hour of closing of the polls!

This is a first-of-a-kind project with terribly exciting ramifications. We sincerely hope you will participate. It is but a simple addition to the important work you will already be contributing.

Please forward this request to all your friends and colleagues who also may be at the polls as they close.