(Lack of) verified voting hits home

U.S. Rep. Rush Holt's, D-N.J., verified voting bill is tanking. The key voting rights groups say it's worse than nothing, after all the meddling in committee since January. It now deserves to be abandoned the way the immigration bill was last week after the GOP nuked Sen. Bob Menendez', D-N.J., amendment.

Ocean County needs the intended bill more than ever, to prove no one preprogrammed an outcome on the machines. It was supposed to ensure voters see and verify their votes on paper ballots that could be used in recounts. BlueJersey featured this quote in Ocean County's GOP that was in an Asbury Park Press story on the Republican freeholder primary losers.

(Bob) Haelig, who has been around the block, who first ran for public office in 1965, says the Republican machine in Ocean County "makes the Democratic machine in Hudson County look like Sunny Brook Farm by comparison."

Note the comment from Jim33:

The biggest and most brazen NJ corruption of all is the Ocean County GOP, where George Gilmore has run a well laundered machine for 11 years and essentially owns the county by sending the money towns and school boards overpay his law firm for "work" back to the local GOP races. And all Christie can find in all of Ocean County is one obscure Dem mayor who admitted he took a $5,000 bribe from a builder to smooth the permit process. Give me a break!

Gilmore is said to be close to Kyrillos, who is said to be a friend of Christie's. Fat chance of an investigation, but just look at the relatives of key GOP loyalists now staffing the Ocean County elections office and you'll grimace. Oh, and Gilmore made himself the head of the county election board, so don't bother contesting it, either. Conflict of interest? Not much. Won't matter as long as most of the county pays no attention to politics, just marks the first R box they see. (Note from Molly: Good point. What if Pena's team had been in the first column?)

Now another quote from challenger Suzanne Pena in Handleman's column:

"About the only thing that really surprised me was that our opponents were completely silent. It's as if they knew it didn't matter. The end result was going to be what it was going to be ... they didn't even bother to have signs made up."

OK. Let's look at one more thing: Vote machine trouble last November at certain polls.

Ocean County ... learned that votes from a single machine in Barnegat were counted twice — and some were also added to vote totals for the U.S. Senate, county freeholder and county sheriff races in Lakewood. ...

The error didn't affect any election outcomes, said George Gilmore, chairman of the Board of Elections. (Now, why would Gilmore, also chairman of the county Republican Party, say that in a tight races decided by fewer than 11 votes?)

"I think this is a serious issue that the county cannot, and I'm sure will not, let go," (Democratic challenger Dolores) Coulter said, adding she was troubled the Barnegat machine affected tallies in Lakewood.

Election officials uncovered a doubling of all votes cast on the Barnegat machine and later found that an overcount of some 75 votes for the U.S. Senate, county free-holder and sheriff races had been carried over by the computer system into tallies from Lakewood. The problems, they said, all stemmed from a fault in computer software provided by Sequoia Voting Systems, the Oakland, Calif.-based supplier of voting machines for Ocean County.

When you whisk away all the smoke, you see the real problem is that no one can verify in any way at all how many votes truly were cast for anyone, except those who are willing to take the GOP party boss' word for it.

Update: Presidential candidate Rep. Dennis Kucinich today pulled his support for Holt's bill, HR 811 in this Congress.

And Ellen Theisen gives seven grave concerns about Holt's bill.

Rep. Rush Holt's ballot bill

One of my favorite radio shows, Ring of Fire, today hosted Ralph Neas of People for the American Way, who says even though N.J. Rep. Rush Holt's electronic ballot bill is flawed, PFAW is supporting it. Time is of the essense, he says.

Last week, show hosts Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Mike Papantonio had on Brad Friedman of Brad Blog, who thinks the bill is too flawed to support in the form it's in.

The main contention is that Holt seems not to have understood the real problem when he wrote it to require "paper trail" instead of "paper ballots." What needs to happen is that electronic poll machines need to be able to spit out a receipt to verify their vote. After all, the makers of these machines also make bank ATMs. Can you imagine how long those would have lasted in the market if it didn't verify to you as a customer what was going in or coming out of your accounts -- if you had to wait until a final statement each month and then had no recourse if they gave your money to another customer but said it was secrret how that happened? That's what the "black boxes" we vote on do now.

Neas says his position is that it's unrealistic to mandate every county clerk in the nation to replace the machines they already have, and if the bill did that, no part of the bill could be put into action by this November.

Ring of Fire plays again from 4 to 6 p.m. tomorrow, Sunday. You can stream it anytime or listen live online tomorrow, but if you're in Monmouth County your radio may pick it up on New York WWRL 1600 AM (may because the radio signal is reduced on nights and weekends).

Off with me now, because their next guest is Joe Wilson. I'm going to get a cup of coffee and roll my chair up to the radio!

Vote fraud tortoise and the hare

The tortoise won in that story, and so, it seems is presumed congressional loser Clint Curtis. The computer-programmer-turned-politician is coming out ahead in his actual voter-by-voter private recount of the Florida's 24th district and others. (And, thank you, Brad Friedman for finally changing your seizure-inducing green-on-black type scheme, phew!)

Looks like Rep. Tom Feeney got greedy. An intellectual, he is not. Curtis, who worked for Feeney in private industry back in 2000, when he says Feeney as a then-Republican lobbyist had Curtis write a vote-stealing program for the black boxes then in use, was running consistently even in polls with Feeney yet lost by 16 percent.

What would you do if that happened to you in a poll of 10 people in the room? I'd go ask the 10 people if they really voted for the other guy. That's what Curtis is doing, and affidavits already show statistical proof to back him up.

Back on Capitol Hill, will he be able to get the holes patched in N.J. Rep. Rush Holt's bill?: "They seem to be getting it in D.C. now. You know, Holt put out his bill. There’s a few things that need to be fixed. But there are several people that are willing to put the amendments out there."

Say it ain't so

Black Box Voting is not supporting Rep. Rush Holt's bill he has said will fix the major problems with electronic voting. BBV is a national nonpartisan electronic voting watchdog group that broke most of the major news of fraud, including the timelines and networks among vote machine ownership.

Here are BBV's reasons:

1. DECEPTIVE LANGUAGE. Calls a paper TRAIL a paper BALLOT.

2. BILLION DOLLAR UNFUNDED MANDATE: Requires text conversion technology in every polling place. At $7000 per machine for 185,000 polling places, you do the math. See this article for documentation on the billion-dollar boondoggle:
http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/1954/46649.html

The bill is not talking about scanner wands, folks. Or if it is, they'd better specify that, and soon! Except that apparently, it's too late to make changes.

Note that only two vendors currently manufacture the needed technology, and one (Populex) has as head of its advisory board Frank Carlucci, the former chairman of the Carlyle Group, former CIA director, who was Donald Rumsfeld's roommate in college. Every polling place in America. Is this really what you want? Isn't it time to read the fine print on this?

3. MAKES THE SCANDAL RIDDEN EAC A PERMANENT FIXTURE AND INCREASES ITS POWER. Alan Dechert, from the Open Voting Consortium says it best: "Holt contemplates the invasion of these United States by the Federal government. If passed, it would BREAK the voting system in the states while establishing a dictatorship to handle things: the Election Assistance Commission ("EAC" or just "the Commission") with its four commissioners appointed by the president of the United States." Bradblog on latest EAC scandal: http://www.bradblog.com/?p=4119

4. ALLOWS LOSS OF SECRET BALLOTS for the Military

5. NO RECOGNITION OF CITIZEN RIGHT TO OVERSIGHT. Audit provisions do not allow either citizens or candidates access to any records for meaningful audits.

6. CONFLICTING REQUIREMENTS -- ie, must have text converters by 2008 and must study how to best do the conversions by 2010.

7. LANGUAGE ON DISCLOSED SOURCE CODE CONTAINS AN ERROR in that it doesn't deal with COTS - meaning, any electronics component with a chip on it would be required to disclose source code. There are literally hundreds of commercial off the shelf components in the system -- printers, video drivers, motherboard components -- that contain firmware, and these are manufactured all over the world. The bill would require Hitachi, Seagate, Fuji, Western Digital to open up their code for their commercial products if used in voting machines. Effectively eliminates the use of electronics while at the same time mandating electronics.

8. MUSH LANGUAGE. (Example: "The manufacturer shall provide the appropriate election official with the information necessary for the official to provide the information...")

9. UNREADABLE: People complain about their legislators not reading the bills -- well the way this is written, it guarantees they won't read it. No Appendix, so sections of the bill require the reader to actually go find a different bill and look up sections in it in order to make sense of the current bill. (example: "Section 301(a)(1) of such Act (42 U.S.C. 15481(a)(1)) is amended (A) in subparagraph (A)(i), by striking "counted" and inserting "counted, in accordance with paragraphs (2) and (3)");

10. AUDIT PROTOCOLS NO ONE AGREES WITH, even fans of audit solutions

11. LOOPHOLE ALLOWING INTERNET CONNECTIONS for central tabulators and ballot definition software

12. LOOPHOLE ALLOWING MANUAL AUDITS TO BE BYPASSED states with computer-only recount protocols

13. LOOPHOLE ALLOWING MACHINE COUNT TO SUPERCEDE VOTER VERIFIED PAPER when fuzzily described circumstances arise. Los Angeles Registrar Conny McCormack already has tried to co-opt this (Feinstein senate hearing yesterday) into meaning when there is a printer jam damaging the paper, the machine count will trump.

14. SUPPORTS DREs (Touch-screens and other on-screen voting techniques that are NOT recommended by NIST)