Election Issues

The Department of Justice's Voting Section is pressuring 10 states to purge voter rolls before the 2008 election based on statistics that former Voting Section attorneys and other experts say are flawed and do not confirm that those states have more voter registrations than eligible voters, as the department alleges.

Voting Section Chief John Tanner called for the purges in letters sent this spring under an arcane provision in the National Voter Registration Act, better known as the Motor Voter law, whose purpose is to expand voter registration. The identical letters notify states that 10 percent or more of their election jurisdictions have problematic voter rolls. It tells states to report "the subsequent removal from rolls of persons no longer eligible to vote."

"That data does not say what they purport it says," said David Becker, People for the American Way Foundation's senior voting rights counsel and a former Voting Section senior trial attorney, after reviewing the letters and statistics used to call for the purges. "They are saying the data shows the 10 worst voter rolls. They have a lot of explaining to do."

Ohio Republicans have blocked a proposal to test electronic voting machines prior to the 2008 presidential primary.

By a 4-3 vote, Republicans on Ohio’s State Controlling Board blocked Democratic Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner’s proposed $1.8 million unbid contract for voting machine testing.  Brunner had already set aside the $1.8 million for the test. Her specific request to the Controlling Board was a waiver for competitive bidding. Her office had hoped to complete all testing by November 30, 2007.

A former judge, Brunner is successor to the infamous J. Kenneth Blackwell, who helped engineer the theft of Ohio's electoral votes for George W. Bush in 2004.  Brunner won election as a reform candidate, vowing to guarantee the public access to the polls---and an accurate vote count---in 2008.

In California, Democratic Secretary of State Debra Bowen recently completed an extensive testing of that state's electronic voting machines.  She decertified many of them and is on course to rework how America's biggest state casts and counts its ballots.

I haven't been sleeping well lately. Every new revelation about the state of our elections puts me in a tailspin. The rush to vote on Rep. Holt's Bill (now unaffectionately known as Microsoft 811), and the degree to which both the public and our members of Congress don't adequately understand the issues and what's at stake, are very disturbing.

I can't even escape through reading. I picked up some interesting books from the library, among them a mystery that revolves around home improvements, and the latest novel by Michael Chabon. Ordinarily, they would have piqued my interest, but now, I couldn't get into either of them. I'm going to read A Margin of Error, Ballots of Straw by Lani Massey Brown, a computer expert who has been closely watching elections from her perch in Florida. Like Man of the Year her book talks about what could happen at election time with computers running the show. At least it's fiction, even if I haven't strayed very far from the topic I've become obsessed with.

Let’s make it official. The DRE is dead. DRE, of course, stands for “Direct Recording Electronic” voting machine. It also goes by the name of touchscreen voting machines. But whatever you call it, for all practical purposes, it is dead.

Consider the evidence. How many new DREs have been sold by vendors such as Diebold (ah, Premier), Sequoia, ES & S, and Hart? The vast majority of sales have already taken place. And there are still some states that have statewide implementations from one vendor without VVPAT, such as Maryland and Georgia . But the truth is that no one recently has come out with a new DRE device. Third tier vendors (see my site for a listing) have had little success and many of them are now folding up shop, and the ones that are still remaining have got to be hurting, or working on other lines of business.

Michael Collins is a writer in the Washington, DC area. He got involved as a citizen journalist, outside his career, due to his concern about the dreadful series of elections that began in 2000 when, as he quotes, "the last became first." He writes for "Scoop" Independent News out of Wellington and Auckland, New Zealand. "Scoop" Director and Co-Publisher Alastair Thompson has taken a keen interest in American politics for years. "Scoop" has published the who’s who of election news and commentary found in the compendium, American Coup II. Collins describes his excellent relationship with "Scoop."

I can’t say enough positive things about Alastair and the organization. I was in online services in the '80s and early '90s and I’ve followed the net’s expansion closely since then. "Scoop" has one of the best collections of internet publishing talent around, imho [in my humble opinion].

Collins is also the editor of www.electionfraudnews.com, a web site devoted to election news.

What’s motivated you to write so extensively on voting rights and election fraud?

For those of you who don't know him, Steve Heller became an election integrity activist after the 2000 election debacle in Florida. He became known as the "Diebold Whistleblower" when in January 2004, he stole and exposed legal documents providing smoking gun evidence about Diebold Election Systems' nefarious activities in the State of California. Partly as a result of Steve's actions, in April 2004, former California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley de-certified Diebold in California for what he called their "fraudulent," "despicable," and "deceitful behavior."*?

?For stealing and exposing legal documents, Steve was charged by the Los Angeles District Attorney with three felonies. In November 2006, he pleaded guilty to one felony count of unauthorized access to a computer. He is currently on felony probation.?

?Steve is an actor, writer, political progressive and election integrity activist. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, actor and writer Michele Gregory. He is also a personal hero of mine.?

I'm continually amazed by the connections between seemingly unrelated threads in my life. I've already mentioned various times that I love to read audio books to replace the bad-news-all-the-time radio. Right now, I'm reading Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise, the memoir of Ruth Reichl, the former New York Times restaurant critic. It's a lot of fun reading about someone whose life is so different from my own and about scads of meals that I couldn't or wouldn't ever eat. It's hard to think of a topic more removed from the state of our elections. And yet, both yesterday and today, her book touched on topics that seemed uncannily relevant.

At 10:03 A.M. on August 7, 2006, one month before Judge Algenon Marbley ordered all 88 Ohio Boards of Elections to continue to preserve the ballots from the 2004 presidential election, Jacqueline J. Neuhart, Director of the Guernsey County Board of Elections, sent an e-mail to "All Counties" asking if they were aware of a website called savetheballots.org. Her exact wording was: "Good morning, everyone. Has anyone else heard about this? I wonder how far it will go."

Pursuant to a public records request, Matthew Damschroder, Director of the Franklin County Board of Elections, graciously provided us with responses to said e-mail. Here they are:

Monday, August 7, 2006, 10:30 A.M. From Lorain County Board of Elections
"Someone should tell them to give it up. The election is over. They lost."

Monday, August 7, 2006, 10:32 A.M. From Brown County Board of Elections
"YES BROWN COUNTY HAS HEARD ABOUT IT"

Monday, August 7, 2006, 10:32 A.M. From Allen County Board of Elections

A record request of August 6, 2007 made to the Director of Franklin County’s Board of Elections, Matt Damschroder, has turned up some very interesting records.

Additional proof that all of Ohio’s Boards of Elections knew that they should retain the 2004 election records. Deputy Director Denny White was in attendance at the time of the delivery of the request. I now am in the possession of interoffice emails where they discuss the records, and their repulsion for those of us that seek to know what the story is, which only the actual documents can tell.

New university studies in Connecticut and California join the growing list of academic warnings about the use of Software Driven Devices [SDD] in the casting or counting of votes. What the scholars are telling us, that the computer security experts already knew, is that there is no way to prevent undetectable malicious software code from altering the outcome of an election.

Software can be altered with self-deleting code to provide erroneous vote outcomes on all SDD equipment, without exception. The SDD machines cannot safely be trusted to provide an honest count, none of them.

The touch-screen SDD danger is greatest because there is absolutely no way to verify the outcome. In Sarasota, Florida, 18,000 votes were lost in a 2006 congressional election and no one has yet been able to explain what happened. SDD propagandists blame "ballot design" and voter ignorance but the truth is if the votes were stolen no one will ever know, that is the nature of the SDD threat.